Privacy
Last updated November 8, 2026
Margaret Hale is a pen name. This site and The First Year are run by Better Bot LLC ("we"). This note covers margarethale.org, The First Year's daily journal, and Margaret's email letters.
The First Year (the daily journal)
Only you read your entries. What you write, by replying to a page or on the page itself, is encrypted (AES-256) before it is stored, using a key per person derived from a secret kept apart from the database. No one at Better Bot LLC reads entries. They are never used to train AI, never analysed, shared or sold, and no AI replies to them. Because your journal shows your pages back to you, our server decrypts them when you are signed in; that is a promise kept by design and policy rather than a mathematical impossibility, and we would rather say so plainly.
What we store: your email address; the name and time zone you give us; which edition you chose, your send time, and which pages have gone out; your encrypted entries; and, for a gift, the giver's name and email, the recipient's first name and email, and the note (the note is not encrypted, since it's written to be sent). Payments are handled by Stripe; we never see your card. Emails are sent through Resend, and replies are received through Cloudflare Email Routing, which passes them to our server to be encrypted and saved; we don't keep the raw email. Photos and attachments in replies are discarded.
No trackers inside your journal. The journal pages, settings and printable book load no analytics or advertising code. The public pages that describe and sell The First Year use Google Analytics and the Meta pixel, and when you buy we tell Meta a purchase happened (with your email hashed) so we can measure our ads. Nothing you write is ever part of that.
Emails: only the morning pages, a one-time note the first time a reply is saved, sign-in links you ask for, and one note after the last page. No marketing is mixed in.
Your choices: download everything as text from Settings, print it, or delete your journal; deletion erases every entry immediately and stops the emails. You can also write to margaret@margarethale.org and we'll delete your account for you.
The rest of this site
margarethale.org uses Google Analytics and the Meta pixel to understand visits and measure ads; Cloudflare hosts the site and processes ordinary request data such as IP addresses. Links to Amazon may count as a referral.
If you sign up for Margaret's free email letters, we keep your email address (and name, if you give it) to send them, through Resend. Each letter has an unsubscribe link. Replies come to Margaret's mailbox.
Contact
Better Bot LLC · margaret@margarethale.org