The map, and what happens to your text

Scrin can read a manuscript and hand back its map: an outline, a synopsis, the characters, the places, the threads. It is the one thing Scrin does that sends your text anywhere it can be read. This page says exactly what that involves.

Nothing moves until you ask

The map never runs on its own: not when you open Scrin, not on a timer, not after an import. It runs when you click “send and map” in a dialog that names what leaves, where it goes and how long it is kept.

Close that dialog instead, and not a word has left; Scrin's own usage record only notes that a map was declined, unless you have switched that record off. A map is also never redrawn behind your back: a scene you edit afterwards is simply marked “edited since the map”, until you ask for a new one.

What leaves

The text of the manuscript: its scenes, in order, with their chapter titles. The notes you keep for yourself inside the text (%%…%%) are removed first. A manuscript over 250,000 words is refused before anything leaves.

With the text go Scrin’s own instructions to the model: a genre instruction and a style instruction. They are the same for every writer and come from Scrin, not from you.

If you have written or corrected a memory of the text, it goes too. That memory is a short note on how the book is told: narration, point of view, tone, scope. Only a memory you have written or corrected leaves, never one a map proposed on its own.

It travels as the text does: through our map service, which can read it, then to the language-model provider, whose model reads it with the text. No one keeps it beyond what this page says for the text.

Then, a random identifier for this installation of Scrin. The app draws it at your first map and keeps it on your device. It goes to our map service and stops there; the provider never receives it.

Last, a line in Scrin's usage record: that a map was asked for, drawn (how many scenes, how long, in broad bands), failed or declined. No text, no title, no name travels with it, and you can switch the record off in the help panel.

What never leaves: the loose pages, the trash, your other boxes, your version history. None of it is part of a map.

Where it goes

First to our map service, on a server we rent in Quebec, Canada, the same one that carries your sync.

The text passes through it readable, unlike your sync, which that server cannot read. It checks our pause switch, the day's spending, this installation's count, this connection's count and the text's size, then hands the text on and keeps none of it.

Then to Anthropic, in the United States, where a language model reads the text and writes the map.

Anthropic does not use your text to train its models. It deletes it within 30 days, and keeps it longer only where the law requires it or where it needs the text to enforce its usage policy. A text its automated safety checks flag as breaking that policy can stay for up to two years.

Its own pages say so; we read them on 19 October 2026. Anthropic also agrees, with some of its customers, to store neither what they send nor what comes back, except where the law or the fight against misuse requires it; the results of its safety checks are kept all the same. That is an arrangement made through its sales team, subject to Anthropic's approval. We have not asked for it and have nothing in writing, so we say 30 days, in the dialog and here.

The United States is outside the European Union. The privacy policy says what covers that transfer, what we have not yet read, and how to ask for a copy.

What comes back, and what we keep

The map comes back to your device and is checked there against your text: every name and every quote has to appear in the scenes it cites, or it is dropped.

A map that loses too much in that check is not shown at all, and does not count against your quota.

The map is then stored in your box, next to the text, and travels with it. Nothing is written into your manuscript.

We keep no map and no text. In memory, cleared daily, our service counts each connection's maps; the address is never written to disk. On disk it keeps what the day's maps cost us, overwritten at the next day's first map.

Also on disk, kept for good: how many maps each installation has had, all manuscripts together. It sits under the SHA-256 hash of a random identifier the app drew, keeps on your device and sends only here.

Your consent, and taking it back

Clicking “send and map” is your consent, and it covers that one map. Nothing is remembered from one map to the next: each one asks again.

You can take your consent back at any time, as simply as you gave it: close the dialog before you click, or answer “not now” the next time. If you want it on record, write to us at the address in the privacy policy.

Taking it back does not undo a map already made, and cannot recall text that has already left: for that text, “Where it goes” says how long it is kept.

How we choose the provider

We choose the provider, not you, and we judge it on three things: the quality of the map, its price, and the guarantees it lets us give you.

A provider that trains on what it reads, or will not say how long it keeps it, is out, whatever its maps look like.

We only cite what we have read on a provider's own pages. Anthropic's commercial terms and its privacy pages state the two commitments above.

Its data-processing terms we have read. They are part of its commercial terms and carry the European Commission's standard contractual clauses. Its security certifications we have not read, so we cite none here. The day we do, they will appear on this page.

Where this is going

We would rather the map never left machines we run ourselves. Today that is out of reach at a price writers would pay. Each time we compare models, we note the best open one we could host, to be ready the day it is.

The privacy policy covers the map alongside everything else Scrin handles. Back to open Scrin in your browser.