Privacy

Who is responsible

The controller of your personal data is Carlos Mahonri Monterroso Garcia, operating StoriesForge from Guatemala (address and email under "Operator and contact" at the end of this page).

We have not appointed a data protection officer, because we do not carry out the large-scale monitoring or large-scale processing of sensitive data that requires one.

What we hold

Providing your email address is necessary to create an account; without it we cannot provide the service. All other data is created by what you do in the service.

The stories you write may contain personal data about other people (for example family members). Do not enter special categories of data (health, beliefs, sexual orientation and so on) about real people, and do not enter personal data about a child other than what you, as the child's parent or guardian, choose to include. You are responsible for what you enter about others. You can ask us to remove such data (see "Your rights").

• ·Account: email address and the identity provider's subject id, interface language, plan, subscription status, and credit balance.
• ·Worlds: everything you wrote or answered — premise, interview answers, decisions, directives, promises — and everything the engine wrote back: chapters, turns, canon, game state, illustrations.
• ·Reading signals: where you stopped, how long a chapter held your attention, and the reactions you left. They tune the story and nothing else.
• ·Credit ledger: one row per reservation, charge, refund, and purchase, with the job and world it belonged to.
• ·Operational logs: request and job records, kept short-lived, for diagnosing failures.
• ·Terms receipt: the version of these documents you accepted and when, as proof that you confirmed you are 18 or older.
• ·Billing identifiers: the customer, subscription and price identifiers Paddle gives us. We do not receive your card number.
• ·Messages you send us through the contact form or by email: your address, your message and its topic. We keep a short-lived counter keyed by a one-way hash of your address to limit abuse of the form.
• ·Visit counts: a first-party counter of page views and sign-up completions on our public pages. It stores no cookie, no IP address, no browser identifier and no account identifier.

Why we use your data and on what legal basis

If you are in the EEA, the United Kingdom or another place with similar law, we rely on these legal bases:

We do not currently rely on your consent for any processing. If we ever add something that needs it (for example marketing email), we will ask first and you can withdraw consent at any time without affecting what came before. You can ask for a summary of our legitimate-interests balancing by writing to us.

• ·Create and run your account, sign you in, generate your chapters, turns and illustrations, store and show your worlds, export and delete on request: account, worlds, credit ledger, session - performance of our contract with you (Art. 6(1)(b)).
• ·Charge, refund, keep accounting and tax records: credit ledger, billing identifiers, restricted payment and refund records - contract (6(1)(b)); legal obligation (6(1)(c)).
• ·Keep the service secure, prevent abuse and fraud, rate-limit, diagnose failures (short-lived logs), enforce the Acceptable Use policy: operational logs, contact-form counter, account status - our legitimate interests in running a secure and reliable service (6(1)(f)).
• ·Tune the story with your reading signals (where you stopped, reactions): reading signals - our legitimate interests in giving you a relevant story (6(1)(f)). You can switch it off at any time (see "Your rights").
• ·Keep proof that you accepted the terms and confirmed you are 18 or older: terms receipt - legitimate interests in being able to show compliance (6(1)(f)); contract.
• ·Answer your messages: contact-form data - contract if you are a customer, otherwise legitimate interests (6(1)(f)).
• ·Count visits to our public pages without identifying anyone: counter events - no personal data is processed; if it were, legitimate interests.
• ·Establish, exercise or defend legal claims (chargebacks, disputes): restricted retained records - legitimate interests (6(1)(f)); legal claims.

What we never hold

We never see your card. Payments run through Paddle as merchant of record; StoriesForge stores only the customer and subscription identifiers Paddle gives us, so we can tell which plan you are on.

We do not store passwords. Email and password are checked with Amazon Cognito; StoriesForge keeps only a signed session cookie that references your account id.

Who else sees it

Generation requires sending the relevant part of your world to a model provider. Only what a given step needs travels: the writer receives the story's context, not your email or your ledger. We do not sell your data and do not use it for advertising.

• ·Amazon Web Services (AWS), our hosting provider and processor: it hosts our database, image storage, application logs, sign-in (Amazon Cognito) and email delivery (Amazon SES). Our infrastructure is in the AWS US East (N. Virginia) Region.
• ·Model providers, our processors, to write the chapters, turns and illustrations you request: text models (Anthropic Claude and Amazon Nova) and image models (Stability AI models) are accessed through Amazon Bedrock, which runs them inside AWS; AWS states the model providers do not receive or have access to your prompts or outputs.
• ·Google (Gemini API), our processor, to generate the illustrations of Kids picture books.
• ·Paddle, which sells the subscriptions and credit packs to you as merchant of record. Paddle collects your payment details, handles invoicing, tax and refunds, and acts as an independent controller of that data under its own privacy notice. We receive only identifiers, plan and transaction status.
• ·People you choose: readers you invite into a cooperative world, and anything you choose to publish (for example a public blueprint or community profile).
• ·Authorities, advisers or a buyer of the service, where the law requires or to defend legal claims.

International transfers

We operate from Guatemala, and our servers and the model processing run mainly in the United States. If you use StoriesForge from the European Economic Area or the United Kingdom, your data is therefore transferred outside those areas.

• ·AWS: transfers are covered by the AWS Data Processing Addendum, which is part of the AWS Service Terms and includes the EU Standard Contractual Clauses and the UK International Data Transfer Addendum.
• ·Model providers through Bedrock: processing happens inside AWS under the same terms. Some models use US cross-Region inference, so processing can occur in more than one US Region.
• ·Paddle: transfers from the UK/EEA to countries without an adequacy decision rely on Standard Contractual Clauses (controller-to-controller) and the ICO's UK addendum, per Paddle's privacy notice. Paddle is an independent controller; its notice governs.
• ·Google (Gemini API): transfers are covered by Google's API data processing terms.
• ·Between you and us: when you send us data from the EEA/UK, the transfer to us in Guatemala is made at your request to provide the service you asked for (Art. 49(1)(b)). You can ask us for a copy of the safeguards (write to us).

Model training

We do not use your prose, decisions and images to train a model. Amazon Bedrock does not use your content to improve its base models and does not share it with the model providers; Google states that prompts and outputs of its paid Gemini API are not used to improve its products.

AWS may retain inputs and outputs for abuse detection, depending on the model's data-retention mode, and cross-Region inference can store retained data in the destination Region.

How long it stays

Deleting a world removes its active application records and queues its image files for cleanup. Account closure also removes the reader profile and owned stories. Shared image references, recovery failures, backups and vendor copies require separate handling; the application receipt does not establish removal of every copy.

Restricted account, credit, payment, refund, chargeback, tax, claim and recovery records can remain linked to the closed account. Used blueprints are unpublished and detached from the creator, with their content held for privacy review. Free text, images and metadata can still identify people; these records are not described as anonymous.

• ·Account, worlds and ledger while the account is open: until you delete the world or close the account.
• ·After account closure, application records of the account: removed as described under "Deleting your account"; ordinary access is blocked as soon as erasure starts.
• ·Restricted payment, credit, refund, chargeback, tax and recovery records: as long as tax and accounting law requires.
• ·Used blueprints (unpublished and detached from you at closure, held for privacy review): until the review is finished.
• ·Application logs (CloudWatch): 30 days.
• ·Database backups: 7 days. Closure removes the live data; a copy can persist in backups until they expire.
• ·Short-lived OAuth sign-in cookies: 10 minutes.
• ·Session cookie: up to one year, or until you sign out or close the account.
• ·Messages you send us and our replies: as long as needed to answer you and handle any follow-up.
• ·Contact-form abuse counter: about one hour (rows are deleted when the hourly window rolls).
• ·Model-provider copies: under the provider's own terms (see "Model training").
• ·Paddle's records: under Paddle's own privacy notice.

Taking your data with you

Your account page exports a single JSON file containing your account record, every world you own with its full narrative — chapters, canon, game state, decisions, promises, image metadata — the rows you left in worlds owned by others, and your complete credit ledger. It is generated on request, from the live database, with nothing summarized away.

Deleting your account

Request closure from your account page. For a linked subscription, cleanup waits for confirmed immediate cancellation. Active work or unresolved shared ownership can stop the request for review. Once erasure starts, ordinary application access is blocked. Application cleanup, queued images and login-system removal have separate outcomes and may need a retry or operator recovery.

Completed application cleanup cannot be undone. Included and purchased spendable credits are cleared; a restricted record of those balances remains for review. This does not issue an automatic refund or waive any applicable refund right. A later registration creates a new account without restoring the old data or credits. Contact the operator if a request remains pending or you need review of retained information.

Your rights

If you are in the EEA or the United Kingdom (and, where the law gives you similar rights, elsewhere) you have the right to:

How to use these rights. Export and account closure are self-service on your account page. For everything else write to the contact address below from the email address of your account. We may ask you to confirm your identity. We answer within one month; we can extend by up to two further months for complex or numerous requests and will tell you why. Requests are free unless manifestly unfounded or excessive. Where we hold your data only because you typed it into a world owned by someone else, we may need that owner's input.

• ·Access your data and receive a copy. Use "Export" on your account page: one JSON file with your account record, every world you own with its full narrative, the rows you left in worlds owned by others, your community and blueprint records, your Kids books and your complete credit ledger. For anything it does not cover, write to us.
• ·Portability: the same file is machine-readable and can be moved to another service.
• ·Rectify inaccurate data: edit your account, profile and settings at any time, or write to us.
• ·Erasure ("right to be forgotten"): close your account from your account page. The deletion section above explains the stages and the restricted records we must or may keep, and why.
• ·Restrict processing while a dispute about accuracy or lawfulness is resolved: write to us.
• ·Object to processing based on our legitimate interests, including personalization: switch personalization off per world or globally in Settings, which stops use of your reading signals from then on; for any other objection write to us and we will stop unless we have a compelling reason that overrides your interests or need the data for legal claims.
• ·Withdraw consent at any time, where we rely on it (currently none).
• ·Not be subject to a decision based solely on automated processing that has a legal or similarly significant effect on you. We do not make such decisions.
• ·Complain to a supervisory authority: in the EEA, the authority in your country of residence, work or where you believe an infringement occurred (list: edpb.europa.eu); in the UK, the Information Commissioner's Office (ico.org.uk). We would appreciate the chance to resolve it first.

Children

StoriesForge is for adults aged 18 or older, and we do not knowingly collect data from anyone under 18. The Kids picture-book feature is a tool for parents and guardians: an adult creates the book and may show it to a child; children have no accounts and do not use the service themselves. If you believe a child has created an account, write to us and we will delete it.

Automated decisions and profiling

We do not use your data to make decisions with legal or similarly significant effects about you. The only profiling is the use of your reading signals to tune the story you read, which you can switch off.

Cookies

We use three functional cookies, none for advertising: a signed session cookie (up to one year, until you sign out), your interface-language preference (one year), and the reader-profile preference used by local installs. During sign-in we also set short-lived cookies (10 minutes) that protect the sign-in flow against forgery. All are strictly necessary to provide what you asked for, so they do not require consent under the ePrivacy rules and we show no cookie banner. We use no tracking or analytics cookie. To understand which public pages get visited we use a first-party counter that stores nothing on your device and records no IP address or personal identifier.

Contact

Write to us at the email address under "Operator and contact" at the end of this page to exercise any right, ask what we hold about you, or raise a privacy concern. You may also complain to your local data-protection authority (see "Your rights").

Operator and contact

Carlos Mahonri Monterroso Garcia

ALDEA EL CARMEN, 3 AVENIDA, Cdad. de Guatemala 01051, Guatemala

cmonterrosog@proton.me