Privacy

Lately is a place to write things down. It is built to know as little about you as it can and still work, and this page is the whole of what it knows.

What is public

Your name, your handle, your bio and any entry you mark public are visible to anyone, signed in or not. They appear on your notebook at /@handle, in the shared archive, and in the sitemap search engines read. Assume anything public can be copied, quoted, cached or archived by someone else — once it has been read, it is out of our hands.

Entries you leave as drafts or mark private are shown only to you, when you are signed in. They are not indexed and not served to anyone else.

What is not

Your email address is never shown to other people. It is used to sign you in and nothing else — no newsletter, no product mail, no sharing it with anyone.

Your password is never stored. What is kept is a bcrypt hash of it, which cannot be turned back into the password you typed.

Cookies

One cookie, lately_session. It is set when you sign in, it holds a signed token saying which account you are, and it expires after thirty days or when you sign out. It is httpOnly, so no script on the page can read it.

There are no analytics cookies, no advertising cookies and no third-party trackers, which is why you have never seen a consent banner here.

Who else sees it

Your writing is not sold, rented, or handed to advertisers, and it is not used to train anything. The only parties involved are the hosting provider that runs the site and the database provider that stores it, both acting on our instructions.

Children

Lately is not intended for children under 13, and accounts are not knowingly opened for them.

Changes

If this wording changes, the date at the top changes with it. Nothing here is applied retroactively to writing you have already published.

What happens to the data itself — how long it is kept, how to get it out, how to delete it — is in the data policy.