Privacy and data

the operator of Inklings is responsible for everything described here, and privacy@inklings.example is where privacy questions and requests go.

Inklings is operated from the United States and is open to writers anywhere. The rights described in clause 9 are given to everyone who uses it, whatever country you are in and whether or not your local law requires them of us.

Everything falls into one of four buckets.

• Your account. Email address, display name, profile photo and location if you give one. Sign-in itself is handled by Clerk — we never see or store your password. Also your date of birth, which you give once at sign-up so the 18+ rule in clause 11 is a check rather than a claim. It is never displayed to anyone, never used for anything else, and if you don’t clear the age it is not stored at all.
• Your shelf. The genres, tropes, age categories, content limits, spice level, length limit, AI tolerance, pace and tone you set, plus your bio and favourite books. Some of this is deliberately private: your content limits and hard-no tropes are filters, and are never shown to another member.
• Your writing.Book titles, pitches, sample scenes, comp titles, declared AI involvement, and the full drafts and snippets you upload. Also the critique, line notes and reactions you write on other people’s pages.
• Your activity. Swipes, friends, messages, reviews, reports, notifications and email preference. Plus ordinary server logs — IP address, browser, what was requested — which our host keeps briefly for security and debugging.

We use no advertising trackers and no third-party analytics. The only cookies are the ones Clerk needs to keep you signed in and the one remembering whether you chose the dark theme.

Almost all of it exists to run the matching engine, which is the entire product: your shelf and your books are compared against everyone else’s in both directions to work out who should see whom. Without it there is no site. Some of it — moderation records, reports, the logs behind a suspension — is kept because the site has to be safe for the people using it, and a report with no evidence behind it cannot be acted on. Email notifications are on by default as part of the service and can be turned off in one click, in the product or from any mail we send.

That is the whole list. We do not hold anything here in order to sell it, rent it, trade it, or build a profile of you for anyone else’s benefit, and there is no fifth bucket of data collected quietly for a purpose not named above.

We do not profile you for advertising, and we make no automated decision that has a legal or similarly significant effect on you. The fit score decides whose card you see next. That is all it decides.

This is the clause most people came for, so it is stated plainly and without the escape hatches these documents usually carry.

The one place AI appears in the product is a label you write yourself: each book carries a declared level of AI involvement so that readers can set a ceiling on what they are willing to critique. That is your disclosure about your own process. It is not us analysing your prose.

Sharing on Inklings is deliberate, never ambient. Different things have different reach:

• Public to members. Your display name, photo, bio, favourite books, and for each open book its title, genre, pitch, tropes, content warnings, spice, length, stage and sample scene. This is what a card in the deck shows, and it is how anyone decides whether to swipe.
• Only your friend. Messages, and anything said in the thread.
• Only who you send it to. Full drafts and snippets. Your manuscript is not visible to the site at large, is not indexed, and does not appear in any deck. It goes to a specific partner in a specific packet, and you can revoke that access.
• Never shown. Your email address, your content limits, your hard-no tropes, your excluded genres, and who you passed on.

Admins can see reports, the threads attached to them and reviews, because moderation is not possible otherwise. They do not read manuscripts.

Running the site means a handful of suppliers necessarily process some of this. They act on our instructions, under contract, and none of them is permitted to use your data for their own purposes — including model training.

All four are US companies, and your data is stored and processed in the United States regardless of where you are writing from. If that matters to you, it is better said plainly here than buried: using Inklings means your manuscripts and messages sit on servers in the US, subject to US law. Beyond these four we share data only where the law requires it — and we will tell you if that ever happens to you, unless we are forbidden from doing so.

There is a button for this. Settings → Your data → Delete account, type the confirmation, and it happens in two stages.

• Immediately. You disappear from every deck, your books close, your friendships end, and nobody on Inklings can reach you or see anything of yours. From the outside you are gone the moment you press it.
• After 30 days. You are erased. Your name, photo, bio, location and email address are destroyed, your sign-in credentials are deleted from Clerk, and your reading parameters, swipes, reviews, reports and notifications are deleted outright. Every word of every manuscript, draft and passage you uploaded is destroyed — including pages already delivered to a partner, which are emptied in place rather than left with them.

One thing survives, deliberately, and it is the part worth being precise about. Critique and line notes you wrote on other people’smanuscripts stay with those writers, and your messages stay in the threads you shared. They are detached from you: your account becomes an unnamed placeholder, shown as “a departed writer”, carrying no name, no photo, no profile and no address, and once your sign-in record is gone there is nothing left to connect it to you.

The reason is that the alternative punishes the wrong person. A partner who spent a fortnight on your chapter would lose their own notes because you closed your account, and you would lose the critique they gave you because they closed theirs. It works the same way in both directions — if a writer you critiqued deletes their account, your notes remain, attached to an anonymous project with nothing left to read. If you would rather that material went too, say so at privacy@inklings.example and we will delete it.

After the 30 days it cannot be undone by us, because there is nothing left to undo it with. Where the law requires us to keep a specific record — a legal claim in progress, for instance — we keep only that record, only for as long as it is required, and nothing else.

While your account is open, we keep what you have put there — it is your shelf, and pruning it is your call. Ended friendships and their threads stay readable to the two people in them, because a critique you were given six months ago is still worth having. Moderation records outlive the reports they concern, so that a pattern of behaviour is still visible after the individual complaints are resolved. Server logs are kept for a matter of days.

You can ask us to:

• Show you everything we hold about you, as a file you can keep.
• Correct anything wrong — most of it you can edit yourself.
• Delete all of it, per clause 7.
• Export your own content in a portable format.
• Stopa particular use of it — email, or anything else here you would rather we didn’t do. Where a use is the product itself, we will say so rather than pretend otherwise, and closing the account is then the honest answer.

Requests go to privacy@inklings.example and are answered within 30 days. We will ask enough to be sure the request is really coming from you, and no more. If you are unhappy with how we handled one, say so and a person will look at it again — and depending on where you live you may also be able to complain to your state attorney general or your national data protection regulator.

Traffic is encrypted in transit and data is encrypted at rest. Manuscript access is checked on every read against who the packet was actually sent to, rather than trusting the link or the page that requested it. Admin surfaces are gated on the server, not merely hidden in the interface.

What no system can protect you from is the person you chose to send your chapter to. They can copy it. The terms forbid it, we will act on it, and none of that puts the words back. Send pages to people you are willing to trust with them, and keep your own backups.

If a breach ever affects your data we will tell you without undue delay once we know what happened, and within whatever deadline the law where you live sets for us. What we will not do is send you the notice that says as little as possible: you will be told what was taken and what it means for you.

Inklings is for people 18 and over. Manuscripts here carry adult content warnings and explicit spice levels, and the site is not designed or moderated for children.

This is checked rather than asserted. Before you can reach any part of the site we ask for your date of birth, and an account that doesn’t clear 18 is not opened — the date of birth of someone we turn away is never written down. If we later learn an account belongs to someone younger, we close it and delete the data.

When this page changes the date at the foot of it changes with it. For anything that materially affects you we will tell you in the app or by email before it takes effect. The commitment in clause 4 is not something we will weaken by notice — narrowing it would need your explicit consent, and the same promise appears as a term in the terms of use precisely so that it is enforceable rather than aspirational.