This policy explains what WriterOne ("we") collect when you use the service, why we collect it, how long we keep it, and how to delete it. We have tried to keep it short and specific.
Account: your email address and password. The password is stored as a one-way PBKDF2-HMAC-SHA256 hash (180,000 iterations, salted). We never keep or see the plain password. Your session is an HttpOnly cookie that lasts 7 days.
Thesis content: research designs, evidence cards, chapter drafts, search records and coverage reports. The proposals, mid-term reports and thesis PDFs you upload, plus the source originals we fetch and archive so that numbers can be verified (original text, original PDF, audit page), are stored under the projects you own.
Technical data: background job records, error logs and request timestamps, used to diagnose failed jobs.
Running the service: executing searches, fetching originals, extracting evidence cards, verifying sentence anchors, computing coverage, generating chapter drafts and exports.
Processing by a language model: to extract evidence and synthesise reviews, the retrieved passages and your project content are sent to our model provider (DeepSeek). It is the only third party that receives your content.
Payment: payments are handled by our payment provider acting as merchant of record. They receive your email and transaction details, never your thesis content.
We do not sell your data and we do not share your project content with third parties.
We do not use your thesis content to train third-party models.
We do not serve your archived originals to other users. Archive files live only inside your own projects, every request checks ownership, and guessing a URL will not reach another person's files.
Deleting a project also deletes its evidence cards, chapter drafts, uploaded document records and the entire archive folder for that project. Deleting a single card removes its archived original, PDF, audit page and evidence JSON.
Daily server backups are kept for up to 14 days and are not used for anything else.
Account data is removed when you delete your projects or ask us to delete your account.
Production runs over HTTPS with Secure session cookies, and the application only listens on the loopback interface, reachable publicly through a reverse proxy.
Ownership is verified on every project, card, chapter, export and snapshot request.
For anything about this policy or your data, write to privacy@writerone.app.