Privacy Policy
Last Updated: October 3, 2025
This Privacy Policy explains how Critiquely ("we," "our," or "us") collects, uses, and shares personal information when you access or use Critiquely's Services — including our website, waitlist, user accounts, document upload and processing, AI analysis features, and related software (collectively, the "Service"). By using our Service, you also agree to our Terms of Use.
If you are a user who accesses the Service through a registered account ("User"), this Privacy Policy applies to you. By using or accessing the Service in any manner and providing your information, you consent to the practices described in this Privacy Policy and acknowledge that we may collect, process, and share your personal information as outlined herein.
About Critiquely Products and Services
Critiquely is an AI-powered writing and editing platform for authors and content creators. Our service provides Users with document analysis, AI-driven editing suggestions, and intelligent feedback to improve their writing quality and effectiveness.
We provide tools and AI-powered infrastructure that Users need to analyze, edit, and improve their written content.
Applicability
This Privacy Policy explains Critiquely's practices regarding the collection, use, disclosure, and processing of your information; the rights and choices you may have with respect to such information; how you may contact us; and how we protect your information when you:
- Visit Critiquely's websites, including our main platform and related websites such as blogs, community discussions, and social media platforms (collectively our "Sites");
- Access or use our AI-powered writing and editing services, document analysis features, and related applications offered by Critiquely, including but not limited to:
- Upload and process documents for analysis;
- Receive AI-driven editing suggestions and feedback;
- Access intelligent writing insights and recommendations;
- Use our document critique and improvement tools;
- Interact with our AI analysis features;
- Interact with us in any way, including registering for accounts, contacting support, or using our waitlist features (collectively, "User Activities").
This Privacy Policy does not apply to:
- Third-party websites, services, or applications that you may access through links on our Service. Please review their respective privacy policies for information about their practices.
- Information you choose to share publicly or with other users outside of our Service's intended functionality.
- Any external tools, software, or services you may use alongside our Service that are not provided or controlled by Critiquely.
The information that we collect depends on your interactions with us, the choices that you make, the products and features you use, and applicable laws. We may collect or receive information directly from you, such as your name and email address when you sign up for our Services. In other cases, we receive information through your use of our Services, such as IP address and usage data.
We collect the following information directly from you when using our Service:
- Account Information: We collect information you provide to us to create, update, or administer your account, such as email address and password. By voluntarily providing us with such account information, you represent that you are the owner of such information or have the requisite consent to provide it to us.
- Document Content and File Information: We collect documents and content that you upload, post, deliver, or otherwise provide to the Service, such as text documents, manuscripts, or other files (collectively, "User Content").
- AI Product Information: We collect information when you interact with our AI analysis features, such as analysis requests, feedback on AI-generated suggestions, and preferences for analysis settings.
- Preferences and Settings: We collect information about your preferences, such as language settings, genre preferences, and other customization choices you make within the Service.
- Support Communications: We collect information you provide when you contact us for support, such as the content of messages, feedback, and other details that help us provide support or comply with legal obligations.
- Any Information You Voluntarily Provide: For example, when you provide feedback on your experience with our Services or participate in surveys or discussions.
We receive information about users from third parties or service partners that provide services or support our business operations. We limit our use of your information to the purposes described in this Privacy Policy. Information that we receive from third parties includes:
- Authentication Information: We collect information from our authentication and database provider, such as your email address, authentication status, and account creation details when you create an account.
- Email Service Information: We collect information from our email service provider when we send welcome emails and service notifications, such as delivery status and engagement metrics (such as whether emails were opened).
- Analytics Information: If you consent to analytics cookies, we collect aggregated and anonymized website usage data from our analytics provider to help us improve our service, including pages visited, time spent on site, and general location data.
When you use or interact with our Service, we automatically collect or receive certain information about you, your device, and your usage:
- Usage Information: We collect information about how you interact with our Service, such as pages viewed, features used, time spent on the Service, clicks, searches, and other usage patterns.
- Device Information: We collect information about your devices, such as browser type and settings, device details (e.g., device type, operating system), language preferences, and unique device identifiers.
- Technical Information: We collect log files, Internet Protocol (IP) address, location information derived from your IP address, diagnostic information, performance data, and system configurations necessary to operate and secure the Service.
- Analytics Data: If you consent to analytics cookies, we collect website usage statistics through Google Analytics, including pages visited, time spent on site, and general location data (anonymized IP addresses).
- Cookies and Tracking Technologies: We collect information from your browser using cookies and similar tracking technologies, depending on your settings and preferences. Where required by applicable law, we obtain your consent for the use of cookies.
How We Use Information
We use your information as described in this Privacy Policy to provide our Sites and Services. For example, we may use your information in the following ways:
- Service Operation: To operate and administer our Sites and provide, operate, deliver, monitor, and maintain our Services, including document processing, AI analysis features, troubleshooting, system maintenance and upgrades.
- AI Processing and Analysis: To process your uploaded documents, generate AI-driven editing suggestions, provide intelligent feedback, and deliver personalized writing insights and recommendations to improve your content quality.
- Product Development and Improvement: To improve functionality, quality, user experience, and develop new features for our AI-powered writing and editing platform.
- Support: To provide user assistance and technical support, such as responding to your requests and inquiries about document analysis, AI suggestions, or platform functionality.
- Communication: To send you administrative messages, such as technical or legal notices, product updates, security alerts, and other news or information about Critiquely and our services.
- Account Administration: To create and manage your account, authenticate users, store your document history and preferences, and maintain your personalized settings.
- Security: To detect, investigate, prevent, protect against and respond to potential threats, unauthorized access, and other malicious, deceptive, fraudulent, or illegal activity.
- Legal, Safety, and Compliance: To comply with applicable laws and regulations or a court or legal order, and to review compliance with applicable terms.
- For Any Other Purposes with Your Consent.
How We Retain Your Information
We retain your information for the minimum necessary period to fulfill our legal and contractual obligations, develop our Sites and Services, resolve disputes, enforce our rights, for legitimate business purposes, such as tax or accounting requirements, as described in this Privacy Policy and as recommended by industry standards.
When we no longer have an ongoing legitimate business need to process your information, we will either delete or anonymize it. When we choose to anonymize information, we strive to make sure that the information cannot be linked back to you or any specific user. If deletion is not possible (e.g., backups), we will store it securely.
We do not sell, trade, or rent your personal data to third parties for their marketing purposes. We may only disclose your personal data when required by law, in connection with legal proceedings, or when necessary to establish, exercise, or defend our legal rights.
We disclose information as necessary to provide the Sites and Services, as required by law, or as part of our business practices as follows.
We only disclose information on a need-to-know basis where appropriate safeguards and contractual arrangements are in place and as described below.
- New Owner and Other Corporate Transactions: We may disclose or transfer your information to relevant third parties in the event of, or as part of the due diligence or during negotiations of, any proposed or actual reorganization, sale, merger, consolidation, joint venture, assignment, transfer, or other disposition of all or part of our business, assets, or stock (including in connection with any bankruptcy or similar proceeding). Personal information may be part of the transferred assets. You may be notified thereafter of any such change in ownership or control through email or other means as applicable.
- Third-Party Services: We disclose information with third-party service providers that require access to information to support our operations and delivery of our Sites and Services. The third parties that Critiquely discloses your information with may include:
- Cloud providers to provide data hosting, data storage and content delivery network services.
- AI and Machine Learning Service Providers
- We may use third-party AI providers (via platforms such as OpenRouter) to process your documents and generate analysis.
- For certain models, including Gemini 2.0 Flash, the provider may use interactions to improve and train their systems.
- When this occurs, it is handled by the model provider under their own privacy policy, and we only disclose information necessary to provide the requested analysis.
- Critiquely does not train its own models on your creative works and does not sell or reuse your manuscripts for training purposes.
- Where a third-party model provider requires training to function (such as Gemini 2.0 Flash), this will be clearly indicated, and you will have the option to choose models that do not use your data for training.
- Security, abuse, and fraud service providers to monitor and protect the Services and users from illegal, deceptive, or malicious activity.
- With your consent via our cookie banner, we use analytics service providers, such as Google Analytics, to review and report on usage of our Services and user interactions, helping us improve the platform.
- Any contractors or service providers who assist us directly in providing and maintaining the Services, under confidentiality obligations.
These service providers are authorized to use your information only as necessary to provide Services to Critiquely. We may use and disclose aggregate information that does not identify or otherwise relate to an individual for any purpose unless we are prohibited from doing so under applicable law.
- Legal or Public Authorities: We only disclose your information when:
- It is reasonably necessary to comply with any applicable law or regulation;
- We are required by law to comply or respond to any court order, legal process, government and/or regulatory request;
- Necessary to enforce our agreements and this Privacy Policy;
- Necessary to protect the security or integrity of our Sites and Services;
- Necessary to protect against harm to the rights, property, or safety of Critiquely, its agents and affiliates, you, or the public as required or permitted by law; and
- Necessary to respond to an emergency which we believe in good faith requires us to disclose information to assist in preventing the death or serious bodily injury of any person.
- Any Other Party with Your Consent: We may disclose your information with other third parties with your consent.
How We Secure Your Information
We implement security measures to protect your information, including encryption for documents and secure data transmission. We use trusted cloud providers that implement industry-standard security measures for data storage.
We work with third-party service providers and expect them to maintain appropriate security standards. However, we are not responsible for the privacy and security practices of such third parties outside of the information we receive from or disclose to them.
While we take reasonable steps to safeguard your information, no system is 100% secure and we can not guarantee that unauthorized access, hacking, data loss, or other breaches will never occur. In the event of a data breach that is likely to affect your personal information or rights, we will notify you and, where required, the relevant supervisory authorities in accordance with applicable data protection laws (such as GDPR or CCPA).
If you have any questions about the security of our Sites and Services, please contact us as provided in Contact Us.
Marketing Communications
If you opt in, we may send you product updates or newsletters. You can opt out at any time by contacting us. You will still receive essential service messages.
AI Processing Transparency
When you upload documents, our systems process content using AI to generate analysis and suggestions. We do not claim ownership of your content. You grant us the limited rights necessary to process and store your documents and outputs to provide the Service. AI-generated output should be reviewed carefully before use.
Free Model Training Consent
Some AI models available through our service (such as Gemini 2.0 Flash via OpenRouter) may retain and/or train on your prompts and completions. When you enable free model training consent in your settings, you acknowledge that:
- Free model providers may potentially retain and/or train on your prompts and completions
- Your data is processed anonymously by these providers
- You can disable this consent at any time in your account settings
- Disabling consent will prevent you from using free models that require this consent
For more details about how specific providers handle your data, please review their respective privacy policies (e.g., Google's privacy policy for Gemini models).
Legal Bases for Processing (GDPR)
- Contract: to provide the Service you request.
- Consent: for optional features or communications.
- Legitimate interests: to secure and improve the Service and prevent abuse.
- Legal obligation: to comply with applicable laws.
Data Storage and Security
Your data (including documents and AI outputs you choose to save) is stored securely using our cloud database provider. Our database provider acts as our data processor under data protection law and implements industry-standard measures (encryption, access controls) to protect stored data. While no system is 100% secure, we and our providers take reasonable steps to safeguard your information.
Data may be stored on infrastructure in different jurisdictions. We encourage you to review our database provider, Supabase's privacy documentation for further details.
Data Retention and Deletion
We retain personal data for as long as necessary to provide the Service and for legitimate business or legal purposes. Data may be stored in the European Union or the United States, which means that your information may be transferred out of your country of residence. Documents and analysis you save are kept until you delete them or your account is closed. We may anonymise or aggregate data for analytics.
You may request deletion of your data at any time. Subject to applicable law, we will comply with deletion requests promptly — deleting your data will also unsubscribe you from future communications.
Third-Party Service Providers
We do not share your data with advertisers or marketers. We use trusted providers to operate the Service, including our database provider (storage and authentication), AI model providers (content analysis via OpenAI and OpenRouter), and our analytics provider (Google Analytics). These providers process data only on our instructions and under appropriate security and confidentiality obligations.
We use Supabase and may use OpenAI (depending on your model selection) to store and process your data in order to provide our service. Both processors are GDPR-compliant and bound by Data Processing Agreements with us.
International Data Transfers
We use trusted third-party providers (such as Supabase for data storage and OpenAI for AI processing) that may transfer data outside your country. Where this happens, our providers apply safeguards recognized under data protection law — including the European Commission's Standard Contractual Clauses, the UK International Data Transfer Addendum, or adequacy decisions — to help ensure your information remains protected.
Cookies and Tracking
We use cookies and similar technologies to improve your experience and analyze site traffic. We use Google Analytics to understand how visitors interact with our website. This helps us improve our service and user experience.
Types of cookies we use:
- Essential cookies: Necessary for the website and app to function (for example, to preserve a session and remember your cookie preferences).
- Analytics cookies: Used to understand how visitors interact with our website through Google Analytics. These cookies collect information in an anonymous form, including the number of visitors, pages visited, and time spent on the site.
We do not use advertising cookies or track behaviour for marketing purposes. You can control non-essential cookie preferences through our cookie banner - you can choose to "Accept All" cookies or "Refuse non-essential" cookies (including Google Analytics). Essential cookies are necessary for the website to function and cannot be disabled.
Minimum Age Requirements for Our Sites and Services
The Service is not intended for children under 16. We do not knowingly collect personal data from anyone under 16. If we learn that we have inadvertently collected such data, we will promptly delete it. By using the Service you confirm that you are at least 16 years old. If you are a parent or guardian and you become aware that your child has provided us with personal information, please contact us.
Your Choices
- Access or update certain account information in the app.
- Delete documents and associated outputs you no longer need.
- Opt out of marketing emails using the unsubscribe link.
- Manage non-essential cookies through our cookie banner. You can choose to "Accept All" cookies or "Refuse non-essential" cookies (including Google Analytics). Essential cookies are required for website functionality and cannot be disabled.
Your Rights
Under applicable data protection laws, you have the right to:
- The right to access the data we hold about you.
- The right to request correction of inaccurate or incomplete data.
- The right to request deletion (erasure) of your data.
- The right to object to or restrict certain processing activities.
- The right to withdraw consent where processing is based on consent.
To exercise any of these rights, please contact us (see details below). We will respond in accordance with applicable data protection laws.
Compliance with Laws
Critiquely is based in the UK and complies with UK data protection law (UK GDPR). We also observe EU GDPR standards for our EU users. Our email communications follow UK PECR and GDPR rules, and you can opt-out anytime by contacting us at hello@critiquely.app.
Changes to This Privacy Policy
We may update this privacy policy from time to time. Any material changes will be posted on our website and, where appropriate, notified by email. We encourage you to review this policy whenever you use the Service.
Other Sites and Services
The Service may contain links to third-party sites or services. We do not control them and are not responsible for their content or practices. We encourage you to review their privacy policies.
If you have any questions about this Privacy Policy or wish to exercise your data rights (for example, to request deletion), please contact Critiquely at: hello@critiquely.app.