How this works

Anyone. The facts on a profile — name, occupation, biography, work history — are public and appear in search results.

To view the reviews you’ll need to subscribe. That split is deliberate: searching somebody’s name should not return a wall of accusations to a stranger who typed it in idly.

Any subscribing member can create a profile for anybody and write most of it. That is what makes the site work at all — otherwise there would be nothing here to begin with.

No. Once anybody claims a profile it closes to other editors. If the profile is about you and somebody else has claimed it, verifying your identity stops them from having any ability to edit it and gives that ability to you. We built it this way so that you will always have a way to control your own profile.

No. Not by the person it is about. This is the rule the whole site rests on, and there is no version of it that bends for any amount of money.

Three narrow exceptions exist: intimate images, copyright-infringing material, and content we are legally required to remove or restrict. Those duties can apply to any format, including review text, but they do not let someone delete a review merely because it is critical, embarrassing, or unwanted.

Yes, once you have verified your identity, and as often as you like. Verification is required because a reply appears beside the review in your voice, with your name attached to it.

The reply itself is not what costs money. Verification, at $25 a month for one profile, pays for the identity check, which costs real money to run, and for the badge that comes with it.

You can subscribe to make changes. If you want to make sure nobody can add incorrect information to your profile again, you can claim or verify the profile. You can also ask for a correction using the form linked from your profile.

One person can leave two reviews per profile: one for professional and one for personal (but they must be relevant). Restricting it means the averaged star rating reflects how many people hold an opinion rather than how determined one of them is.

Professional and personal are averaged separately, and neither appears until at least three people have written one. Somebody can be a superb electrician and a difficult neighbour; one number covering both tells you neither thing, and an average of one review dresses a single opinion up as a statistic.

It depends which option was chosen, and the difference is real and guaranteed.

Anonymous: This method is truly anonymous. Reviews are posted without attaching your account identity. A stolen database or a court order will not be able to reveal who wrote your review, and we simply would not be able to figure it out ourselves (even with a gun to our head).

Reply notices: Your name is never shown. If you want reply notifications, you can use your account email, a separate email address, or no email at all. For the strongest separation from your account, use a unique email alias from a privacy-focused provider such as Proton Mail or SimpleLogin. Any email attached to a review could still be exposed in a breach or legal order, which is why you should make sure to use a privacy-focused email provider rather than Gmail or your work email.

Show my name: This option is for verified subscribers only, so we know your name is correct. Your name and profile link will appear with the review.

It could order us to hand over what we hold. For a plain anonymous review there is nothing to hand over — not because we would refuse, but because it was never recorded. For a review posted with notifications, that would be only the email address that the notifications go to, so your privacy depends entirely on the email provider. For a review from a verified account with your name attached, that is a link to an account that comes with your identity.

They will likely see the review. Whether they can find out it was you depends entirely on which review posting option you chose, which is why that choice is the first thing the ‘add a review’ form asks.

There is a route that carries more weight than a review, and it does not need the police. A civil protective order is decided on the balance of probabilities instead of ‘beyond reasonable doubt’. It does not involve a prosecutor or pressing charges. It’s simple: a judge makes a finding that becomes a court record. Once that record exists it can be published here as a record rather than an allegation. The next answer sets out how.

If you are in immediate danger, call 911. The National Domestic Violence Hotline is 1.800.799.7233, or text START to 88788.

Open the profile, go to the section called “On Record”, and use “Attach a record”. Choose “Court order or judgment” or “Court filing or case record”, then give the court and the case number.

Link to the record — the court’s own docket or records portal, or a report of it that names the court and the case. Then describe it in plain terms in the note: what the court did, and when. Do not characterise it beyond that; the record carries its own weight.

The entry stands as an official record rather than simply an allegation, and the way we publish it protects the victim(s) by hiding their identity.

Add the outcome if you know it and leave it blank if you do not. It can be filled in later by whoever attached the record, by the person the profile is about, or by site staff.

Because of who it would expose. Protective orders and family filings routinely carry the petitioner’s home address, a phone number, an employer, and often a child’s name.

Specify the outcome on the record itself rather than attaching a second entry. If the profile is about you the control is there if you verify your profile; if it is not, ask site staff and they will add it.

If it’s a review, reply to it. If it’s something else, subscribe to change your details. Otherwise, you can ask for a correction if a factual detail is provably wrong.

If you believe a review is unlawful rather than merely unfair, use the report form — but read the answer about removal first, because a complaint about what a review says almost never results in a deletion. That boundary is what stops the report form becoming the tool for deleting criticism.

Yes, to either, as long as it is your photograph. A picture of the two of you is often the clearest evidence that you knew them at all, so we recommend you add them to reviews.

What does not belong: photographs you do not own the rights to, intimate images of anybody, and pictures whose real subject is a third party who has nothing to do with this.

Every image is checked automatically as it arrives, and a clean one appears in about a second. We strip all identifying hidden data from the file first, including the GPS coordinates your phone records because, on a site about personal safety, publishing an uploader’s home location inside their own photograph would be a self-inflicted wound — the version carrying that data is never saved.

Photographs scoring for sexual content or graphic violence do not publish. Ambiguous ones publish and are looked at afterwards.

A basic Backstory subscription costs $5 and lets you edit any profile that is not claimed or verified. It also allows you to read and add reviews.

Claiming a profile costs $15 a month, and buys the exclusive right to edit it and to keep others from editing it while it is yours. You can claim several, at $15 each.

Verifying your own profile as yours costs $25 a month: that adds the identity check, the verified badge, the right to reply to reviews, and re-verification if you change your name.

Removal of a review, alteration of a review, suppression of a rating, or a better position than anybody else. There is no arrangement, at any price, that changes what this site says about somebody. If you are ever offered one, it did not come from us.

You do not need to sign up or pay to read your profile, except for your reviews. You will need a basic Backstory subscription to read the reviews that have been posted to your profile.