Privacy Policy

Reading is open, sharing is a choice

You can browse and read published stories without an account. You only sign in if you want to share your own story, save stories, or react to one. Anything you publish becomes public and can be read by anyone on the internet. Your story stays a private draft until you choose to publish it, and you can switch it back to private at any time.

One thing to know before you publish: once a story is public, search engines and other people can copy or save it. Unpublishing or deleting removes it from Foreword right away, but we cannot take back copies that others made while it was public.

You choose what to share

Your story is yours, and so is the level of detail. Share as much or as little as feels right. Before publishing, it is worth a quick read to check you are comfortable with everything in it becoming public, including details that could identify you or the people you mention.

What we collect

• Account: your email address, and your name if you sign in with Google. Your public byline is a choice between a shortened name like “First L.” and a generated alias, and you can change it from your story’s edit page. We never ask for your full legal name, and Google does not share your password with us.
• Your profile: the basics you enter (birth year, country, cancer type, stage, treatment status, and similar) and the answers you write. Your birth year is only ever shown as an age range, never your exact age.
• Activity: the stories you mark helpful and the reactions you add. These appear on stories as counts, never with your name.
• Messages: anything you send through the contact form or a report.
• Technical basics: like most websites, our hosting provider keeps short lived server logs that include your IP address. We do not use these to track you. When you send a message, report a story, or ask for a sign in link, we also keep a scrambled version of your IP address, so that nobody can flood us. It cannot be turned back into your address, and it stops counting after an hour. We clear it the next time anyone does one of those things, so on a quiet week it can sit a little longer.
• Sign in links: if you ask for one, we keep the address you typed until the link is used or cleared away. The link stops working after 24 hours, and no account is made unless you use it.
• Page views: which page was opened, including which story, plus rough details like country and browser. If you followed a link here, whatever that site chose to pass on, which is usually its name and occasionally the full page.

We do not ask for or store your date of birth, home address, or medical records.

How we use it

To run the service: show your story, power search and filters, keep you signed in, and let you save and react. We use your email to send you a sign in link when you ask for one, and to reply if you contact us. We do not sell your information or use it for advertising.

When we might share

We do not sell or rent your information, ever. We would only share it if the law required us to, or if it were genuinely needed to keep someone safe.

Who we work with

We rely on a small set of trusted services to operate: Google for sign in, Neon for the database, Vercel for hosting and for counting page views, and Resend for sending email. They only handle your data to do those jobs for us. These services store data in the United States, so if you use Foreword from somewhere else, your information travels there.

Cookies, and counting visits

We use one essential cookie to keep you signed in. We do not use advertising or tracking cookies.

We do count page views, through Vercel, who host Foreword, so we can see what people find worth reading. It sets no cookie, it cannot follow you around other websites, and it never receives anything you or anyone else wrote. It does not get the filters you set on the stories page, or which story you were reading when you followed a link: we strip those in your browser before the count is sent. There is no switch to turn counting off, and rather than imply one, we will say that any of the usual content blockers stops it.

Your choices

You can edit or unpublish your story at any time. You can delete your account, which permanently removes your story, saved stories, and reactions. If you filed a report, it stays on record but is no longer linked to you. A message you sent through the contact form also stays, with your name and email address on it, because it was never linked to your account in the first place. Ask us and we will delete it. If you would like a copy of the data we hold about you, ask through the contact form and we will send it to you.

Keeping your information

We keep your content until you delete it. We take daily backups for safety and keep them for about 90 days, so anything you delete also disappears from our backups within that time.

A message you send through the contact form is kept after we have dealt with it, so that we can still answer questions later about what was asked and what we did. It is not linked to your account, so deleting your account does not remove it. If you want your message deleted, ask us and we will do it.

Security

Your data is stored with reputable providers, connections to Foreword are encrypted, and the database can only be reached by the very small number of people who run Foreword. No online service can promise perfect security, but we keep the surface small: we collect little, we run no advertising or cross-site trackers, and we do not share your data with anyone beyond the services listed above.

Links to other sites

Stories often mention products, resources, and other websites. Those sites have their own privacy practices, and this policy does not cover them.

For adults

Foreword is meant for adults. You must be 18 or older to share a story. Reading is open to anyone.

Changes

If we update this policy, we will change the date at the top. If a change meaningfully affects your privacy, we will say so on the site, not just quietly edit this page.

Not medical advice

Foreword is not medical advice. See our community guidelines.

Questions?

Questions about this policy or your data? Reach us through the contact form here. A real person reads every message.