Privacy Notice — Stories You Live

Last updated

8 October 2026

Contact for privacy requests

privacy@storiesyoulive.com

Who is responsible for your data

Konstantinos Dalpanagiotis (Κωνσταντίνος Δαλπαναγιώτης), an individual in Greece. There is no company behind Stories You Live yet; when there is, this notice will name it.

The name this service publishes under

Stories You Live, at storiesyoulive.com.

The short version

You can start a story here without giving us your name, an email address, or filling in any form. The first three scenes of every story are free. To read on, you sign in — with Google, with Apple, or with a code we email you — and unlock that one story with a single payment, taken by Stripe. Signing in gives us an email address; paying gives us a record of the payment.

If you read a story, we keep the story itself — the scenes, the choices you made, and anything you typed — because that is what lets the story continue and what lets you come back to it. Your story is sent to an AI company to be written. You can ask us to delete it.

What we collect

• Your story. The scenes written for you, the choices you selected, and any free text you typed as an action.
• One cookie. When you first open a story we set a single cookie named nw_reader. It contains one identifier and our signature on it, and nothing else — no email, and nothing about your behaviour. It is how the server recognises that a returning request is yours, so that your story is yours and not someone else's. It is not used for advertising, it is not shared, and no other site can read it. It lasts a year. If you were invited by name, that identifier is worked out from the name on your invitation rather than being random — see below. It does not contain the name and cannot be turned back into one by anyone, including us — but we can work the same identifier out again from a name we already have, which is exactly how your stories appear under yours. It is the same for you every time.
• A note in your browser. Your browser also stores which story you have open, so that returning to the page returns you to your place. Clearing your site data removes both this and the cookie. If you sign in, your browser also keeps the sign-in service's session and which of the three ways you signed in last, so it can offer that way first next time.
• If you sign in: your email address. Signing in is done by Supabase, which sends the code if you choose email, or hands you to Google or Apple if you choose one of them. We keep the email address the sign-in gave us (if you use Apple's "hide my email", that is Apple's relay address, not yours), which of the three ways you used, the sign-in service's own identifier for you, when you first and last signed in, and the language you chose. If you were invited, we also keep the one-way identifier worked out from your invitation (never the link itself), so that your invitation still counts once you have signed in. At the moment you sign in, the stories your browser already had move to your account, so you find them on any device.
• If you unlock a story: the payment. You pay on Stripe's own page; your card details go to Stripe and never reach us. We keep what Stripe tells us when the payment goes through: the amount and the tax on it, the currency, which story it unlocked (its title and length), whether it was refunded, Stripe's references for it, and Stripe's own message about the payment as it sent it to us, which includes the email address the receipt went to. We give Stripe your email address so the receipt reaches you.
• What each scene cost us. When a scene is written we record what that cost, how long it took, and which story it belonged to. This is our own accounting; it contains none of your text. It is stored against the same identifier as your story — random if you came here uninvited, worked out from your name if you were invited, your account's once you have signed in — and it is deleted when your story is deleted.
• What you agreed to. When you unlock a story, we record that your account agreed to our terms and asked for the story to continue at once (which ends the 14-day right to withdraw from a purchase of digital content), with the version of the terms, the price you were shown and the time. Nothing about your device is recorded with it. It is kept for as long as the payment it belongs to.
• What you did in the story, and on our pages. Which of our pages you opened (the kind of page, never the address or anything in it), which story you opened, whether you accepted the content warning, how long you waited for a scene, how far you read and whether you finished — and, if you arrived through one of our own campaign links, its short label. Our own server records this against the same identifier as your cookie. It never contains your text, your IP address or your browser's identifying string: of the browser we keep only whether it was a phone, a tablet or a computer, and which browser it was. If you came here uninvited it is deleted after 90 days; if you were invited it is kept as long as your stories; once you have signed in, it is kept until you delete your account.
• Which headline you saw, as a count. Our front page has three versions of its headline, and your browser remembers which one it showed you. We count, per day, how many times each version was shown and how many visitors went on to start a story — totals only, with no cookie, no identifier and nothing that could tell us it was you.
• What you tell us about a scene. If you report a problem with a scene, or answer the question at a story's ending, we keep your reason or answer and at most 280 characters of your own words, with the story they are about. Anything that looks like an email address or a card number is removed before it is stored. It is deleted with the story.
• Errors in your browser. If our page breaks in your browser, it tells our server what broke: the error message, the part of our code it came from, which of our pages it happened on (never anything after the address's ?), your browser's identifying string and, if one was open, which story. No cookie and no identifier of you is sent with it. Kept for 30 days.
• Where a request came from, for a day. While anyone may read without an invitation, we limit how fast free scenes can be asked for from one place. To do that we turn your IP address into a code that changes every midnight and cannot be turned back into the address, and keep which stories that code started or continued for two days, so we can see if one place is costing too much. The IP address itself is not kept by this.
• Ordinary server records. Requests to our servers, including your IP address, are recorded by the web server for security and to prevent abuse, and deleted after 14 days. Our application's own logs are overwritten automatically once they reach a fixed size.

We use no analytics, no advertising trackers and no measurement pixels.

Reading, signing in and paying — and if you were invited, we know your name

You do not sign in to start reading. The first three scenes of every story are free. The fourth needs that story to be unlocked: you sign in, agree to our terms, and pay once — €1.99 for a Short story, €3.99 for a Standard one. That unlocks the one story to its ending; there are no credits and no subscription. During the closed beta, a reader who came by invitation reads free.

If you reached this site through an invitation link, that link carried a name. The person running Stories You Live typed it when they made your link — usually your first name — and it is attached to everything you do here: which stories you started, how far you read, the choices you made, and anything you typed in your own words. They can see all of it beside that name.

This is not a side effect we can talk you out of. Your invitation link is made from the name itself, so the identifier in your cookie is not random: it is worked out from the name, which is how the site recognises you when you come back, and how your reading is listed under it.

If you reached this site without an invitation, and have not signed in, you are anonymous in the ordinary sense: a random identifier in a cookie and nothing else, with no name attached to it anywhere.

If you sign in, your stories — including the ones your invitation link started — belong to your account from then on, and we hold the email address described above.

Why your stories are unusually personal, and how we treat them

A saved story is not neutral log data. It records what you chose when a story told you a stranger was at your door at 2am, and it contains sentences you wrote yourself. It can say something about you.

So: your stories are not used to train AI models by us, are not sold, are not shared with advertisers, and are not read by staff except where strictly necessary to fix a fault you have reported, to investigate abuse, or as described in the next paragraph.

During the closed beta the owner may read a tester's story to improve the product; stories are not shared further. This is the exception the line above points at, and it is deliberately narrow: it is one person, reading in order to make the writing better, and every time it happens it is recorded. Nothing is passed to anyone else.

Who else sees your story

• OpenAI — this is the important one. To write a scene we send the story so far and the text you typed to OpenAI, which writes the prose. This processing may take place outside the European Economic Area, under OpenAI's data processing terms, which use the European Commission's standard contractual clauses for that transfer. Under those terms OpenAI does not use what we send to train its models, and keeps it for up to 30 days to detect abuse before deleting it.
• Supabase, which hosts the database your story is stored in, in Germany. Supabase also runs the sign-in: it holds your email address and sends the sign-in code, and when you delete your account we ask it to remove your sign-in too.
• Google or Apple, only if you choose to sign in with them. They confirm who you are to Supabase and give it your email address; what they record about that sign-in is under their own privacy terms.
• Stripe, which takes the payment when you unlock a story. Stripe receives your card or wallet details, your email address for the receipt, and the country it needs to work out the VAT. It is given our own reference for the story and for your account, but never the story itself. Our Stripe account is with Stripe Payments Europe, Ltd., in Ireland.
• Hetzner, which hosts the server the site runs on, in Germany.

When something goes wrong with the service — a failing provider, a backup that did not arrive, a cost alarm — our server may send its operator a short alert by email, or through a phone notification or messaging service. An alert names the problem, a number and a page to open; it never contains your story, your email address or anything else about you.

Where your data is

Your story is stored in the European Union — in Germany. The site runs in Germany too.

The exception is the step above: to write a scene, your story is sent to OpenAI, which may process it outside the European Economic Area.

Your sign-in is handled by Supabase, in Germany, like the database. If you sign in with Google or Apple, or pay through Stripe, those companies process what they receive under their own terms, and may do so outside the European Economic Area under the European Commission's standard contractual clauses.

How long we keep it

Ninety days is meant to be long enough that a story you abandoned is still there when you come back from a holiday, and short enough that we are not holding the reading history of someone who visited once.

The 90-day deletion runs by itself, once a day.

Your rights

If you are in the EU or UK you have the right to ask for a copy of your data, to correct it, to have it deleted, to restrict or object to how we use it, and to complain to your local data protection authority.

You do not need to sign in to exercise these rights. But you should know exactly what we can and cannot do for you, because it differs with how you came here:

• If you have signed in , you can do both yourself, from your profile: download a copy of everything your account has here, and delete your account and all of it at once. You can also ask us to do it.
• Whoever you are, each story has its own delete control, and the story's id is in the address of its page.
• If you were invited by name, we can look you up by that name — it is how your stories are listed for us, and you can ask us about all of them at once. Unless you have signed in, we hold no email address for you.
• If you came here uninvited and have not signed in, we cannot look you up at all: we hold no name and no email address. The identifier that ties your stories together lives in a cookie your own browser will not reveal to you — it is deliberately readable only by our server, so you cannot copy it into an email however willing you are. What you can give us is the id of a particular story, and we will act on that story.

So the honest promise is different for each case, and we would rather say that than imply more than we can do: a signed-in reader can export and delete everything themselves; an invited reader can ask about everything under their name; an uninvited reader who has not signed in gets per-story deletion.

Lawful basis

• Providing the story you asked for: performance of a contract with you.
• Keeping the service working and preventing abuse: our legitimate interests.
• Your account, and taking and recording your payment: performance of the contract you make when you unlock a story. Keeping the record of a sale, and of what you agreed to when you made it: our legal obligation.

Children

Stories You Live publishes fiction for adults: horror and thriller stories containing violence and threat, and romance containing adult desire. It is not intended for children: you must be 18 or older to use it, and each story asks you to confirm that before it starts.

Changes

If this notice changes materially we will say so on the site before the change takes effect.