Privacy Policy

Effective July 29, 2026  ·  Last updated July 29, 2026

Who runs this site

The Fiction Laboratory is operated by Cory Ottenwess, based in Chicago, Illinois. Questions about this policy, or requests about your own information, go to Inquiries@fictionlaboratory.com.

What is collected

Your email address, if you choose to give it

The signup form on the home page asks for an email address and nothing else. No name, no school, no role. It is used for one purpose: to let you know when The Fiction Laboratory launches, and occasionally to share progress on it. You gave it voluntarily, and you can take it back at any time.

Anything you write to us

If you email us, we have your message and your email address, for as long as that conversation is useful. That is how email works, and we mention it only because a privacy policy that pretends otherwise is not being straight with you.

Standard server records

This site is hosted on GitHub Pages, operated by GitHub, Inc., a Microsoft company. GitHub processes ordinary web server information for security and abuse prevention, which typically includes IP addresses, the time of a request, and which page was requested. Their handling of it is described in the GitHub Privacy Statement.

Worth being clear about: we never see any of it. GitHub Pages gives a site owner no access to visitor logs, so there is no traffic data on our end to analyze, profile, or connect to your email address, whether or not we wanted to.

The signup form loads code from another company

The email form is provided by Kit (the service formerly called ConvertKit). To make the form work, this page loads a small script from Kit's servers. That happens on every visit, not only when you submit the form, which means Kit's servers can see your IP address even if you never sign up, and Kit may set cookies in your browser.

We are telling you this plainly because it is the only part of this site that involves a third party seeing anything about you. Kit's own privacy policy governs what they do with it, at kit.com/privacy.

What is not collected, and not done

• No analytics. No Google Analytics, no Plausible, no Matomo, nothing. We genuinely do not know how many people visit.
• No advertising or tracking pixels. No ad networks, no retargeting, no social media trackers.
• Nothing is sold, rented, or traded. Not now, not later. If that ever changed, it would require your consent first, and this policy would say so before it happened.
• No profiling. Your email address sits on a mailing list. It is not scored, segmented by inferred behavior, or enriched with data bought from anyone.
• No fonts loaded from Google. The typefaces are served from this site, so visiting this page does not tell Google anything about you.

Cookies

This site sets no cookies of its own. It has no login, no shopping cart, and no session to remember. The Kit script described above may set its own cookies to recognize whether a form has already been submitted from your browser. Your browser settings can block those, and the site works fine without them.

Who else can see your information

Two companies, both acting on our behalf, and no one else:

• Kit (ConvertKit LLC), which stores the mailing list and sends the emails.
• GitHub, Inc., a Microsoft company, which serves these pages through GitHub Pages and processes the server information described above.

Beyond that, information would only be disclosed if we were legally required to, and we would push back on any request that looked improper.

How long it is kept

Your email address stays on the list until you ask to come off it, or until two years after the last time you opened an email from us, whichever comes first. When you unsubscribe, the address is deleted rather than kept on a suppression list, unless you specifically ask us to keep it suppressed.

Your choices

Whatever jurisdiction you are in, you can do all of the following by emailing Inquiries@fictionlaboratory.com. We are not going to ask you to prove a legal right before honoring a reasonable request.

• Leave. Every email has an unsubscribe link, or just reply and say so.
• See what we have. We will tell you, which for nearly everyone is one email address and a signup date.
• Correct it.
• Have it deleted. We will delete it and confirm when it is done.

Children

This site is meant for teachers and other adults. It is not directed to children, and the signup form is not intended for anyone under 13. We do not knowingly collect information from children under 13. If you are a parent or guardian and believe a child has given us an email address, write to Inquiries@fictionlaboratory.com and it will be deleted promptly.

Students and schools

This is worth being explicit about, because it is the question a district will ask.

No student information is collected by this website. There are no student accounts, no grades, no scores, and no rosters. The progress tracker that comes with the curriculum is a spreadsheet that lives on the teacher's own computer or their own cloud storage. Student names and scores entered into it never reach us, and we have no way to see them.

If a future product does handle student information, that would not be governed by this policy. It would require a written agreement with each school or district before any student data changed hands, along with the obligations that come with the Illinois Student Online Personal Protection Act, FERPA, and the equivalent laws of other states. Nothing like that exists today, and this page will be updated before it does.

Security

This site is served over HTTPS. The mailing list lives inside Kit's systems rather than on any machine we run, which means their security controls protect it. We hold no payment information and no passwords, because the site has nothing to pay for and nothing to log into. That is a deliberate choice: the least risky way to hold data is not to hold it.

Changes to this policy

If this policy changes, the date at the top changes with it. For a change that actually affects what happens to information already collected, everyone on the mailing list gets an email about it rather than a quiet edit to this page.

Contact

Inquiries@fictionlaboratory.com
The Fiction Laboratory, Chicago, Illinois

Written to be read, not to be defensible in the abstract. If something here is unclear or looks wrong, say so and it gets fixed.