Privacy
Polis Press. Last updated 3 October 2026.
What Polis Press keeps when you read, and when you make an account.
If you never make an account
You can read everything without one, and we set no cookie until you sign in.
Your reading settings, the stories you have marked, and where you stopped reading are kept by your own browser and are never sent to us. Clearing your browser data removes them, and we cannot recover them because we never had them.
Measuring how the site is used
We count how the site is read so that we know what to publish and what to fix: which pages are opened, roughly where in the world readers are, what brought them here. It is counting, not watching.
Three rules govern it and they do not change with whichever tool we use. We set no third-party cookies. We do not let advertisers or data brokers follow you from here to anywhere else. And we do not join what we count to your account, so a signed-in reader is not a named row in a report.
What an account stores
Your email address, so we can tell you apart and reach you about the account. A display name, if you give one. Your password as a hash, never as you typed it, so nobody here can read it.
If you sign in with Google instead, we keep the identifier Google uses for your account and the email address it tells us. We ask Google for nothing else and keep no ongoing access to your Google account: we cannot read your mail, your files or your contacts, and we never could.
What a sign-in stores
A session is a random value held in one cookie. We store only a hash of it, so the contents of our own database would not let anyone sign in as you.
Beside it we keep when the session began, the browser description your browser sends, and a hash of the network address you signed in from. The address itself is never written down. We also count failed sign-in attempts, so that guessing at passwords can be slowed.
Cookies
The session cookie described above is the only one we ask you to carry, and only once you have signed in. It is marked so that scripts on the page cannot read it and so that it is only ever sent to the site you are reading.
No advertising or tracking cookies, on any page, signed in or not, which is why there is no cookie banner to click past.
The one exception is paying. When you choose to subscribe, the payment form is Stripe's, and Stripe's script sets cookies of its own to catch card fraud. It is loaded only on that form and only once you open it.
Paying
If you subscribe, Stripe takes the payment. The card form on our page is drawn by Stripe inside its own secure frame, so your card number goes straight to Stripe and never reaches us. We are told that you paid and for which plan; we never see or keep your card number.
Stripe keeps its own record of the payment under its own privacy policy, as any card payment does.
The assistant
Some of our sites have an assistant whose answers an AI model writes, for the readers it is switched on for. What you write to it, and what you have open beside it, is sent to Anthropic, the company whose model writes the answers, so that it can answer. Anthropic handles it under its own terms and privacy policy.
We keep your conversations with the assistant in your account so you can come back to them, and they are deleted with it.
Who else sees it
Nobody. We do not sell, rent or share account information.
Some services necessarily handle a little of it in passing: the company that delivers our email sees the address a verification or password-reset message is sent to, whoever we use to count page views sees the request that page made, if you choose to sign in with Google then Google knows you did, if you subscribe then Stripe handles the payment, and if you use an assistant then Anthropic reads what you write to it.
Keeping and deleting
Sessions expire on their own, and signing out ends one immediately. Verification and password-reset links are single use and expire.
Write to [email protected] and we will delete your account and everything attached to it. You do not have to give a reason.
Children
These are books for children and the accounts are not. An account is for a grown-up, and nothing about reading requires one.
Changes, and how to ask
If this changes we will change the date at the top. Anything you want to know about your own account, ask at [email protected].