Your book is private.Until you say otherwise.

What “private” should mean for a manuscript

Privacy for a novelist is less about secrets and more about control. You want to decide who reads a draft and when. You want to know whether your words are being sent somewhere you didn’t intend, and whether anyone is training a model on them. And you want to be able to leave with everything, at any time, without asking.

Those are reasonable things to ask of any writing tool, and the answers should be specific rather than reassuring. This page sets out what Authrot does, with the detail in the privacy policy, which names every company that handles your data, what it receives and how long it is kept.

It is also worth knowing what privacy can’t mean in a shared tool. Once you invite someone into a project, they see your name and email address, your edits and their history, and your cursor while you are both writing. That is how co-editing works. If you want a reader to know you only by a pen name, publish chapters for them, unlisted if you like, instead of inviting them into the project itself.

Private until you publish

Every project is private by default. Only its members can open it, and to anyone else it doesn’t appear to exist. You choose who joins, by email invitation, and what role they have: from editors who can change the text to viewers who can only read. Your conversations with the assistant are private to you, even in a shared project.

Authrot’s own staff can see account, billing and usage records to run the service, but the app does not let them open your projects. Publishing is always a step you take on purpose, chapter by chapter, under a pen name; readers never see your real name or email. You can publish unlisted, shared by link only, and unpublish whenever you like.

Your files stay on your machine

When you import a manuscript, the file is parsed in your browser, not on Authrot’s servers. Only the converted text reaches us: the original Word file, PDF, EPUB or zipped folder is never uploaded, though its file name is kept so you can see where each chapter came from.

That matters for a writer bringing in years of notes, which often hold more than the book: real names, journal fragments, half-formed ideas. You review the split before anything is imported: chapters, bible material and notes are found for you, and you send each where it belongs. If you later ask the AI to sort an import, it is sent file names, titles and roughly the first 900 characters of each file, never whole files, and only if you choose that option.

The AI only when you ask, or never

Authrot sends text to an AI model only when you use a feature that needs one, and only the parts that feature needs. The privacy policy lists what each feature sends. Authrot does not train AI models on your writing, and the model providers it hosts are listed there along with how each one handles and keeps what it receives.

You can choose which models do your work in Settings → Models, which also chooses which provider receives the text, so your writing goes only to the provider you pick. Or turn the AI off altogether: AI blackout is one switch per project, after which no model reads a word and every AI control leaves the screen. Writing, the bible, linking names by hand, history, branches, import and export all keep working. Anything you publish is still checked by an automated moderation service before it goes public.

• Every ✦ action shows what it costs before it runs
• AI work runs in the background, with Stop in the bell
• AI-written text is marked through every edit, copy and branch

Your account, under your eye

There are no passwords to leak. You sign in with an email code or link, a passkey, or Google, Apple or Microsoft. Settings shows every device where you’re signed in, and lets you sign any of them out. Each new passkey or sign-in method triggers an email to you, and sensitive account changes need a recent sign-in. A session ends after 30 days without use, and after 90 days in any case.

So you can keep writing when the connection drops, the app keeps copies of the documents you open in your browser’s own storage. Signing out deletes them from that browser, so sign out on a computer other people use. Traffic to Authrot is encrypted in transit; your writing is stored on Authrot’s servers, not end-to-end encrypted, because the server has to hold the text to sync co-authors and run the features you ask for.

Leaving with everything

Export any project you can open as EPUB, PDF, Word, Markdown or plain text, one file or one per book, along with its story bible, notes, plans, story map, pictures and narration. Separately, “Download my data” gives you a file of what your account holds about you: your details and settings, devices and sign-in history, your conversations with the assistant, and a list of your projects.

You can delete your account, and every project you own, from Settings. A project you delete disappears at once and is erased 30 days later, so it can be restored if you change your mind in the meantime. The privacy policy covers the rest, including backups and what other companies keep. Work you did in someone else’s project stays in their book if you leave, because it is part of it, but your name is removed from it.