Summary of Changes to Privacy Policy and Terms of Service

We’ve updated our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy as of April 10, 2014.

We did so because we want to be respectful and transparent about your interactions with us.

We made two types of changes:

1. We now provide you with even more control and protection of your content.
2. We rewrote it to be even more clear about our practices.

We’ve put a lot of effort into adopting the most progressive privacy practices possible, cutting the legalese, and spelling out exactly what we do with your information.

We also recently changed our name from The Obvious Corporation to A Medium Corporation, so that is changed throughout.

The points below are just a few highlights of the changes we made, so please review the new version carefully. If you want to see every change, head over to our GitHub page where we’re tracking them all from here on out.

We hope these changes, and our posting of historical revisions, make our practices and intentions totally clear. If you have any questions or suggestions, email yourfriends@medium.com and we’ll be happy to help.

Terms of Service

• We started tracking and publishing our revisions and past versions of the Privacy Policy and Terms of Service.
• We clarified the rights we have to use content you post on Medium. This was our most important change because, despite efforts to be clear, there was a lot of misunderstanding about what we can or will do with your content. It was, and still is, the case that you own the rights to the content you post on Medium. We do not claim ownership over any of it, and we will not sell your content to third parties without your permission. We think the new terms make this even more clear and will hopefully quell any concerns you might have about losing control or ownership of your content.
• We deleted our Jury Trial and Class Action Waiver and Arbitration clauses, meaning you have a right to participate in a class action suit or jury trial for disputes relating to our policies. This shifts the balance of rights more strongly in favor of our users.
• We answered a common question as to whether you can post content that you own on Medium even if you’ve already posted it elsewhere: the answer is yes.
• We used to prohibit testing for security vulnerabilities, but we’ve changed that policy and now welcome your help in maintaining our security. Please follow the rules we’ve described to respect our product and our users’ privacy.
• We expanded our explanation of copyrights and the DMCA and gave it a separate policy document all of its own.

Privacy Policy

• We clarified that we use encryption (HTTPS/TLS) to protect data transmitted to and from our site.
• We provided more clarity to the process for requesting that we change or delete your data.
• We added details about how we comply with Do Not Track requests in browsers.
• We added information about our data logs and how long we keep various types of data. We also added examples of logs with descriptions of each item.