Privacy Policy

Last updated on 31 October 2026.

Charlene's Tales is run by one person, who decides what is done with your data and is the one you write to: contact@charlenes-tales.com (see the Legal Notice). Nothing is sold, and nothing is used for advertising.

What is kept, and why

Your account: your email address, your name and the account id if you sign in with Google or Discord, your passkeys, and your open sessions. To sign you in and keep the site working for you (the contract between us).
A record of sign-ins and account changes, with the IP address and device, and short-lived counters of attempts. To protect accounts and stop abuse (legitimate interest).
What you do on the site: your public name, your reading progress, lists, ratings and tag votes, what you post, your reports and author claims, your notifications. To give you these features (the contract), and to keep a moderation history (legitimate interest, and the law on hosting).
Alerts on your devices, if you turn them on: the address your browser gives for them. With your consent, withdrawn by turning them off.
Page views, counted with Matomo, on this site's own server. Without your consent: no cookie, no account, part of the IP address removed, and you can object. With your consent: an id kept on your device and your account id, to see how readers come back. Both are explained, with their switches, in the Cookie Policy.
Technical logs of errors and requests, which can hold an IP address or an account id. To keep the site running and secure (legitimate interest).

Who else receives it

OVHcloud (France) hosts the server, in Canada, and the files, in Canada with a copy in France. Canada is recognised by the European Commission as protecting personal data adequately.
Brevo (France) sends the site's emails, so it receives your address and the email.
Grafana Labs, an American company, stores the technical logs in its European region, in Germany.
Your browser's push service (Google, Mozilla, Apple or Microsoft) carries alerts, encrypted, to your devices if you turned them on.
Google or Discord, only if you choose to sign in with them: they learn you signed in here, under their own privacy policies. If your Discord account is linked and the site's Discord bot is on, your site roles are given to you on the community server, and taken back while your account is limited.
Google also receives the mail you send to the contact address, which is forwarded to a Gmail inbox.
Other readers see your public name and what you post. Moderators see reports and claims.

How long it is kept

Your account and what you do on the site: until you delete it.
A session: 30 days after it was last used.
The record of sign-ins: 6 months.
A notification: 90 days after you read it.
Matomo's visits: 25 months.
Technical logs: 14 days.
Backups of the database: up to 3 months.

Deleting your account (from your information page) takes effect after 30 days, during which you can change your mind. Then your address, name, sign-in methods, reading, lists, ratings, votes, notifications, your own stories and your Matomo visits are erased, and the backups holding them are gone within 3 months. What stays, under a "deleted user" name: what you added to other authors' stories, and the moderation history (decided claims and reports), which other people's rights depend on.

Your rights

You can ask to see your data, have it corrected or erased, receive a copy, limit its use or object to it, and withdraw a consent at any time. Write to contact@charlenes-tales.com from your account's address; you get an answer within a month, or word that it needs longer and why. Wherever you live, the same requests are welcome.

If you think your data is mishandled, you can complain to the CNIL, the French authority (cnil.fr), or to the authority of your own country.

Children

An account needs you to be at least 13, or older where your country requires it (15 in France). An account found to belong to a younger child is deleted.

Changes

If this policy changes in a way that matters, signed-in users are told on the site before it applies. The date at the top is the last change.