We know your privacy on the internet is extremely important to you. Since GS Poetry gathers certain personal information about registered users, we want to ensure that you fully understand the terms and conditions surrounding the use of the information collected. GS Poetry reserves the right to revise this policy at any time without notification to you, so please read it often in connection with your use of the GS Poetry web site.
We know that you care how information about you is used and shared. GS Poetry will not share your e-mail address or other identifiable information with any third-party company (no external spam). GS Poetry will protect your information through the use of secure, encrypted databases.
GS Poetry collects the personally identifiable information that you submit on the registration and user profile forms to permit you access to certain content on the site.
Generally, the information GS Poetry collects help us to communicate with you regarding the status of your poetry submissions, any issues that may need to be resolved or to answer any other types of questions. For instance, we use your e-mail address to provide you with an e-mail confirmation of your registration or poetry submission.
We will not share your personally-identifiable information with any entity, except with the proper local, state or federal authorities when necessary to comply with local, state and federal laws (i.e. answering subpoenas).
We do require that all users who register on the platform enter their date of birth. This is solely for legal reasons and compliance. We do not allow anyone under the age of 13 to become a registered user of the site. By default, date of birth information is not publicly displayed. If a user chooses to publicly display their birthday, only the month and day will display, not the year of birth. We do not knowingly collect information from minors under the age of 13.
When you visit, our servers automatically receive basic technical information such as your IP address, browser type, device type, and the page you asked for. We use it to run the site, keep it secure, and fix problems. We count visits with the cookieless analytics tool described below.
We use the information we collect to:
We do not sell, trade, or rent your personal information to third parties. We may share information with trusted service providers who help us operate the site (e.g., email platforms, hosting providers), who are obligated to keep it confidential.
Private messages. Your direct messages are between you and the person you're writing to, and our staff don't read them as a matter of course. We look at messages only when a member files a report, so we can check what happened and take action if it's needed. That review covers the messages between the members named in the report and, when a member has been reported, messages they've sent to other members, so we can check for spam or a pattern of unwanted contact. Every review is logged. Outside of a report, we access messages only when the law requires it, as described in the section on public authorities below.
Governments, courts, regulators, and law-enforcement agencies sometimes ask online services to disclose information about their users. This section explains how GS Poetry handles those requests. It expands on our statement above that we will share personally-identifiable information with the proper authorities when necessary to comply with the law.
We recommend that you choose a password that will not be easily guessed by others. It is recommended that you use a separate password for every site to which you are a member. This is a form of damage control. In case the security of one site is compromised, your other accounts are still protected. If you forget your password, you can reset it.
We only use cookies the site needs to work. We do not use tracking cookies, advertising cookies, or cookies from social networks or ad companies.
A cookie is a small text file your browser keeps for a website. GS Poetry uses cookies to keep you signed in (through Clerk, our sign-in provider), to save your progress while you set up a new account, to stop someone who entered a birthday under 13 from trying again with a different date, and to remember whether you chose the light or dark theme. None of these cookies are used to follow you around the internet, build an advertising profile, or share your activity with anyone. Cookies set for gspoetry.com cannot be read by other websites. You can block or delete cookies in your browser settings, but you will not be able to stay signed in to GS Poetry without them.
Children under thirteen (13) years of age are not allowed to register on the site. We do strive to comply with the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA). If you are the parent of a child under the age of thirteen (13) who has created an account using a false birth date, please notify our support center and we will immediately cancel your child's account and delete all materials associated with your child's account from the site and our database. Anyone legally under the age of thirteen (13) who registers on the site is violating our Terms of Use. GS Poetry is not liable for any actions taken by a violator of our age requirement. For more information about COPPA, visit the Federal Trade Commission's web site.
Closing your account removes your access from the website and its features. Closing your account does not remove your poems from our website or database. If you would like your poems scrubbed from our databases, please contact our support team. All requests will be processed within 45 days. For step-by-step instructions, see our Data Deletion page.
Depending on where you live (for example, if you are a California resident under the CCPA/CPRA), you have rights over the personal information we hold about you. We honor these requests regardless of your location:
You can exercise most of these rights yourself in Settings → Account, which lets you close your account and export your data (both protected by a security check). To make any other request, or if you prefer we handle it for you, email us at support@gspoetry.com or contact our support team. We will respond within the timeframe the law requires and will not discriminate against you for exercising these rights. You may authorize someone to make a request on your behalf.
We use trusted third-party providers to operate parts of the service. These providers process limited personal data on our behalf and are contractually obligated to protect it:
Phone numbers and SMS. Adding a phone number is optional and is used only as a second factor at sign-in if you turn on SMS two-factor. Your email address, not your phone, is your primary login. SMS two-factor is available in the United States and Canada. Standard message and data rates from your carrier may apply. See our Terms of Service for SMS consent details.
We understand that many people are concerned about security on the Internet. The security of the information that you provide to us is also very important to us. To prevent unauthorized disclosure, maintain data accuracy and ensure the correct use of information, we have in place reasonable physical, electronic and managerial procedures to safeguard and secure any information we collect online. Purchases are processed by Stripe; your payment details are entered on Stripe-hosted forms and are subject to Stripe's terms of use and privacy policy. In the event that the security system is breached, we will attempt to notify members as soon as possible.
We do not have any control over the privacy practices of any external websites linked from GS Poetry (including links posted by other members). Therefore, you should review those sites' privacy policies separately from GS Poetry's before providing them any information.
We use Umami, a privacy-friendly self-hosted analytics tool, to understand how visitors use the site. Umami does not use cookies or any client-side storage. Visitor identity is computed server-side as an anonymized hash of IP address, user agent, and a daily-rotating salt, meaning the same visitor cannot be re-identified across days, and the underlying IP is never stored as personal data.
We collect aggregate, non-personally-identifying metrics like pages visited, referring sites, browser type, country (no city-level), screen size, and time on page. Because Umami is self-hosted, this data lives only in our own database, it is never shared with Google, Meta, or any third-party analytics provider.
Because no cookies or device storage are involved and no personal data is retained, this analytics does not need cookie consent under most reasonable EU/UK readings.
We reserve the right to change our privacy policies at any time, except as may be prohibited by law. Use of our websites or services or the purchase of products after posted changes means that you consent to the privacy policies as changed.