We ("Poeticous", "us", or "our") takes the private nature of your personal information very seriously. This policy regarding our privacy practices (the "Privacy Policy") describes how we treat the information we collect when you visit and use the website at poeticous.com (the "Site") and/or content (collectively with the Site, the "Services"). When you use the Services, you are consenting to the collection, transfer, manipulation, storage, disclosure and other uses of your information as described in this Privacy Policy.

This Privacy Policy covers our treatment of information gathered when you are using or accessing the Services. This Privacy Policy does not apply to the practices of third parties that we do not own or control, including but not limited to any third party websites, services and applications ("Third Party Services") that you elect to access through the Service. While we try to facilitate access only to those Third Party Services that share our respect for your privacy, we don't take responsibility for the content or privacy policies of those Third Party Services. We encourage you to carefully review the privacy policies of all Third Party Services you access.

This Site is affiliated with Freestar for the purposes of placing advertising on the Site, and Freestar will collect and use certain data for advertising purposes. To learn more about Freestar’s data usage, click here.

When you create an account on Poeticous (an "Account"), you will provide information such as your name, password, and email address. This information may personally identify you. For example, if you use your full name as your username, you are disclosing your identity to the public.

As part of the Services, you may occasionally receive email and other communications from us, such as administrative communications relating to your Account (e.g., for purposes of Account recovery or password reset). These communications are considered part of the Services and your Account, which you may not be able to opt-out from receiving. Note that we will never email you to ask for your password or other Account information; if you receive such an email, forward it to us.

You can link your Account to certain Third Party Services. In order to do so, you will provide us with your username or other user ID on each of those Third Party Services. You may also be required to engage in an authorization process with each of those Third Party Services, where we receive a token that allows us to access those accounts so that we can, for example, authenticate you in Poeticous through those services. We do not receive or store your passwords for your Third Party Service accounts.

In some cases, when you connect your Account with your accounts on Third Party Services, we may obtain information about you from those Third Party Services. Such information could include, for example, your gender, if you have disclosed that information to that third party and made it available for Poeticous to access. To the extent we obtain such information, we may use the information about you that we receive from Third Party Services to improve and personalize the Services. As a general practice, we strongly urge you to make careful judgments about any personal information you disclose to Internet services, including Poeticous and linked Third Party Services, regardless of whether you choose to link your accounts together.

By default, all sharing through the Services is public, and when you provide us with content it is published so that anyone can view it. You should assume that anything you publish is publicly accessible. Content published and shared publicly is accessible to everyone, including search engines, and you may lose any privacy rights you might have regarding that content. In addition, information shared publicly may be copied and shared throughout the Internet. While you are free to remove published pieces of content from or delete your Account, because of the nature of Internet sharing, and technological limitations inherent to the Services, copies of that content may exist elsewhere and be retained indefinitely, including in our systems.

Cookies are pieces of text that may be sent to and saved by your web browser when you access a website; your web browser stores these cookies in a way associated with each website you visit, and you can see your cookies through your browser settings. We use cookies to enable our servers to recognize your web browser and tell us how and when you use the Services. Our cookies do not, by themselves, contain information that personally identifies you, and we don't combine the general information collected through cookies with other such information to tell us who you are. However, we do use cookies to identify that you have logged in and that your web browser has accessed aspects of the Services, and we may associate that information with your Account if you have one. Most web browsers have an option for turning off the cookie feature, which will prevent your browser from accepting new cookies, as well as (depending on the sophistication of your web browser software) allowing you to decide on acceptance of each new cookie in a variety of ways. If you disable cookies, you won't be able to log into your Account, and so will not be able to use the vast majority of our Services; as such, we don't recommend disabling your cookies when using the Services. Some third-party services that we use, such as Google Analytics, may also place their own cookies on your browser, and individual blogs on our network may contain code that places their own cookies. Note that this Privacy Policy covers our use of cookies only and does not cover the use of cookies by third parties.

We never share information we receive from you unless that information is aggregate information or other information that does not identify you.

As noted above, by default, content published through the Services is shared with the public, and this is an important feature of the Services. Such information includes, but isn't limited to, anything you choose to post on or submit to a public blog, including "Biography" information that may describe you and anything apparent in a posted photograph. Because this kind of information can be seen by anyone and may be indexed by search engines (like Google Search), you should be careful in what you choose to disclose publicly and make sure it is information you want to share with everyone.

You may access Third Party Services through the Services, for example by clicking on externally-pointing links. You may also choose to share information that you provide to us, like poems, with those Third Party Services (for example, by syndicating posts to Twitter or Facebook). This Privacy Policy only governs information we collect and you are responsible for understanding those Third Party Services' privacy policies.

Your Account information is protected by a password for your privacy and security. You need to prevent unauthorized access to your Account and Personal Information by selecting and protecting your password appropriately and limiting access to your computer and browser by signing off after you have finished accessing your Account on the Services.

We seek to protect your information (including your Account information) to ensure that it is kept private; however, we can't guarantee the security of any information. Unauthorized entry or use, hardware or software failure, and other factors, may compromise the security of user information at any time.

If you are a registered user, you can access and delete most information associated with your Account by logging into the Services and editing your Account page. Registered and unregistered users can access and delete cookies through their web browser settings.

You can access, correct, or delete your personal data and the content you post using your account settings and the tools that we provide:

To delete a poem, click on the trash can icon on the top-right corner of the poem.

To delete a comment, click on the trash can icon to the right of the comment.

To delete or change your name, email, biography, or social media links, click on your avatar image and then settings.

To delete your Account entirely, email your request to us at providing proof of authority over the Account. What constitutes "proof of authority" will vary depending on the circumstances, but generally will require sufficient identifying information so that we can be confident you are the Account owner. For example, if you email us from the same email you used to create your account, that constitutes "proof of authority".

After your account is deleted, all your personal data (name, email, links to social media) and the content you posted (biography, poems, comments) are also deleted forever and you will not be able to recover any of it. What might not get deleted immediately are the things you shared outside Poeticous as it can be extremely hard to delete something once it goes out onto the Internet, so be sure you’re only publishing content that you’re certain you want to publish.

We may amend this Privacy Policy from time to time, using the process for modifications set forth in our Terms of Service. Use of information we collect now is subject to the Privacy Policy in effect at the time such information is used.

If you have any questions or concerns regarding privacy using the Services, please send us a detailed message.

Effective: March 17th, 2023.