Privacy & Submission Notice · Version 1

Protect the person before the story.

This notice explains what PC collects, how Passenger Confessions and Driver Field Notes submissions are screened, how Wear This voting works, who processes information, how analytics and optional email preferences work, when records can be preserved or disclosed, and the current retention targets.

What Passenger Confessions accepts

A Passenger Confession may be about anything a passenger wants to confess. It does not need to involve the ride, driver, or transportation. Driver stories and encounters, safety lessons, earnings observations and strategies, equipment recommendations, market or event notes, BOLO-style operational warnings, lessons, and hacks belong in Driver Field Notes.

Adults only

PC accepts public-facing community submissions only from people who are at least 18 years old. The site and submission forms use an adult attestation; PC does not collect a full date of birth or government identification by default. If PC learns that a submitter is under 18, PC may stop ordinary processing and delete or restrict the submission, subject to applicable safety, legal, security, and preservation requirements.

An adult submission may discuss a minor. Do not include information that identifies a minor. Apparent harm to a minor, child sexual abuse or exploitation, trafficking involving a minor, or a comparable child-safety concern is blocked from publication for priority human review.

Information PC collects

Depending on the action you take, PC may collect the content you submit; perspective, category, driver-type, or public-credit choices; optional nickname, city, market, or region; an optional Quick Confession email; a required private submitter email for community Driver Field Notes; handbook-delivery email and an optional separate story-email preference; consent and terms-version records; contact-form information; moderation and reviewer records; reaction counts; Wear This vote records; screening topics; first-party analytics events; and technical/security information generated by PC or its service providers in operating the service.

PC does not require a legal name, full date of birth, government ID, home address, precise location, employer, or phone number for ordinary confession or Field Notes submission. Do not provide those details unless PC has a specific legitimate reason to request them.

Submission permission and ownership

Quick Confessions and Driver Field Notes are private at intake. Contributors authorize PC to receive, store, process, screen, review when needed, edit, redact, or anonymize submitted material. If a privacy-screened version passes the applicable screening and publication rules, the contributor grants the limited nonexclusive publication permission stated on the applicable submission form and in the Terms of Use. Contributors retain ownership of their original submissions.

The current Vault-enabled Quick Confession consent permits the approved public-safe version to appear through PC-controlled editorial/community channels and the public Vault. It does not transfer copyright ownership to PC and does not authorize merchandise, advertising endorsements, third-party resale, release of raw/private source material, or authenticated long-term Archive rights. Older submissions made under narrower consent are not silently broadened.

Driver Field Notes

Field Notes may include driver stories, encounters, safety lessons, earnings observations and strategies, gear opinions, market or event notes, BOLOs, lessons, and hacks. PC asks contributors to remove passenger names, faces, plates, private addresses, usernames, phone numbers, and other identifying combinations before submission. BOLOs should concern conditions, patterns, scams, hazards, or temporary operational situations rather than identifiable people and remain human-review-required.

A valid email address is required for a community Driver Field Note submission. PC uses that address as a private operational contact for submission follow-up, accountability, rights/removal questions, and other administration connected to that Field Note. The email is not public credit, is not returned through the public Field Notes feed, and does not enroll the submitter in marketing or recurring editorial email.

Service providers and data flow

The current technical stack uses service providers to operate the site. Netlify hosts the site, forms, and serverless processing and can receive submission data and ordinary operational request logs. Supabase is used for private submission records, public-safe records, moderation/audit controls, screening topics, Driver Field Notes, Wear This vote records, privacy-safe first-party analytics events, and opted-in story-email preference records. An AI moderation provider is used to screen submission text for harmful-content risk before PC combines that result with privacy rules. Google Analytics is used for page and event measurement. PC's analytics code is designed to send event names, page/source information, campaign/referrer metadata, and pseudonymous browser/session identifiers—not confession or Field Note text or private submission email. Substack receives information when a person follows the separate editorial subscription link. Commerce providers operate separately from confession intake.

PC continues to review provider settings, contractual retention, security settings, subprocessors, advertising features, and deletion controls as the service evolves. PC does not intentionally sell confession or Field Notes submission content to advertisers.

Analytics and browser storage

PC runs privacy-limited first-party measurement alongside Google Analytics so it can count pageviews, approximate unique visitors and sessions, repeat visits, traffic sources, story reads, confession-funnel activity, Field Note activity, handbook requests, Wear This interactions, optional story-email opt-ins, Substack handoffs, and shop clicks. PC's first-party analytics endpoint accepts only an allowlisted set of event names and properties. It is not designed to collect confession text, Field Note text, form email addresses, or other form contents, and PC does not intentionally store IP addresses in the first-party analytics table.

The site uses local or session browser storage for functions such as remembering the adult gate, preserving limited attribution information, maintaining pseudonymous first-party visitor/session IDs, storing private moderation-session credentials in the owner's browser, preventing duplicate interaction events, preserving confession-form variant attribution between submit and confirmation, remembering Wear This voting activity, and remembering Road Bird behavior during a visit. Google Analytics may receive page/event metadata, referrer host, and campaign parameters. Submission field contents are not intentionally sent to Google Analytics by PC's analytics code.

Wear This voting and anti-abuse data

Wear This is an advisory monthly product-interest signal for eligible public Vault material. The browser stores a randomly generated first-party voting token and a limited record of which Vault items that browser voted for in recent monthly cycles. The token is pseudonymous and is not designed to identify a person by name or email.

When a vote is submitted, PC sends the Vault item identifier and the browser voting token to a same-origin Netlify function. The server converts the voting token into a one-way keyed hash before storing it in Supabase. The raw voting token is not stored in the vote table. For rate limiting, Netlify may provide a connection IP address to the function; the function converts that address into a day-specific keyed network hash and stores the hash, not the raw IP address, in the vote table. Ordinary infrastructure providers may still process request/IP information under their own operational logs and policies.

The stored vote record currently includes the environment, monthly cycle, Vault item identifier, pseudonymous voter hash, optional day-specific network hash, and timestamp. PC uses these records to prevent obvious duplicate voting, limit abusive bursts, calculate rankings, investigate manipulation, and compare product-interest patterns. Rankings reset by monthly cycle, but PC may retain prior-cycle vote records or aggregate totals for integrity, trend analysis, and historical comparison, subject to applicable legal, security, and retention requirements.

Voting does not create merchandise rights in a confession or source artifact. A vote also does not authorize commercial use of handwriting, illustrations, notebook scans, signatures, historical photographs, or other source material. Rights, privacy, safety, economics, owner review, and required counsel clearance remain separate gates.

Automated screening

Raw confession and Field Note text may be processed through automated harmful-content moderation plus PC privacy rules. Automated screening is a risk-reduction tool, not a guarantee that every privacy or safety issue will be detected. The current screening outcomes are:

• Green: a sanitized public-safe candidate may publish automatically after screening if the submission otherwise satisfies the applicable consent and publication rules.
• Yellow: the submission remains private and is held for human review.
• Red: the submission remains private and is not used publicly through the ordinary process.
• Safety Red: serious current safety material is blocked from ordinary publication and prioritized for restricted human review.

Driver BOLOs remain at least Yellow because operational warnings can become identifying accusations quickly.

Contributor statements and accusation risk

Confessions and Field Notes are accounts, opinions, observations, or advice submitted by contributors. PC does not independently verify every factual statement, earnings claim, safety claim, or product claim. Publication does not mean PC endorses, confirms, or adopts the statement as fact.

PC does not intend to publish serious accusations against a private person when the subject is reasonably identifiable from the remaining details, particularly accusations involving crime, sexual misconduct, abuse, trafficking, fraud, theft, professional dishonesty, or similarly severe reputational harm.

Public credit

Anonymous is the default. A contributor may request a coarse city/region or market label, or a nickname where the applicable form allows it. PC may remove or generalize requested credit if it creates an identification or safety risk. A private submission email is never public credit.

Public Vault topics

The public Vault may organize approved public-safe material into topics. For example, a submission that explicitly asks for prayer may be placed in a visible Passenger prayers / requests topic. Topic assignment is an editorial label and does not expose the raw submission, private submission email, or private moderation record.

Serious safety disclosures

Passenger Confessions is not an emergency service, law-enforcement reporting channel, legal service, therapist, or confidential/privileged professional service. If anyone is in immediate danger, contact 911 or the appropriate emergency service.

Safety Red includes apparent current harm to a minor, child sexual abuse or exploitation, qualifying trafficking concerns, credible imminent violence, active self-harm emergencies, kidnapping/hostage-type danger, or comparable serious current threats. Safety Red blocks ordinary publication and triggers restricted, priority human review. PC may preserve or disclose information when required by applicable law or legal process, or when disclosure is otherwise lawfully permitted under PC's safety, emergency, and legal procedures. Automated tools do not independently decide legal reporting duties or contact authorities.

Retention targets

Current operating targets, subject to legal/safety holds and technical backup behavior, include:

• Rejected ordinary/private confession or Field Note: target deletion within 30 days after final disposition.
• Withdrawn unpublished Quick Confession: target deletion within 30 days, absent a hold.
• Raw record behind a published Quick Confession or Field Note: retain while published and for a limited period after removal as reasonably needed for rights, safety, security, or dispute handling.
• Public sanitized version: retain until removed under policy.
• Wear This vote records: retain as reasonably needed for ranking integrity, abuse prevention, trend analysis, and historical comparison; cycle-based ranking presentation may reset even when prior-cycle records or aggregate totals are retained.
• Opted-in story-email preference: retain while subscribed and for a limited period afterward as reasonably needed to honor suppression/unsubscribe records and consent history.
• Safety Red with no statutory or litigation hold: target 12 months after incident closure.
• Records subject to a specific statutory preservation duty: retain for the applicable required period.
• Routine technical/security logs: target 90 days unless needed for an incident or security purpose.
• Backups: rolling deletion target of 30–90 days.
• Legal/litigation hold: retain until the designated legal decision-maker releases the hold.

PC will not use “archive” as a reason to keep unnecessary identity data forever.

Public Vault and long-term Archive

The public Vault is a publication surface for approved public-safe material covered by the applicable consent. PC's proposed authenticated long-term Archive agreement and any separate 90-day ordinary-withdrawal mechanism remain different rights programs and are not activated by an ordinary Quick Confession or Field Note unless the applicable form explicitly says so.

PC intends to preserve accepted archive material on a long-term basis, but does not guarantee that any public item will remain available permanently, continuously, or in any particular format. PC may edit, restrict, unpublish, relocate, or remove material when reasonably necessary for law, legal process, privacy, safety, intellectual-property, defamation, accuracy, security, administration, or policy reasons.

Removal and correction requests

A contributor or affected person may ask PC to correct, restrict, anonymize, or remove material. See the Removal & Correction Policy or use the Contact page. PC may request only information reasonably necessary to locate the material and evaluate or verify the request.

Legal, safety, and preservation holds

PC may delay or limit deletion when retention is reasonably necessary to comply with law or legal process, preserve evidence, address a safety matter, investigate fraud or security incidents, or maintain records of rights previously granted or exercised. Information retained solely because of a hold is restricted to the purpose of that hold.

Separate email purposes

A Quick Confession email is optional and is used only for private follow-up unless the person separately chooses another email service. A community Driver Field Note email is required for private submission follow-up and administration. Neither capture silently enrolls a contributor in recurring marketing. Driver Handbook delivery remains a one-time purpose unless the requester separately checks the optional story-email box on that form. If checked, PC records the email, consent version, source, and opt-in time as a separate recurring-story preference; leaving it unchecked does not affect handbook delivery. Passenger Handbook release notices remain one-time unless the applicable form says otherwise. Substack remains a separate editorial-subscription option. A future Wear This product-alert signup must keep a requested product alert separate from broader marketing consent. Recurring emails must include an applicable way to unsubscribe.

Contact

For privacy, removal, correction, rights, email-preference, or legal-process questions, use the Contact page or email confess@passengerconfessions.com.

Version 1. Last updated August 29, 2026. PC will continue to obtain counsel guidance on specialized reporting, provider-status, and other legal questions as the service evolves.