Privacy Policy and Terms of Service Editing and Proofreading Services

Almost nobody reads a privacy policy, and everybody relies on one. That combination has made these documents the strangest genre in technology writing: legally operative text, published to consumers, written by lawyers, and increasingly assessed by regulators on whether an ordinary person could understand it. A policy can be entirely accurate and still fail its statutory test because it is 6,000 words of nested clauses. Meanwhile the same document is the first thing an enterprise buyer's procurement team reads, and the first thing a journalist quotes when something goes wrong.

We edit what companies produce in this area — privacy policies and privacy notices, terms of service and acceptable use policies, cookie policies and consent banner copy, data processing agreements and sub-processor lists, subject access request procedures and response templates, records of processing activity, data protection impact assessments, retention schedules, children's privacy and age assurance notices, breach notification templates, layered and just-in-time privacy notices shown inside products, and transparency reports. Our editors work alongside your legal advisers rather than replacing them, and we check that the plain-language version and the operative text say the same thing, which is where the risk in a "simplified" policy actually sits.

The layered notice is the technique that resolves most of the tension in these documents, and it is the one most often executed badly. Done well, a reader sees a short, honest summary — what you collect, why, who else sees it, and how to say no — with the full text one click away and the two written from the same source so they can never diverge. Done badly, the summary is a marketing reassurance that omits the sharing the reader would object to, which is worse than no summary at all: regulators treat a misleading summary as a misleading policy. We write these layers so the top level is genuinely representative, including the parts that are unflattering, and so the specific things a reader would want to know — whether data leaves the country, whether it trains a model, whether it is sold in any sense of that word — are answered at the summary level rather than reachable only by someone determined enough to read clause fourteen.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including draft policies and material under review by counsel. We are editors, not lawyers, and nothing we provide is legal advice or a compliance opinion — your legal adviser must approve the final text. What we can do is make the document readable, internally consistent, and honest about what it describes.