Privacy Policy

1. Who we are

Manyfold is a social platform for AI-assisted branching interactive fiction. You write stories that fork, and readers choose their way through them.

Manyfold is operated by Rajeev Chourey, an individual sole operator based in India. For the purposes of the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 ("DPDP") we are the Data Fiduciary; under the GDPR we are the data controller.

2. What we collect

Account information

• Your email address — from you at sign-up, or from Google if you use Google Sign-In.
• Your handle and display name. Both are public.
• Your password, stored only as a bcrypt hash. We never store or log it in readable form. If you sign in with Google, no password exists at all.
• Your date of birth, collected once to confirm you are 18 or older.
• Your avatar image, if you upload one.
• Your Google account identifier, if you link Google Sign-In. Google gives us exactly four things: a stable account id, your email, whether that email is verified, and your name. We ask for nothing more.

What you create

• Stories: titles, abstracts, tags, cover images, story bibles, scene text, and the labels on every branch.
• Characters: names, traits, appearance, backstory, and any images you generate or upload for them.
• Images and audio you upload or generate, up to 5 MB per file.
• The instructions you give Spark, our AI co-writer, and a record of which model produced which passage.

How you use Manyfold

• Your reading history — which stories you started, where you are in them, and every individual choice you made. Choices power the heat-map that story authors see. Authors see aggregate paths through their story; they do not see which reader you are.
• Search terms you type into Manyfold's search.
• Reactions, bookmarks, follows, and follow requests.
• Notifications addressed to you, which contain another user's handle and a story title.
• A record of AI generation jobs you ran, including their status and credit cost.

Device information

• A Firebase Cloud Messaging registration token and your platform name, if and only if you grant notification permission. Revoke notification permission or sign out and it is removed.

Credits, plans and purchases

• Your Spark credit balance and a ledger of every grant, spend, and top-up.
• Your plan: which subscription you are on, its state, the Google Play product it was bought on, and when the current period ends.
• For every purchase, the Google Play purchase token and order id, the product bought, and when. We keep these as our record of what you are entitled to and to make sure the same receipt cannot be redeemed twice.
• We never receive or store payment card details. Payment is processed entirely by Google Play (or Apple, on iOS) under their own privacy policies; we receive only confirmation that a purchase succeeded and the token identifying it.

Crash reports (mobile app)

• When the app crashes or hits an unexpected error, a report goes to Firebase Crashlytics: the error and its stack trace, your device model, OS version, app version, and a Crashlytics-generated install identifier.
• We do not attach your account to crash reports — no email, user id, or handle is set on them.
• Crash reporting runs in released builds of the mobile app only. The website does not use Crashlytics.

If you joined the waitlist

• Your email address and, where relevant, which shared story link brought you to us.

3. What we don't collect

This list matters as much as the one above, and we keep it accurate deliberately.

The Android app requests exactly two permissions: internet access, and permission to post notifications.

4. Why we use it, and on what legal basis

We do not use your personal data for automated decision-making that produces legal or similarly significant effects about you. Spark generates fiction; it does not make decisions about you.

5. Your content and AI

This is the section people most want a straight answer on, so here it is.

When you ask Spark to write, illustrate, or brainstorm, we send the relevant story material to our AI provider. That can include your story bible, the scene you are working on, your instruction, the chain of scenes leading up to it, character sheets, and any reference image you attached.

Our AI provider is OpenRouter. OpenRouter forwards each request to the provider that operates the model serving it, so your story material is received by OpenRouter and by that provider.

How that content is handled, and by which providers, is governed by OpenRouter's own policies. Read them directly — they are the authoritative source, and they are kept current in a way a copy here could not be:

• OpenRouter Privacy Policy
• OpenRouter Terms of Service
• OpenRouter's privacy and logging documentation, which explains how requests are routed and what each provider may retain

We configure our OpenRouter account to exclude providers that train on submitted inputs.

We do not train any AI model on your stories. We do not build our own models, and we do not sell or license your content as training data.

Content that Spark generates for you is stored with a record of which model produced it. We keep that record so we can trace quality problems and investigate abuse reports — not to profile you.

6. Who we share it with

We do not sell your personal data. We do not rent it, and we do not share it for anyone else's advertising.

We use service providers to run Manyfold. Most of them are Google; the AI providers are not:

We may also disclose personal data where we are legally required to — a valid court order or lawful government request — or where it is genuinely necessary to investigate fraud, abuse, or a threat to someone's safety. If Manyfold is ever acquired, your data would transfer to the acquirer, and we would tell you before that happened.

7. What other people can see

Manyfold is a social product, so some things are public by design. Be deliberate about what you publish.

• Always public: your handle, display name, avatar, and any story you publish.
• Public unless you make your profile private: your follower and following lists, and the stories on your profile.
• Never public: your email address, date of birth, password, reading history, bookmarks, credit balance, and search terms.
• Shown to authors in aggregate only: the choices readers make. An author sees that thirty readers took a branch, not that you did.

8. How long we keep it

9. Your rights

Wherever you live, you can:

• Get a copy of your data. Settings → Legal & Privacy → Export my data gives you a machine-readable JSON file containing your profile, stories, characters, reading history, and credit ledger.
• Correct your data. Edit your profile in the app.
• Delete your account. Settings → Delete account. See section 10.
• Withdraw consent for notifications, by turning them off in your device settings.
• Object to, or ask us to restrict, processing based on legitimate interest — email privacy@manyfold.co.in.
• Complain to a regulator. In India, the Data Protection Board. In the EEA or UK, your local supervisory authority. We would rather you came to us first.

We answer rights requests within 30 days. Exercising a right never costs you anything and never degrades your service.

10. Deleting your account

You can delete your account from inside the app — Settings → Delete account. No email, no form, no waiting on us. It takes effect immediately.

Erased permanently

Your account record and email, password, date of birth, linked Google account, device tokens, all reading history and choices, credit account and ledger, AI job history, follows and follow requests, reactions, bookmarks, notifications, your uploaded avatar, all active sessions, your unpublished drafts, and any waitlist entry matching your email.

Kept, because a purchase is a financial record

Your purchase records survive deletion: the Google Play purchase token and order id, which product was bought, and when. Your credit balance and ledger are erased, but the record that a purchase happened is not.

We keep it for two reasons. It is an accounting record we are required to retain, and it is what lets a purchase be restored: if you sign up again from the same Google Play account and restore your purchases, an unexpired subscription or a top-up you never fully used can be reattached to the new account. Without the record, that is impossible. See Terms §10 for exactly what can and cannot come back.

These records contain no name, email, or handle — only the store's identifiers for a transaction. If you want them erased as well, accepting that any remaining entitlement is gone for good, email privacy@manyfold.co.in and we will erase everything we are not legally required to keep.

Anonymized, not erased

Stories you have published, and characters you have donated to the community, stay online but are reassigned to a tombstone author shown as @deleted. Your name, handle, and account no longer attach to them in any way.

Account deletion is immediate and cannot be undone. Export your data first if you want to keep it. Backups are purged on our provider's rolling schedule, within 35 days.

11. Security

• All traffic uses HTTPS/TLS. The released app does not permit unencrypted connections.
• Passwords are hashed with bcrypt. Sign-in sessions are stored only as irreversible hashes, are single-use, and are revoked automatically if we detect one being replayed.
• On your device, sign-in tokens live in the platform keystore — Android Keystore or iOS Keychain — not in ordinary app storage.
• Sign-in endpoints are rate-limited to blunt brute-force and account-enumeration attempts.
• Secrets are held in Google Secret Manager. Our deployment pipeline uses keyless federated identity, so no long-lived credentials exist to leak.

No system is perfectly secure. If a breach affects your personal data, we will notify you and the Data Protection Board of India without undue delay, and within 72 hours where the GDPR requires it.

12. International transfers

Your account, stories and media are processed on Google Cloud in our primary region in India.

AI generation is not. Story material sent to Spark goes to OpenRouter, and on to the provider serving that request, which may be outside India, the EEA and the UK — see OpenRouter's Privacy Policy for how it handles that. Crash reports are processed by Google outside India. If you are in the EEA or UK, all of this means your data is transferred outside your region.

The Google legs rely on the European Commission's Standard Contractual Clauses as incorporated into Google Cloud's terms. For the AI leg we rely on the contractual protections in OpenRouter's data-processing terms, and on the fact that no identifying information is attached to the content sent — what crosses a border is story text and images, not a named person.

13. Age requirement

We ask for your date of birth at sign-up and refuse registration below 18. Manyfold is not directed at children, contains mature fiction, and carries no child-directed content, advertising, or tracking. The United States Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) does not apply to us.

If we learn an account belongs to someone under 18, we terminate it and delete its data. If you believe a minor has created an account, tell us at privacy@manyfold.co.in and we will act promptly.

14. Region-specific rights

India — DPDP Act, 2023

You are a Data Principal and we are the Data Fiduciary. You have the right to access a summary of your data and our processing, to correction and erasure, to nominate someone to exercise your rights if you die or become incapacitated, and to a grievance-redressal process. Our Grievance Officer is reachable at privacy@manyfold.co.in and responds within 30 days. If unsatisfied, you may complain to the Data Protection Board of India.

EEA and UK — GDPR

You hold the rights of access, rectification, erasure, restriction, portability, and objection, and the right to withdraw consent at any time without affecting processing already carried out. Our legal bases are listed in section 4. You may complain to your local supervisory authority.

California — CCPA/CPRA

In the past twelve months we collected the categories described in section 2: identifiers, commercial information (credit balance), internet activity (in-app usage only), and user content. We collected them for the purposes in section 4, from you directly and from Google Sign-In where you used it.

We have not sold or shared personal information in the preceding twelve months, and we do not sell or share it now — including, expressly, the personal information of anyone under 16. We do not process personal information for cross-context behavioural advertising, so there is no "Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information" link to provide. You have the rights to know, delete, correct, and to be free from discrimination for exercising them; all are served by the mechanisms in section 9.

15. Changes to this policy

If we make a material change — a new category of data, a new processor, a new purpose — we will notify you in the app and by email before it takes effect, and update the version and date at the top of this page. Continuing to use Manyfold after a change means you accept the updated policy. Previous versions are available on request.

16. Contact