TL;DR
- • You own everything you write. We claim zero rights to your manuscript, ever.
- • We never train AI models on your work — ours or anyone else's, no exceptions.
- • We never sell or share your data, except if legally compelled by valid court order.
- • Employees never access your manuscript unless you explicitly choose to share it with us.
- • Enterprise-grade encryption and infrastructure — not a consumer chatbot backend.
- • You can export everything, anytime, in plain, human-readable formats.
- • If StoryClerk ever shuts down or is acquired, you'll get advance notice and a guaranteed export window.
Ownership
You own everything you write. We don't.
Every manuscript, character sheet, world compendium, and note you create in StoryClerk belongs to you — entirely, exclusively, and permanently. We don't claim any license to your work. Period. It’s YOUR PROPERTY; you just allow us to Clerk it. You can export it, delete it, or walk away at any time, and it leaves with you.
No ownership claims
Our Terms of Service grant StoryClerk zero rights to reuse, license, publish, or repurpose your content.
No lock-in
Export your full manuscript, compendium, and Iceberg Analysis at any time, from Settings → Import/Export.
Delete means delete
When you delete a manuscript or your account, your data is permanently removed from active systems within 30 days, including system backups.
AI Training Policy
Your manuscript will never become someone else's AI training data.
This is a firm, permanent commitment — not a setting you have to remember to enable.
No model training, ever. Your manuscripts, notes, and compendium entries are never used to train, fine-tune, or improve any AI model — not ours, not a third party's. Never.
No exceptions for "anonymized" or "aggregated" use. We don't extract patterns, phrases, or story data from your work for any secondary purpose.
This applies even if you use AI-assisted writing features. Turning on AI assistance changes how the AI helps you — it never changes whether your data gets used to train anything.
Data Sharing & Sales
Your manuscript is not a product. You are not the product.
🚫 Never sold
We do not sell your manuscripts, personal data, or usage information to advertisers, data brokers, or anyone else — under any circumstance.
🤝 Never shared for marketing
Your story data is not shared with partners, affiliates, or advertisers.
⚠️ Limited Disclosures
StoryClerk does not disclose your manuscripts, notes, characters, worldbuilding data, or any other user‑generated content to any third party under any circumstances, except when required by applicable law.
We will only release data if:
- We receive a valid legal demand, such as a subpoena, court order, or other binding legal process.
- We are legally compelled to comply, and only after verifying the request’s authenticity and scope.
- We limit the disclosure strictly to what the law requires, never more.
Whenever legally permitted, StoryClerk will:
- Notify you before any disclosure occurs.
- Provide the minimum amount of information necessary to comply with the law.
- Challenge or narrow overly broad or improper requests to protect your privacy.
StoryClerk will never disclose your creative work for:
Your story remains yours—private, protected, and never shared unless a court compels us to do so.
Security & Infrastructure
Your manuscript isn't sitting on a consumer chatbot's servers.
There's a real difference between the tools built for a business handling sensitive data and the free consumer AI apps most people use casually. StoryClerk is built on the former.
Purpose-built data pipeline
Your story is processed through infrastructure designed specifically for manuscript data — not a general-purpose consumer chat product.
Not the consumer interface
When StoryClerk uses AI models to power features like Lore Scans or the writing assistant, it connects through commercial/enterprise API access under contractual terms that prohibit training on your data — the same category of access used by enterprise businesses to protect their IP, not the free public chat apps.
Encryption
All data is encrypted in transit (TLS 1.2+) and at rest (AES-256).
✓ Data in Transit (API Calls & Hosting)
- All communication to and from cloud services—including database operations, App Hosting, and cloud Hosting—is encrypted in transit using HTTPS and Transport Layer Security (TLS). This ensures that every API call is fully encrypted, protecting your data from eavesdropping or tampering.
- To provide the highest level of protection, our enterprise provider front-ends support perfect forward secrecy (PFS) methods (such as ephemeral elliptic curve Diffie-Hellman key exchanges signed with RSA and ECDSA). This ensures that even if a cryptographic key is compromised in the future, your past traffic remains completely secure.
✓ Data at Rest (Storage & database)
For data stored in our databases, our provider automatically and transparently encrypts all data before it is written to disk.
Employee & Internal Access
We don't access your manuscript. Ever — unless you explicitly choose to share it.
StoryClerk employees do not read, review, or access your manuscript, compendium, or notes as part of normal operations. There is no routine internal review of your creative work.
Your choice, always
We never access your work without you initiating it — there's no automatic or background review of your manuscript.
Explicit, not assumed
The only way an employee sees your work is if you actively share it — for example, attaching content to a support request.
Scoped to what you share
Sharing a specific issue with support never grants broader access to the rest of your account or manuscript library.
AI Assistance Scope
AI assistance works for you — it doesn't work on you.
When AI assistance is turned on, it uses your story's context (characters, world details, prior chapters) to give relevant suggestions — but that context stays isolated to your account and your session. It is not pooled into a shared model, and it is not retained by the underlying AI provider beyond what's needed to generate your response in the moment.
🤫 Quiet Clerk
Prefer zero AI involvement in your prose entirely? Quiet Clerk turns off every writing assistance tool — chat, popups, and suggestions — while StoryClerk continues organizing your world exactly as it always does.
Business Transition Protection
What Happens If StoryClerk Shuts Down or Is Acquired?
Authors have been burned before by tools that quietly disappeared with their data. We want to answer this directly instead of leaving it to speculation.
Advance notice
Users would get advance notice and a guaranteed export window before any shutdown.
Acquisition protection
In any possible acquisition users would receive notice and a copy of the acquiring company’s terms. Users could export their data, and delete if they chose.
Human-readable files
You can ALWAYS export ALL your manuscript and compendium data at anytime. It’s human readable, not a strange, unreadable binary format. You can open those files directly and keep working or import them into any other editor.
Compliance
We hold ourselves to GDPR and CCPA standards — even though we don't have to yet.
StoryClerk is a small, independent studio. We're not currently large enough to be legally required to comply with regulations like GDPR or CCPA. That said, we meet their core standards anyway:
No tracking, no ad data
We don't collect cookie-based tracking data or advertising/marketing data — the kind of data those regulations primarily govern.
We meet the bar anyway
No training, no selling, no sharing without legal compulsion, and full export/deletion rights — this already meets or exceeds what GDPR/CCPA would require of us.
Have a specific compliance question relevant to your situation?
Reach out to [email protected] and we'll answer directly.
Frequently Asked Questions
? Does StoryClerk read my manuscript?
StoryClerk's automated systems process your manuscript to power features like Lore Scans and the World Compendium. No employee reads your manuscript unless you explicitly share it with us — for example, by attaching content to a support request..
? Is my data used to train ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or any other AI model?
No. Never. This applies to our own systems and any third-party AI providers we use to power features — none of them train on your data, by contract.
? Can other users see my manuscript?
No. Your manuscripts are private to your account by default.
? What happens to my data if I delete my account?
Data is removed after 30 days, including backups.
? Is StoryClerk GDPR or CCPA compliant?
We're a small studio and not currently required to comply with these regulations, but we hold ourselves to their core standards anyway — see the Compliance section above for details.
? Who can I contact with privacy questions?
Closing statement
Writing a novel means trusting a lot of your world, your characters, and sometimes years of work to whatever tool you choose. We don't take that lightly. Every commitment on this page is a permanent one — not a setting that could quietly change, and not marketing language dressed up to sound like a policy.
Ready to try it?
Experience the power of a dedicated writing partner that respects your absolute ownership and privacy every step of the way.