Privacy Policy

1. What this covers

This explains what ThePaper collects when you use the site, why, and what choices you have about it. It’s part of the Terms of Service. If you’re a contributor, the Contributor Agreement also applies to what you publish.

2. What we collect

Account: your email address and password. Your password is handled entirely by our authentication provider (Supabase) and is never visible to us in plain text.

Profile: whatever you choose to add when you set one up, contributor profiles can include your name, handle, bio, location, organization, areas of focus, avatar, skills, credentials, and portfolio links; publisher profiles can include your organization’s name, handle, description, location, and focus areas.

Content and activity: stories you publish, assignments you post or apply to, direct messages between a contributor and a publisher, recommendations and follows, and reward or redemption activity tied to your account.

Automated review: when a story is published, an automated check runs against its content and stores its result (whether anything was flagged, and why) so an editor can review it if needed. See the Contributor Agreement for how that process works.

3. What’s public

Your writer or publisher profile page, the stories you publish, and assignments you post are public by design, that’s the point of the platform. Your email address, password, and direct messages are never shown publicly.

4. Cookies

We use one essential cookie, set by our authentication provider, to keep you signed in. It’s required for the site to work if you have an account.

We also use Google Analytics to understand how people use ThePaper.in, such as which pages are visited, roughly where visitors are, and what device and browser they use. It sets its own cookies (named _ga) to tell visits apart. We use this only to improve the site, and we don’t use it for advertising. It isn’t used on signed-in areas like your dashboard.

How we ask depends on where you are. If you visit from the European Union, the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom or Switzerland, Google Analytics only runs if you choose Accept in the privacy banner; if you choose Decline, or make no choice, nothing is sent to Google and no analytics cookies are set. Everywhere else, Google Analytics runs by default and the privacy banner tells you so. Wherever you are, you can change your choice at any time with the Cookie settings link at the bottom of every page; turning analytics off removes the analytics cookies. You can also use Google’s Analytics opt-out browser add-on or by blocking cookies in your browser.

We show ads from Google AdSense on reading pages: stories, Explore and category pages. We don’t show them on your dashboard, on sign-in or legal pages, or on sponsored stories. Third-party vendors, including Google, use cookies to serve ads based on your previous visits to this and other websites. Google’s use of advertising cookies lets it and its partners show you ads based on those visits. Where the law requires it, you’ll be asked for your consent first.

You can turn off personalized ads in Google’s Ads Settings, or opt out of some third-party vendors’ cookies at aboutads.info. Google explains how it uses information from sites that show its ads here.

5. Who we share it with

We don’t sell your data. A limited set of outside services process it on our behalf, to run the platform:

• Supabase hosts our database and handles authentication and account emails (like sign-in links and password resets).
• Resend delivers our notification emails, such as story review results, messages, assignment updates and reward codes. It receives your email address, your name and the content of each email.
• Cloudflare Turnstile runs the security check on our sign-up, login and password reset forms, to stop automated abuse. It sees technical details of your visit, such as your IP address and browser, under Cloudflare’s own privacy policy.
• Amazon Associates: when you click a Product Recommendation that links to Amazon, the click is tagged with ThePaper.in’s own affiliate ID. See the Affiliate Disclosure for how that works; no personal data is shared with Amazon beyond the click itself.
• Google Analytics receives information about how the site is used (see Cookies above). Google processes it under its own privacy policy.
• Google AdSense shows ads on reading pages and uses cookies to serve and measure them (see Cookies above).

We don’t currently process payments directly. When we do, this policy will be updated to name the payment processor and what it handles.

6. How long we keep it

We keep your account and profile information for as long as your account is active. A record of your agreement to the Terms and (for contributors) the Contributor Agreement is kept permanently as an audit trail, independent of whether the account is later closed.

7. Your choices

You can review and update most of your profile directly from your dashboard. Self-serve controls for things like notification preferences are still being built; for anything else, including requesting a copy of your data or asking us to delete your account, email us and we’ll handle it directly.

8. Who this is for

ThePaper is for adults able to enter a binding agreement, consistent with the Terms of Service. We don’t knowingly collect information from children.

9. Where your data is processed

Our infrastructure providers may process and store data outside your own country. We rely on their own security and compliance practices for that infrastructure.

10. Changes to this policy

We may update this policy as the platform changes, most notably once we add direct payment processing. Material changes will be reflected in the “last updated” date above.

11. Contact

Questions about this policy, or a request about your data: contact@thepaper.in.