Privacy at literatureofiranian.com

We do not ask you to create an account to read anything, and we do not sell data to anyone. We do keep anonymous usage statistics so we can tell which texts people actually read, and two features send data to third parties: the chatbot and donations. The detail is below.

When you browse the site, your browser reports each page view, text view, button click and approximate reading time to our own server. For each of those we store:

• A random visitor identifier held in your browser and reused on later visits, so repeat visits can be counted
• A session identifier for the current browsing session
• The page path, the referring page, and your browser's user-agent string
• A one-way salted hash of your IP address — the address itself is never written to our database
• For reading-time samples, the number of seconds a text was open, capped at 30 minutes

We use these statistics to decide which works to publish, translate and maintain. They are ours alone: there is no Google Analytics, no advertising pixel, and no third-party tracker on this site.

We do not ask for your name, and we do not try to identify you. But the visitor identifier is persistent, so we can tell that the same browser returned — this is not anonymous in the strictest sense, and the earlier version of this policy was wrong to say so.

You can erase the identifier at any time by clearing this site's data in your browser. Doing so also clears your saved verses and reading position (below).

Some features remember things locally. This data stays on your device and is never transmitted to us:

• Your theme choice (light, dark, or system)
• Your reading-language preference
• Any verses or texts you save, and where you left off reading
• A small flag recording that you have an active session, used on the admin sign-in only

This site sets a cookie recording your chosen reading language, so the site opens in the same language next time. It contains no identifier and is not used for tracking.

Signing in to the administrative area sets an additional, strictly necessary session cookie. It is HttpOnly, scoped to the authentication endpoints, and is not set for ordinary readers.

If you use the chat feature, your question and relevant passages of site content are sent to an external AI provider (currently Google Gemini) so that an answer can be generated. Do not enter personal or sensitive information into the chat. That provider processes the request under its own terms and privacy policy, not ours. Everything else on this site works without it.

Donations are processed by Stripe. Stripe receives your email address and payment details directly; we never see or store your card number. We keep a record of the transaction (amount, currency, status, and the email Stripe reports) so we can acknowledge the donation and keep our accounts.

If you choose to appear on the supporters page, the display name you enter is published. Leaving it blank keeps the donation private.

If you write to us, we store the name, email address and message you submit, and we verify the email address with a short code before the message is accepted. It is used to reply to you and for nothing else.

Usage statistics are retained for a limited window and then deleted; the current window is set per environment and is at most about 400 days. Contact messages and donation records are kept as long as we need them to answer you and to keep accurate accounts. Verification codes are short-lived and deleted once used or expired.

You can clear this site's stored data in your browser at any time, which removes the visitor identifier, your saved items and your preferences.

You can ask us what we hold about a contact message or a donation, and ask us to delete it. Because the usage statistics contain no name or address — only a random identifier and a hashed IP — we usually cannot connect them to a person, which also means we cannot single them out to delete them.

When what we collect changes, this page changes with it and the effective date above is updated. This version corrects earlier statements that no longer described the site accurately.