What we collect, in plain language

• Your legal name. There is no field for it anywhere.
• Your address, phone number or social accounts.
• An account, a password, or a login of any kind.

• The story you write, and the optional role, country and year you attach to it.
• Nothing that contacts you. The submission flow has no required email field, so we have no way to reach you about your story — which is why the reference and the recovery code matter.
• A hashed signal used to stop the same device reacting to a story a thousand times. It is not a profile and cannot be reversed into an identity.

Aggregate, cookie-free page counts only. No third-party advertising trackers, no session recording, no fingerprinting for marketing purposes.

Keep your reference and your recovery code. Together they let you ask for a withdrawal or a correction on the request page, without telling us anything that identifies you. A person reviews every request; a withdrawn story comes off The Record.

If we are compelled to hand over information about a submission, the honest answer is that in almost every case there is nothing to hand over. We will publish a transparency note whenever a request is received, unless we are legally prohibited from doing so.