Privacy Consent Agreement

1. What we collect and store

By creating an account you agree that we collect and store the following, for as long as your account exists:

• Your account: email address, display name, and the secure credentials used to sign you in.
• Your reading: stories opened, episodes read, choices and branches taken, bookmarks, library, ratings, and wishlist.
• Coins, membership and unlocks: your balance and its history, membership status, and which episodes you have unlocked.
• Community activity: comments and reactions you post, shown publicly under your display name.
• Preferences: language choice, reading font size and display mode, and alert subscriptions.
• Technical records: IP address, browser and device type, and timestamps, kept for security and fraud prevention.

Payments are handled by Paddle, our Merchant of Record. We never see or store your card details.

2. Writers & authors agreement

This section applies to you the moment you publish, submit, or draft a story with us. Accepting this agreement at sign-up also accepts these writer terms.

• You keep your rights. You own the stories you write. You grant us a non-exclusive licence to host, display, translate, promote, and distribute them on the Service while your work is published with us.
• Public writer information. Your pen name, author profile, story titles, covers, and publication dates are shown publicly. Your email address, earnings, and payout details are never shown publicly.
• Writer data we store: drafts and unpublished episodes, AI writing-credit usage, reader statistics for your stories, earnings records, and payout correspondence.
• AI writing tools are optional. When you use them, the text or prompt you submit is sent to our AI provider to produce the result. We do not use your drafts to train AI models, and we do not run AI over your work without your action.
• Reader data you see. Statistics about your stories are aggregated. You never receive readers' email addresses or personal details, and you may not attempt to identify, contact, or export reader data outside the Service.
• Payouts. If you earn money, we store the bank or payout details you give us, and we share what tax and payment law requires with our payment partners.
• Your content responsibility. You confirm your work is yours, does not infringe anyone's rights, correctly carries a Mature 18+ label where needed, and does not contain real people's private data.
• If you leave. Deleting your account removes your drafts, writer records, and AI credit history. Published stories are unpublished on request; we may keep transaction and tax records where the law requires it.

3. How your data is protected

Your data travels encrypted, sits in a managed cloud database with row-level rules so only you can read and change your own records, and is only shared with the providers needed to run the Service: hosting, the AI providers behind translations and writer tools, and Paddle for payments. We never sell your data.

4. Withdrawing your consent

You can withdraw this consent at any time by deleting your account, which erases everything listed above. Open My Account, scroll to the Danger zone, and confirm — the steps are set out on our Data Safety page. Because running the Service requires this data, withdrawing consent means closing your account.

5. Accepting this agreement

New accounts accept this agreement on the create-account form, once. We record the date of your acceptance with your account. If we make material changes we will ask you again and post the new version here.

6. Contact

Questions about this agreement? Email us at hello@thesecretlevel.org.