Last reviewed 16 August 2026.
EditFast has edited other people’s writing since 1998. People send us manuscripts, dissertations, business reports and personal letters — work that is often unpublished and sometimes private. This page explains plainly what we collect, who else can see it, how long we keep it, and how to make us delete it.
We do not sell your information to anyone, and we never have.
Who is responsible
EditFast operates from Canada and handles personal information under Canada’s Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA). If you are in the United Kingdom or the European Union, we also honour the access, correction and erasure rights their law gives you — ask and we will act on it, rather than argue about which law applies.
Questions, corrections, and deletion requests all go to one place:
- Email: hello@editfast.com
- Phone: 1 (877) 333-3321
What we collect
When you use the estimate or contact form
We collect your name, email address, your message, and the word count and page count you tell us about. If you attach a document, we receive the file itself.
Your enquiry is recorded in our system and emailed to your editor. An attached document is held in a folder that is not reachable from the web — it cannot be found by guessing a web address and is not indexed by search engines. As soon as it has reached your editor it is deleted from the website server. If it cannot be delivered, it is deleted anyway and we ask you to send it again; we do not leave manuscripts sitting on a web server.
From that point the only copy is the one in our email system, which is where the retention period below applies.
When you subscribe to the newsletter
The subscribe box in our footer collects your email address and nothing else. It is handled by Formspree, a form service based in the United States, which means your email address is transmitted to and stored on their systems. Every newsletter includes a way to unsubscribe, and you can also just email us.
When you have an author profile
Authors we have edited may be invited to build a profile page. If you accept, we collect your email address, a password, and whatever you choose to put on your profile — your name, photograph, location, biography, website, social links, and details of your books including cover images.
Your password is never stored. What we store is a one-way scramble of it, which cannot be turned back into your password — not by us, and not by anyone who steals the file.
Everything on an author profile is published deliberately, by you. It is a public page. Nothing appears on it that you did not enter and submit.
Automatically, when the site is used
Our server keeps ordinary web logs. For the author portal we also record the IP address and time of sign-ins and of significant actions such as submitting or publishing a profile. This exists so that if an account is misused we can see what happened, and it is the same record that lets us prove we did not alter someone’s page ourselves.
Cookies, and what we deliberately do not do
There is no advertising, no tracking, and no analytics on this website. We do not use Google Analytics or any equivalent. We do not run advertising pixels. We do not build a profile of you, and we cannot follow you to other websites.
The only cookies we set are the ones that keep you signed in to the author portal or the administration area. They are strictly necessary, they expire, and they contain no personal information — only a session reference. If you never sign in, we set no cookies at all.
Who else touches your information
Three outside services are involved in running this site. Each receives only what it needs to do its job:
- Our hosting provider (Hetzner) operates the server that stores the website, the database, and any document you upload. Their servers are outside Canada, which means your information is stored outside Canada and is subject to the laws of the country the server sits in.
- Google reCAPTCHA protects the contact form from automated spam. To decide whether you are a person, it receives your IP address and information about how you interacted with the page, under Google’s privacy policy. Without it the form would be unusable within days.
- Formspree delivers newsletter sign-ups, as described above.
That is the complete list. No advertising network, no data broker, and no marketing platform receives anything.
How long we keep things
- Documents you send us through this website — removed from the web server as soon as they reach your editor, usually within seconds. Nothing you upload stays on the website.
- The working copy of your document, in our email and on the editor’s computer — kept for 12 months after we deliver the finished work, then deleted. That window exists so returning clients can ask for the file again and so we can resolve any question about what we did. Ask us sooner and we will delete it sooner.
- Enquiries and correspondence — kept while they are useful for serving you, then deleted.
- Newsletter subscriptions — until you unsubscribe.
- Author profiles and accounts — kept while the profile is published. Ask us to remove it and both the page and the account go.
- Sign-in and audit records — kept while the account exists, because their whole purpose is to provide a history.
Confidentiality of your writing
This matters more to our clients than anything else on this page, so it gets its own section. We treat unpublished work as confidential. We do not show it to anyone outside the editor working on it, we do not quote from it, we do not use it as a sample, and we do not feed it to any artificial-intelligence system for training or any other purpose. If we ever want to mention your project publicly — in a testimonial or on an author page — we ask you first, and a no costs you nothing.
How your information is protected
- The whole site runs over an encrypted connection. Requests that arrive unencrypted are redirected.
- Passwords are stored as one-way scrambles, and accounts lock themselves after repeated failed sign-in attempts.
- Uploaded images are re-processed before being stored, so a file disguised as an image cannot run as a program.
- Uploads are limited to four document formats, and each file is checked to confirm it really is the type it claims to be rather than something disguised.
- Uploaded documents are stored outside the public website folder, readable only by the server account, and deleted once delivered.
- Configuration files holding passwords are blocked from being served.
No website can promise perfect security. What we can promise is that if a breach ever affected your information, we would tell you rather than hope you did not notice.
Your rights
You can ask us to:
- tell you what personal information we hold about you;
- correct anything that is wrong;
- delete it, including any document you sent us;
- stop emailing you;
- withdraw consent you gave earlier, at any time.
Email hello@editfast.com. We aim to reply within a few days and to act within 30 days, which is what PIPEDA requires. There is no charge, and you do not need to give a reason.
If you are unhappy with how we handle a request, you may complain to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada. We would rather you told us first and gave us the chance to put it right.
Children
This site is meant for adults and for the professional editing of adult work. We do not knowingly collect information from children under 16. If you believe a child has sent us something, tell us and we will delete it.
Changes to this policy
If we change how we handle your information, we will update this page and change the review date at the top. Substantial changes affecting people who already have an account will be emailed to them rather than quietly posted.