What we collect, what we don't.

You can read every story on PlotGround without an account and without signing in. Browsing the archive doesn't require you to give us anything.

To publish, comment, react, follow, or message, you create a free account. Depending on how you sign in, we store:

• Email sign-in: your email address, used to send you one-time sign-in links.
• Google sign-in: the name, email address, and profile picture that Google shares when you choose to sign in with Google. We never see or store your Google password.
• Profile: a username (you can change it), a display name, an optional short bio, and an optional avatar. Your username, display name, bio, and avatar are shown publicly on your profile.

When you publish a story we save what you write — your role, industry, years of experience, optional region, the type of change and any AI tools involved, and the before/now/advice/feeling text. Stories publish immediately. For each story you choose whether to publish it under your profile or anonymously. An anonymous story is not linked to your profile or username in the public site.

Comments you post are linked to your account and shown publicly under the story. Reactions (Seen, Hopeful, Concerned, Curious) are tied to your account so each person reacts once per story. Follows record which accounts you follow; follower and following counts are visible on profiles.

Some older reactions were recorded anonymously using a random ID stored only in the reader's own browser, before accounts existed. Those remain in aggregate counts and aren't linked to anyone.

If you send another user a private message, we store the message so it can be delivered and shown in your conversation. See the Private messages section below for how access is restricted.

Our hosting and infrastructure providers keep technical logs that may include IP addresses, browser types, and request times, for security and abuse prevention. We don't analyze these ourselves, and they're retained according to our providers' policies — typically around 30 days.

We are deliberate about absence. PlotGround does not use:

• Ad trackers or third-party analytics that profile you. No ad networks, no advertising pixels. Any analytics we use are privacy-respecting, cookie-free, and don't fingerprint visitors.
• Accounts to read. Reading is open to everyone; an account is only needed to take part.
• Cross-site tracking. We don't embed pixels or scripts that report your visit to other companies.
• Behavioral profiling. We don't build profiles of who reads what, for how long, or what they react to.
• Your data for AI training or advertising. We don't sell your data or use it to train AI models.

We use the data you provide to:

• Sign you in and keep your account secure
• Publish your stories and show your profile, comments, reactions, and follows
• Deliver private messages between you and other users
• Send account emails — sign-in links, a welcome email, and messages you ask for or that relate to your account (from hello@plotground.com)
• Detect and remove spam or abusive content, and moderate the community

We do not use your data for advertising, profiling, training AI models, or any commercial purpose beyond running this archive.

PlotGround relies on a few third-party services to operate. They process data only as needed to run the site, under their own privacy and security terms, and aren't permitted to use it for their own purposes:

• Supabase — hosts our database and handles account authentication.
• Google — used only if you choose "Sign in with Google," to verify your identity.
• Fastmail — delivers our account emails.
• Cloudflare — hosts and serves the website.

We do not sell, rent, license, or otherwise share your data with advertisers, data brokers, or AI-training companies. If law enforcement compels disclosure with a valid legal order, we'd comply but push back on overly broad requests, and notify you when we're able and legally allowed to.

Private messages are exactly that. A message is readable only by the two people in the conversation — the sender and the recipient. This is enforced at the database level with row-level security, so other users can't read your messages, and they aren't shown anywhere public. We may access message content only where necessary to investigate abuse or comply with a valid legal request.

You're in control of what you've shared:

• Edit your profile and stories. Change your username, display name, and bio, or delete any story, right from your account page.
• Delete your account. From your account page you can permanently delete your account. You choose whether to remove your stories too, or keep them published anonymously; either way your profile, comments, reactions, follows, and messages are removed.
• Reach us for anything else. Email hello@plotground.com to request a copy of your data or ask a question. We respond within seven days, usually sooner.

Search engines may take time to drop cached copies of anything that was public; that's outside our control.

If we change how we collect or use data, we'll update this page and the date at the top. For material changes, we'll post a note on the site. We will never change this policy to expand data collection without appropriate notice.