Privacy Policy

PenWriter is run by Penwriter, who decides why and how your information is used and is responsible for it under this policy. The Terms of Service cover the rest of the arrangement.

Three kinds of thing, and nothing else.

• Your account. Your name, your email address, your pen name and author bio, your settings and defaults (among them the time zone your writing day is counted in), and when you accepted the terms. Your password is never stored as such: only a salted one-way hash of it, which cannot be turned back into the password.
• Your writing. Your books and everything in them: premises, outlines, chapters, character notes, the editor's reviews and suggestions, the Amazon listing you draft, and any cover you upload. Also how many words you wrote each day, which is what the streak and the activity grid show.
• How the service is used. Like any web service, PenWriter's servers record each request: the time, the page asked for, whether it worked, and the network address it came from. Network addresses are also used briefly to limit repeated sign-in attempts. Logs do not record what you typed, your password, or your cookies.

We use this to give you the service you asked for, to keep it secure, to tell you things about your account, and to meet our legal duties. We do not use it to advertise to you.

When you ask the AI to do something, the text it needs goes to a language model that Penwriter runs on its own infrastructure. It is not sent to a third-party AI company. Nothing else is sent to the model.

• What is sent: the instruction, and what the task needs — the passage or chapter being written or edited, your outline, the book's description and genre, the cast, your notes, and the voice sample if you gave one. For the editor's review, that is the text of the book.
• What is not added: PenWriter does not attach your email address, your password or your account details. (What you wrote can of course contain a name or an address; if it does, it goes with the rest.)
• How: from PenWriter's server to the model server the operator runs, which sends the answer back. The text is used there to produce the answer, and it is not handed to any other company.
• Training: PenWriter does not use your writing to train or improve any model.
• What comes back is stored in your book when it is part of the book — a chapter, an outline, the editor's reviews and its suggested edits, including the ones you reject — and stays until you delete the book or your account. The model runs on the operator's own infrastructure, so anything its server records about a request is held by the operator, under this policy, and not by another company.

If you do not want your text processed by the AI, do not use the buttons that ask the AI to write, edit or review. The rest of PenWriter works without it.

PenWriter uses other companies to run, and each handles your information only to do that job and on the operator's instructions:

• The hosting and database provider that runs the service and stores your account and books.
• Storage for any cover you upload, if the operator keeps it separately from the database.
• An email provider, which sends the messages PenWriter emails you (a reset link, a confirmation).
• An error-reporting service, if the operator has switched one on, which receives a technical description of a failure and not your writing.

The language model is not on that list: the operator runs it itself, on its own infrastructure.

When you paste the link to a book, PenWriter looks up that book's public details in public catalogues (Open Library, Google Books, and Amazon's product data where the operator has access to it). Only the book's identifier from the link — its ISBN or ASIN — is sent, not anything about you.

We do not sell your information, and we do not share it with anyone else, except where the law requires it.

• A session cookie keeps you signed in. It is needed for PenWriter to work, is not readable by scripts on the page, and lasts up to two weeks from the last time you used PenWriter, or until you sign out.
• A security cookie proves that a request really came from PenWriter's own pages.
• A few small things in your browser's storage remember whether you chose the light or the dark room, which chapters the editor has already read for a review, and whether you closed a reminder such as the one to confirm your email. They stay in your browser and are never sent to us.

PenWriter does not use advertising or analytics cookies, and does not follow you around the web.

• Your account and your writing are kept until you delete them. Close your account in Settings removes the account, every book and everything in it, and any cover you uploaded, and ends every session. It cannot be undone.
• Copies that exist only as backups are not touched at once. They are kept for a limited time and then overwritten; they are not used for anything but restoring the service.
• Server logs, which contain no writing, are kept for a limited time for security and for fixing faults.
• When you close your account we send one last email to confirm it. After that nothing that identifies you stays in your account or your books. What is left is what is described above — logs and backups, for the times given there — and anything the law requires us to keep.

• See and take your information. Download my data in Settings gives you one zip: everything PenWriter holds about you as data, each book as readable Markdown, and any cover you uploaded.
• Correct it. Your name, pen name, bio and settings are editable in Settings; your sign-in email and password can be changed there too.
• Delete it. Close your account in Settings.
• Anything else. Depending on where you live you may have further rights — to object to, or restrict, how your information is used, or to complain to a data protection authority. Write to us and we will help.

Passwords are stored only as salted hashes; connections are encrypted; sessions can be ended from Settings; repeated sign-in attempts are limited; the links for resetting a password or changing an address work once and expire, and the link that confirms an address expires; and one author's books cannot be opened by another. No system is perfectly secure, and if something goes wrong that affects you we will tell you.

PenWriter is for adults who want to write and publish books. It is not meant for children, and we do not knowingly hold their information. If you think a child has made an account, tell us and we will remove it.

This text has a date, shown at the top, which is its version. If it changes in a way that matters, the date changes, and PenWriter asks you to read and accept the new version the next time you open it.

To ask a question, make a request about your information, or tell us something is wrong: hello@penwriter.app.