Privacy Policy

Luar Cafe is a place to read, write, and share stories. We collect as little about you as possible.

References to "the site", "the platform", "us", or "we" refer to Luar Cafe. References to "users" or "authors" refer specifically to those using the site.

What we collect

• Your email address. Required for sign-in. We never send marketing emails, and we never sell or share your data. We retain a history of email address changes to protect user accounts from malicious takeover.
• A username and display name. These are public—they exist only to represent you to everyone else on the site. Please don't use your full real name, or anything else that identifies you, unless you truly want it to be public.
• A push notification identifier, only if you opt in to push notifications on one of your devices. We store this identifier solely to send the notifications you requested. The notifications reach your device through your browser's own push service, run by its maker (for example Google, Mozilla, or Apple), which is the only way a browser can deliver them. Turning notifications back off deletes the identifier.
• What you choose to post—comments, an avatar, works. It always remains yours; see the Terms of Service.

What we never collect

• No trackers, analytics, or third-party user tracking.
• No selling or sharing your data.
• No profiling: we never use your data to advertise or market anything, to you or anyone else, demographically or otherwise.

Cookies and other data stored on your device

Some Luar Cafe features require storing data in your browser or on your device. None of it is shared with anyone, and none of it follows you to other sites. Clearing your browser's data for this site removes all of it.

• Cookies. These keep you signed in and remember your site preferences, such as theme, reading settings, and data freshness tags to ensure your device sees the latest content after you make a change.
• Your place in a story. While reading progress is primarily for syncing between devices (and thus stored on our server), a copy of your reading progress is stored on your device to more accurately restore your reading position on each device and to enable offline reading.
• Unfinished writing. When writing a comment, chapter, or other form content, we remember what you've entered until you've finished to prevent your work from being lost, such as by an accidental navigation or page reload.
• Offline reading. We cache some pages in your browser so that Luar Cafe still functions when you have no internet connection. You can opt in and out of caching specific works from your Library page.
• Other small UI features. We store the dismissal of site guides, nav positions, dismissed info banners, and other small flags about UI state to ensure page-to-page consistency and avoid repeat notifications. None of this data leaves your device, nor is it used to track you or your behavior.
• Which account this device notifies. If you turn on push notifications, your device remembers which account they belong to, so a later sign-in never receives someone else's. Logging out clears it.

Logging out clears all user-specific data.

Where your data lives

Luar Cafe runs on Cloudflare, Inc's global network, and uses this network for storing and serving all the data required to run the site. This includes content you upload or post. We have no association with Cloudflare, Inc, other than purchasing the services necessary to host Luar Cafe.

When data is deleted

• Closing your account takes your works, pseudonyms, and comments out of public view immediately, and permanently erases everything after a grace period: 7 days, or up to one year if you have ever published a work. This grace period exists so an accidental or malicious account closure can be undone. If you wish to hasten this timeline, please contact support.
• We keep a record of which versions of our terms and policies you accepted, even after your account is gone. This record uses a one-way hash of your email address so that we can verify this record in the future without retaining a copy of your email. We keep both for seven years after closure, and we keep transaction records as long as tax and accounting law requires.
• We keep our record of moderation actions, including after an account is gone—it is how we can say what we did and why. This log only refers to accounts by an internal number rather than by any detail identifying you, such as your email.

Your rights

Your data is yours, wherever you live. Email support@luar.cafe any time to see, export, correct, or delete what we have about you.

Changes

If this policy changes, we'll publish the new version, show you what changed, and ask you to accept it. Every past version stays available at /legal/privacy.