Your poems and your personal information belong to you, and we take our duty to handle both carefully and honestly. This page explains exactly what data Three Line Poetry holds about you, what your rights are, how to delete your account yourself, and the small set of things we are required to keep even after you go.

What data we hold

We keep deliberately little. If you have an account with us, we hold:

• Account details — your name, email address, password (stored encrypted), and optional pen name.
• Your submissions — the poems you have submitted, their status (pending, accepted, declined), and the dates involved.
• Your drafts — works-in-progress you have saved on the My Drafts page.
• Preferences — whether you opted in to new-issue notifications, and how you chose to be listed on the Supporters page.
• Support records — if you donated or became a patron, the record of that payment (the payment itself is processed by PayPal; we never see or store card numbers).
• Technical data — the IP address attached to submissions, used only for the security protections described on our Submission Security page.

We do not sell, rent, or share your personal information with anyone. We do not run advertising. Your data exists for one purpose: running a poetry journal.

Our duty to you

Privacy laws differ around the world. In the United States, deletion rights come from state laws that mostly apply to large companies; in Europe and the UK, the GDPR grants deletion rights to everyone. Rather than treat poets differently depending on where they live, we apply one standard to everyone: if you ask us to delete your data, we will — promptly, and regardless of whether any particular law compels us to. The only exceptions are the few records we are genuinely required to retain, explained below, and we will always tell you exactly what those are.

How to delete your account yourself

If you have no accepted poems, you can delete your own account in a few minutes:

1. Withdraw any pending submissions. Go to My Submissions and click [WITHDRAW] next to any poem still marked Pending. An account with pending poems cannot be deleted — the editors would otherwise be reviewing work whose author no longer exists.
2. Go to My Profile → Delete Account.
3. Confirm deliberately. Deletion is intentionally difficult to do by accident: you must type a confirmation phrase, enter your password, check an acknowledgement box, and confirm one final prompt.

Deletion is immediate and permanent. There is no recovery, no grace period, and no backup we can restore your account from. If you change your mind later, you are warmly welcome to sign up again — but you will be starting fresh.

What is deleted

• Your profile — name, email address, password, pen name, and preferences.
• All of your saved drafts.
• Your submission history, including declined submissions and their records.
• Your name on the public Supporters page, if you were listed (the listing becomes Anonymous).

What we must keep, and why

Two categories of records survive an account deletion, and we want to be straightforward about both:

• Published poems and their publication record. If one of your poems was accepted, it was published — online and possibly in a paperback edition. Published work is part of the permanent literary archive, and we are required to retain the record of the first-publication rights you granted us when you submitted. This is why accounts with accepted poems cannot be self-deleted. This is the same principle that lets any journal, newspaper, or anthology continue to exist after its contributors move on. If you have concerns about personal information connected to a published poem, contact the editors — we can often address the specific concern (for example, a name change) without unraveling the publication record.
• Financial records. If you donated or became a patron, the payment record is retained for accounting and tax purposes, as required of any organization that handles money. Your public Supporters listing is anonymized, but the underlying bookkeeping remains.

If you can't use the self-service tool

If you have accepted poems, or you have lost access to your account, or anything else prevents you from using the Delete Account tool, contact the editors directly. We will respond to data and deletion requests promptly — our goal is within 30 days at the outside, and usually much faster. Tell us what you want removed and we will either do it or explain precisely which record we must keep and why.

If you believe a child under 13 has created an account, contact us and we will delete it promptly.

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