The terms you agreed to when you signed up are not necessarily the terms governing your text today. Services update them, notify by email, and continue. That's normal and legitimate, and it means the diligence you did at signup has an expiry date, particularly around the questions that matter most for an unpublished manuscript.
What changes, and what to look for
| Change | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| Content use for training | The change authors most want to know about |
| Retention periods | How long your text is kept after deletion |
| Subprocessors | Who else handles your text |
| Ownership of derived data | What is made from your content |
| Jurisdiction | Which country's law applies |
| Account termination | What happens to your work |
| Acquisition clauses | What happens if the company is bought |
The acquisition row is worth reading in advance. Terms frequently allow the agreement to transfer to an acquirer, whose policies may differ substantially from the ones you evaluated.
A workable habit
- Don't delete the change emails. File them.
- Read the summary of changes, which most notices include.
- Search the new terms for training, retention and delete.
- Note the date and what changed.
- Decide whether to continue, rather than continuing by default.
- Re-audit annually even without a notice.
Point three is the shortcut that makes this realistic. Reading a full terms document isn't going to happen; searching it for three words takes two minutes and finds what matters to an author.
The structural alternative
The reason terms changes matter is that a service holds your text over time. A service that holds nothing has much less scope to change what it does with it.
The Novel Kit is in that position: the manuscript is transiently processed for the scan and never stored, and no manuscript text, filename or extracted term is written to any database. There is no stored corpus for a future policy to apply to.
A practical next step
Search your email for terms update messages from your writing tools and read the most recent one. It is the notice you were given.
Sources checked
- Data retention in writing software
- Questions to ask a writing tool about privacy
- How to audit the tools you already use
Frequently asked questions
Can terms change retrospectively?
Terms change going forward, and content already uploaded is usually governed by the new terms from the change date, which is close enough to matter.
How would I know?
An email, usually titled as an update to terms, which most people delete. That is the notice, and it is the only one.
What should I do about it?
Read the summary, look for changes about content use and retention, and decide whether to continue rather than defaulting to continuing.