Privacy

Told at Midnight is run by Off Record LLC, 1209 Mountain Road, Ste N, Albuquerque, NM 87110. Anything about this page, or about what we hold, goes to admin@offrecord.space.

The site is open to anyone who is old enough. Its public pages can be found through search engines; the stories themselves, and everything behind the door, ask search engines not to list them.

The first time you arrive, the app puts a random key in a cookie. That key is how it knows which stories are yours, what you have saved and how you have rated things. It identifies a browser, not a person: reading and writing never ask for your name or your email, the key is never shown to another reader, and it is never attached to a story you put into the collection. The one place we ask for an email address is the waiting list (below), and only if you choose to join it.

Four small cookies and a note or two in the browser's own storage, plus Google Analytics' own cookies, which count visits (below).

All of it against the key in the cookie, never against a name.

A story is written by language models we run ourselves, not by an AI company's service, so what you type is not handed to another company to be written. They run on a graphics server we rent by the hour, through Vast.ai, from an independent host. Your request and the story pass through that machine while it is being written; we save nothing on it.

What you type is checked against our own rules before a story is written, and the story is checked again before it can go into the collection.

The site runs on a server we rent from Hetzner Online GmbH, in a datacentre in Helsinki, Finland. It keeps ordinary web-server logs - which page was asked for, when, and the network address it came from - for seven days, and then deletes them.

If you send a story to your Kindle, the file leaves us: Amazon receives it when you upload or email it to them, and what happens to it there is between you and Amazon.

The site uses Google Analytics, run by Google LLC, so that we know how many people come and which pages they open. If you would rather not be counted, the button below stops it for this browser, and it does not load again.

Google is told the page by its address and nothing else from it: a story page reaches Google as "a story", with neither its title nor its link, and nothing you type is sent. Google's advertising features are switched off. What Google does with what it receives is set out in Google's own privacy policy.

No advertising, no social buttons, nothing embedded from anywhere else, and no tracker apart from the visit count above, which you can switch off. Even the fonts are served from our own machine, so your browser never asks another company for them. We do not sell what we hold, and there is no newsletter: the waiting list above is written to only about what you joined it for.

What is listed above stays until you ask us to delete it. If that ever changes, this page changes with it.

You can delete it yourself, without asking anybody: "Forget this device" at the bottom of Yours clears what we hold against this browser's key, the cookies that carry it, and Google Analytics' cookies. If you asked not to be counted, that stays. It says exactly what goes before you confirm, and it cannot be undone.

For a copy, or for anything that control does not cover, write to admin@offrecord.space. Because there are no accounts, what we hold is tied to a key in your browser rather than to an email address, so tell us roughly when you last read and what you asked for.

This is a site for adults. The door asks, and your answer is the only thing it records.

The date at the top changes with it, and what we hold is only ever what this page says we hold.