Privacy Policy

Last updated: 12 June 2026

plebos is built around a simple principle: your data is yours, and leaving should never cost you anything. This policy explains what we collect, why, who we share it with, and how you control it.

1. What we collect

• Account information — the email address and handle you sign up with, and authentication data handled through our identity provider.
• Content — the posts, publications, and settings you create.
• Newsletter subscribers — for writers, the email addresses of readers who subscribe to your newsletter. Subscriptions are double opt-in: a reader is added only after confirming via email.
• Usage and technical data — basic logs (such as IP address, request times, and error information) needed to operate, secure, and debug the service.
• Aggregate web analytics — to understand how the public reading room is used, we run our own first-party, cookieless analytics. It counts page views and referrers and records a coarse, approximate location (such as country), using no cookies and no cross-site identifiers. Your IP address is used only momentarily to count the visit and to derive that coarse location — it is not stored. The cookieless signal that recognizes a repeat visit rotates daily, so it cannot link your visits from one day to the next or follow you across sites. It runs only on public pages, honors your browser's Do-Not-Track signal, and is used to see traffic in aggregate — never to profile you.

We do not store payment card details. Paid subscriptions are processed by Stripe through the writer's own Stripe account (see below).

2. How we use it

• to provide the service — publishing your posts, delivering your newsletters, and serving your content to readers;
• to send the email a subscriber opted in to receive, and to honor unsubscribes, bounces, and complaints;
• to operate, secure, and improve the platform, and to prevent abuse;
• to communicate with you about your account.

We do not sell your personal data, and we do not run advertising or behavioral tracking. Our web analytics is cookieless and aggregate by design (see §1), so measuring traffic never means profiling you.

3. Who we share it with

We use a small number of third-party service providers to run plebos:

• Payment processing (Stripe) — for paid subscriptions. Readers' payment details are handled by Stripe under Stripe's privacy policy; for paid subscriptions the writer is the merchant of record through their own Stripe account.
• Email delivery — to send the newsletters and confirmations you opt into, and to process bounces, complaints, and unsubscribes.
• Hosting and content delivery — to serve the site and your content reliably, including edge security and privacy-preserving, aggregate edge traffic analytics.

We share personal data with these providers only as needed to operate the service, and we may disclose information where required by law. A current list of our subprocessors is available on request at [email protected].

4. Federation and public content

plebos is a federated platform. Content you publish publicly is, by design, visible on the open web and may be delivered to and stored by other federated (ActivityPub) servers and their users. Once content has federated, plebos cannot control or retrieve copies held by other servers. Please keep this in mind when publishing.

5. Your subscribers' data (for writers)

If you run a publication, you control your subscriber list. You are responsible for using it lawfully and for honoring your subscribers' choices. plebos enforces double opt-in, one-click unsubscribe, and suppression of bounced or complained addresses to protect everyone's deliverability.

6. Your rights

You can access, correct, export, and delete your data. You can export your content and subscriber list at any time and take them with you if you leave. To exercise any of these rights, email [email protected]. Subscribers can unsubscribe from any newsletter using the link in every message.

7. Retention

We keep your data for as long as your account is active and as needed to provide the service, then delete or anonymize it within a reasonable period, except where we must retain it to comply with legal obligations or to maintain suppression records that protect recipients.

8. Changes

We may update this policy; we will post the new version here and update the date above, and communicate material changes to account holders.

9. Contact

Privacy questions or requests: [email protected]. General contact: our contact page.