What we hold, and what you can do about it.

The short version

We collect what an account needs to work and what your writing consists of, and nothing for advertising. There are no third-party analytics, no tracking pixels and no advertising cookies on this site. We do not sell personal information, and we do not train AI models on your writing.

OpenStoryHub is the party responsible for the personal information described here. Write to hello@openstoryhub.co with any question about it, or to exercise any of the rights in section 08.

What we collect

Because you gave it to us

Your account: name, email address, and a hash of your password. We never store the password itself.
Your consent to the documents: the moment you accepted the Terms and this policy, and which version you accepted.
Your writing: stories, scenes, drafts, the autosaved working copy, every filed revision and its message, and the position and status of each scene. This is content, and it is the reason the service exists.

Because using the service creates it

Sessions: a session record with its expiry, your IP address and your browser’s user-agent string. It is what keeps you signed in and what lets us spot a stolen session.
Provenance: for every revision, the identity that wrote it and the person it was written for. Where an agent wrote it, both are recorded. This is a permanent part of the draft.
OAuth records: clients you registered, consents you granted, and the scopes and expiry of tokens issued against them.
Server logs kept by our hosting provider, which include IP addresses and request paths, for operating and securing the service.

We do not ask for a date of birth, a phone number, a payment method or a location, and there is nothing in the product that infers them.

Why we hold it

To give you an account, keep you signed in, and show you your own work.
To store, sync and version what you write, including holding the history that makes the provenance record meaningful.
To honour the sharing you asked for: a public story is served publicly, a consented client is served your drafts.
To keep the service up and safe: debugging, rate limits, abuse and fraud prevention, and security incidents.
To answer you when you write to us.

We rely on your consent for the account itself and for each grant to a third-party client, and on our legitimate interest in running a secure service for logs and abuse prevention. Where the law requires us to keep something, we keep it.

Who else sees it

People you publish to. A story set to public is readable by anyone, and its title appears in the feed on our home page. Stories are private by default.
Clients and agents you authorise. When you grant scopes on the consent screen, that client can read or write the parts of your work the scopes name, and the content it reads goes to whoever operates it, under their policy. Withdrawing consent stops future access.
Our processors, who host the service and store the database: Vercel (hosting and serverless compute) and Neon (managed PostgreSQL, in the AWS us-east-1 region, United States). Both act on our instructions.
Nobody else, unless we are legally compelled, or a sale of the business transfers it, in which case this policy travels with the data and we will say so on this page first.

Because our infrastructure is in the United States, your information is stored and processed outside Québec and may be accessible to authorities there under local law. Opening an account is your agreement to that transfer.

Cookies

Two cookies. The session cookie, set when you sign in, is how the next request knows it is you: strictly necessary, carries no profile of you, and clearing it signs you out. The second, set the first time you react to a public story at a /s/ address, is a random id with no session behind it: it only stops the same device from reacting to a story twice, and it is not linked to anything you have read. There are no analytics or advertising cookies, so there is nothing here to opt out of.

How long we keep it

Your writing: until you delete it or close your account. Deleting a story or a draft deletes its revisions with it. Because the revision log is append-only, text you cut stays in that draft’s history until the draft itself is deleted.
Your account: until you close it. Closing it deletes your stories, drafts, revisions, sessions and consents.
Sessions: until they expire or you sign out.
Backups and server logs: on our providers’ own rolling schedules, typically weeks rather than months, after which deletion becomes final everywhere.

One honest caveat: a revision you wrote inside someone else’s draft stays in that draft’s history when you close your account, because removing it would falsify their record. It is unlinked from your identity.

How it is protected

Traffic runs over TLS. Passwords are stored hashed. The web app has no database credential at all: it reaches the API the same way any other client does, which is a boundary enforced by a build check rather than by good intentions. Access to production data is limited to the people who operate the service.

No service is unbreakable. If a breach puts you at risk of serious injury we will notify you and the Commission d’accès à l’information du Québec, as Québec law requires.

Your rights

Under Québec’s privacy law and Canada’s PIPEDA you can ask us to:

Tell you what personal information we hold about you, and give you a copy.
Correct anything inaccurate or incomplete.
Delete your account and its contents.
Give you your information in a structured, commonly used technical format, or send it to someone else.
Withdraw a consent, to a client or to the service altogether, at any time.

Write to hello@openstoryhub.co and we will answer within 30 days. If our answer does not satisfy you, you can complain to the Commission d’accès à l’information du Québec or to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada.

Children

Accounts are for people 16 and over. We do not knowingly collect information from anyone younger; if we learn we have, we delete it.

Changes to this policy

This policy carries the same version as the Terms of Use, and the version you accepted is stored with your account. Material changes are announced on this page, and where they affect what we do with your information we will ask for your consent again rather than assume it.