The Writer's Data Pledge

Your novel is yours. That sounds obvious. In 2026, it needs a contract. Here is ours.

1. Your words never train a model.

Not ours. Not a partner’s. Not “anonymized.” Never by default, and never by a setting you’d have to find. There will be one standing switch, and only you will be able to flip it: you can choose to share a specific project to help Scribsy’s on-device intelligence learn the shape of real drafts — including, when you fix your story wiki, the corrections themselves: the claim you fixed, your fix, and the sentence it pointed to. If we ever invite you to, the invitation names the project, shows you exactly what leaves, says what it’s for, and “no thanks” changes nothing. You’ll never find it pre-checked. Silence means no.

With the switch off, fixing your wiki teaches us only that a correction happened — which kind, how often, never any words. Corrections are feedback about Scribsy’s reading, not about your writing, and even that feedback stays counts-only until you decide otherwise. If one mistake is worth showing us, you can send that single example yourself — one claim, one excerpt, displayed in full before it goes, sent once. A report is not a subscription.

2. Scribsy cannot write your novel.

There is no generate button in Scribsy’s core editor — and there never will be. Scribsy’s intelligence reads: it builds a living wiki of your world, catches continuity errors, and holds what your wiki learned from chapter three. If you ever choose AI help beyond reading — a tense fixer, a run-on splitter — that exists only as a plugin you switch on, per project, and every word it touches is marked in your ledger, permanently. Nothing enters your manuscript without your hand or your explicit approval, and the record always shows which.

3. Everything exports, anytime.

Your manuscript leaves as Markdown or plain text whenever you want it. Your provenance ledger — the keystroke-level record of your authorship — exports with it, in an open, documented format. No lock-in, no export tax, no “contact support.”

4. Your proof outlives us.

We’re a small company and you should price that in. If Scribsy ever shuts down: a guaranteed 90-day export window, and the ledger specification stays published openly — so the record that you wrote your book remains readable and verifiable without us.

5. Founding Writers are protected.

If we shut down within 12 months of your Founding Writer purchase, you receive a pro-rata refund. Patronage deserves protection.

6. Your process record works for you, not on you.

Scribsy’s authorship receipts are computed on your machine. The record behind your replay and your authorship report — what was typed, pasted, or plugin-inserted, and when — is edit metadata that exists so you can prove your work; you can see all of it, export all of it, and delete it. Deleting it only narrows what your own report can vouch for — it is never held against you. What Scribsy’s servers receive from this system is feature-health counts — how often it ran, how many passages fell into each category — never your typing patterns, never your personal baseline, and never your prose. If you ever join our Writers’ Research Panel, you can additionally choose to share your writing rhythms — the shapes and timings of your sessions, never the words — under the same rules as everything else here: named, per project, never pre-checked, off by default. Our product analytics follow the same rule: the schemas cannot carry manuscript text. That’s enforced by our build system, and our data table is public, so you can check.

7. Your prose doesn’t leave without a yes.

Every cloud feature that reads your manuscript asks first — per project, in plain words, when you create the project. Each thing cloud intelligence can do with your draft is its own yes — cloud indexing, continuity analysis, and parsing — asked separately, decided separately, and revocable one at a time. Your story wiki is part of that: if Scribsy’s Orchestrator is to draw on what your wiki learned, that is its own yes too, and it starts off. Until you say yes, the answer is no: your prose stays out of cloud indexing, continuity analysis, and parsing, and “decide later” simply means it stays off. Change your mind anytime: no new excerpt leaves after you revoke — we re-check your answer before every single batch we send — and any search index built from your words is deleted on a published clock, not “eventually.” Revoking takes effect the moment you flip it — from that moment nothing reads what was built from your words, and the stored entries themselves are erased on the same published clock. Every yes, and every change of mind, is written to a permanent consent record that is yours to see, and each entry names the version of this pledge in force when you decided. We cannot quietly move the goalposts: if this pledge materially changes, we ask again — and until you answer, your earlier yes keeps meaning exactly what it meant when you gave it.

8. Your numbers are yours too, and they are not your words.

If you choose to appear on a leaderboard, what leaves is a count — words written, days kept — and never a line of your draft. It is off until you turn it on, it is per project, and turning it off removes you and what was shared. A leaderboard is a scoreboard, not a window.

Where your words travel

The guarantee comes first: nothing you write trains anyone’s model, and your manuscript is never used for anything you didn’t explicitly choose. Here is the mechanism, plainly: today, Scribsy’s intelligence features run in the cloud — when the parser reads your draft to build your wiki, excerpts are processed by Google’s models under paid API terms that prohibit training on them. Processing is not training, and you deserve that distinction stated rather than discovered in a network tab. Starting at launch, that cloud path is also gated by you: it runs per project only after you turn it on, and “decide later” means it stays off. We are moving parsing onto your device so a correct story wiki never requires your words to leave your machine, and manuscripts you flag as sensitive will get the strictest lane we can build. When that ships, this section will say so in the past tense.

What Scribsy’s AI does — and never does

This pledge is versioned

Each published version of this pledge carries a unique version number and an effective date, and stays published permanently. When you say yes to any cloud feature, your consent record names the version in force that day — the terms you agreed to are pinned, not floating. A material change — anything that affects what data is covered, what it is used for, who processes it, how long it is kept, or how deletion works — becomes a new version, and we ask you again; until you answer, your earlier yes keeps meaning exactly what it meant when you gave it. Copyedits that change none of those things do not create a new version.

Version: pledge-v5 · Effective date: 28 September 2026