Our visitors come first. Here is exactly how we protect the privacy of everyone who reads, shares, or contributes to Stronger in the Light.
We do not store cookies on your device. Our website is designed to function without cookies or other browser-based identifiers, so you can use it without being tracked across visits.
When you make a contribution to our site, we keep a one-way cryptographic hash (SHA-512) of your network address, but never the address itself. The hash lets us guard against abuse and spam, but it cannot be reversed to identify you or your location. The anonymous survey doesn't even store a hash — nothing links a survey response to any device or moment in time.
Every location on our story map is intentionally offset by a random distance within the reported region. Pins are never placed at an exact address. This protection applies equally to manual entries and locations identified automatically by our systems.
Before you submit a story, an optional check can scan your text for personal details (names, phone numbers, addresses, and other identifying information) to suggest safer replacements. If you use this feature, your text is temporarily sent to a third-party AI service for analysis and then discarded — it is never used to train a model or retained by that service. Using this check is entirely your choice.
Our anonymous survey is intentionally built to be as unlinkable as possible. We store only aggregate answers — no submission time, no IP hash, no device information. Individual responses cannot be tied back to you.
The figures on our Statistics page are computed across many submissions. No individual story or survey response can be reconstructed from the numbers shown.
We track anonymous page counts, approximate time-on-page, and aggregate navigation patterns — nothing more. No third-party analytics service (like Google Analytics) is used, and no individual sessions are tracked across visits. Analytics data is deleted within 90 days.
If you make a donation, your payment details go directly to a third-party processor such as Stripe or PayPal. We never see or store your card number or bank account information. The processor's own privacy policy governs how your payment data is handled.
A small number of outside services help us operate and protect the site: our hosting provider (Hostinger) stores all website data; security services such as Cloudflare may process your IP address to defend against attacks; and Google Maps is used when you search for a location on the story map. We use only what is necessary and choose providers with strong privacy standards.
When you submit a story or incident report, you keep ownership of what you wrote. You grant us a non-exclusive license to publish it on this site and use it in our advocacy work — but we never sell your content, and you can request removal at any time by contacting us.
All traffic is encrypted over HTTPS. Data sent to third-party services is encrypted in transit. Server access is protected by firewalls. IP addresses are hashed before storage. No security system is perfect, but these measures meaningfully reduce risk.
For full legal details, read our Privacy Policy. If you're ever in crisis, you are not alone — please reach out to one of the hotlines on our Resources page.