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THEHUMAN DIARYThere is a word for what you felt.
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Privacy

Last updated September 2026

People send us private things. This page describes exactly what we hold, and it is short because we hold very little.

What we collect

If you create an account, three things:

  • Your email address, so we can tell you what happened to a story you sent us, and so you can recover your account.
  • A display name, which you choose and which may be a pen name.
  • A password, stored only as a scrypt hash. We cannot read it, and neither can anyone who obtains the database.

We also generate a permanent Human Diary ID for you, such as HD-000184. It is public on stories you publish under your name.

What we deliberately do not collect

No phone number, postal address, date of birth, employer, school, legal name, or social media handles. Your session records no IP address and no browser fingerprint. We ask for none of it because we do not need it, and data not collected is data that cannot leak.

Anonymous stories

When you publish anonymously, the story carries no name and no ID, and it does not appear on your profile. This is enforced in the database itself rather than in the page that displays it, so no future change to the site can expose it by accident.

Moderators can still see who wrote an anonymous story. That link is what allows us to act on abuse, threats, and illegal content. It is not visible to readers, to search engines, or through any public part of the site.

Cookies

One cookie, set when you log in, holding a random session token. It is HTTP-only, so scripts cannot read it. No advertising or analytics cookies are set at present. If that changes, this page changes first and you will be asked for consent where the law requires it.

Deleting your account

Write to us and we will delete your account, your email address, and any unpublished submissions. Published stories can be removed on request. Moderation records relating to abuse may be retained where we have a legal reason to keep them.

Third parties

We do not sell your data and we do not share it for marketing. The site runs on our own server. If advertising is introduced, the advertising partner will be named here before the first advertisement appears.

Questions about any of this: contact us.