Confidentiality, agreements, and what happens to your file

Will my document be kept confidential?

It should be, and the reason to ask is that no licensing body requires it. Editing is not a regulated occupation in the way that law or accountancy is, so there is no registrar to complain to and no license to lose.

The professional standards do address it. Editors Canada's Professional Editorial Standards ask editors to understand the ethical dimensions of their work, including the need to respect confidentiality and privacy.¹ That is a professional expectation rather than an enforceable rule, which is precisely why the written undertaking matters.

Every document a client sends us is treated in confidence. That covers the text, the fact that we were sent it, and anything a client tells us about it while we hold it.

Can I send an NDA?

Yes, and for business work it is routine rather than remarkable. An editor who has done corporate work has signed them before and will not treat the request as suspicion.

Friction, where it arises, is usually about scope rather than principle. Agreements drafted for a supplier relationship sometimes carry obligations an individual editor cannot meet, such as uncapped indemnity, insurance minimums, or data-handling requirements that assume a company with its own systems.

Where an editor declines a particular agreement, the useful next question is which clause is the problem. A refusal to accept unlimited liability is different from a refusal to commit to confidentiality at all, and only the second is a reason to look elsewhere.

Proportion is worth keeping in view. An agreement that takes a lawyer two hours to review sits oddly on a three-hundred-dollar proofread, which is why many editors carry a short standard form of their own.

Does an agreement actually protect anything?

It changes what you can do afterward rather than preventing anything in advance. A signed agreement gives a contractual claim if the document is disclosed, and enforcing it costs money that may exceed what is at stake.

Its more useful work happens earlier. Negotiating one forces both sides to state what counts as confidential, how long the obligation runs, and what happens to the files at the end. Most disputes come from those three things never having been discussed.

One clause is worth more than the rest of the document, and it is the one about the files. An agreement promising silence leaves every copy where it is; an agreement saying what happens to the working copies gives you something concrete.

What happens to my file after the job?

Ask, because the honest answer differs between editors and nobody volunteers it. Working copies, backups, and email attachments all persist unless somebody deletes them.

The practical questions are short. Where is the file held while the work is under way, is it in a cloud service and whose, how long are copies kept afterward, and will they be deleted on request.

An editor who has never thought about this will say so, which is itself an answer. An editor who has thought about it will have a practice to describe rather than a reassurance to offer.

For a document that matters, asking for deletion on completion is reasonable and easy to agree in advance. Asking for it a year later means asking somebody to search their own backups.

Who else sees it?

Whoever the editor tells you, and the question is worth asking of any company rather than any individual. SFWA's Writer Beware makes a general point here that travels well beyond its own market. It warns against services that will not disclose the names of their staff, or will not identify the person assigned to the work before the client commits.²

At EditFast the client does not choose the editor. EditFast makes the assignment, matching the subject of the document to an editor's experience, and one person makes that decision on every job.

What follows from that is a straightforward undertaking: the document goes to the editor assigned to it and to nobody else, and it is not sent anywhere a client has not been told about.

Can I send a redacted version?

Yes, and for some documents it is the right answer. Names, figures, client identities, and unannounced product names can be replaced with placeholders before sending, and the edit works perfectly well on the redacted text.

Two cautions apply. Consistency checking is weakened where the real terms are hidden, because an editor cannot tell that two placeholders should have been the same word. Redaction also has to be done properly, since text hidden behind formatting in a word processor has not been removed from the file.³

Where only part of a document is sensitive, sending the whole thing with the sensitive sections marked as not for editing is usually better than redacting. The editor reads for context and leaves those pages alone.

What if my document is embargoed or not yet announced?

Saying so, and saying when the embargo lifts, is the whole requirement. It changes nothing about the editing itself, and it changes how the file is handled and whether it can be mentioned.

Editors work on unannounced material routinely. Results before publication, filings before submission, and product copy before launch are all ordinary categories of work. What is not ordinary is the handling, and that is the part to be explicit about.

The specific thing to establish is whether the editor may reference the work at all. An editor who lists clients or shows samples needs to know that this one is not available for either, and for how long that holds.

The answer can change with time rather than being permanent. Material that is confidential before an announcement is often unremarkable afterward, and saying which applies saves a second conversation.

What if my document contains personal data?

Then it carries obligations that have nothing to do with editing, and they belong to you rather than to the editor. Case notes, employee records, customer details, and research data involving identifiable people all raise questions about what may be sent outside an organization.

An editor can work on such material where your own rules permit it, and cannot tell you whether they do. We are editors and not your compliance function, and the question of whether a document may leave your organization is one to settle inside it first.

Where it may not, redaction or an on-site arrangement is the usual alternative. Asking before sending is considerably better than asking afterward, because a document that should not have left cannot be unsent.