Privacy and sharing on Notebook.ai: How it works
When it comes to creativity and the worlds we create, privacy is one of the most important issues to get perfectly right — and to be completely transparent about.
There are two privacy settings for pages on Notebook.ai: “public” or “private”. There’s also a distinction between changing a universe’s privacy, and changing the privacy of any other kind of page (e.g. characters, locations, towns, races, religions, creatures, etc) — we’ll get to that below. First, let’s talk about public vs private pages.
By default, every page in Notebook.ai is set to “private”. In this case, only the owner is able to see that page, and only when they’re actively logged into Notebook.ai on the device they’re viewing it from.
If you choose, you may change any page’s privacy setting to “public”. This switch can be done at any time, and you can flip back to “private” at any time to have that content no longer accessible to people, even if they know the page’s URL.
While a page is “public”, it can be discovered in three ways:
- You can share its link with anyone, and they will be able to access it directly. They will be able to view it, but not edit it in any way.
- When you make changes to a public page, those changes show up in a feed on your profile. Someone visiting your profile can see links to public pages you’ve edited, but not any private pages.
- If that page is in a public universe, anyone browsing that universe’s page will be able to see all pages for that universe — like a mini wiki for your universe (more on that in the next section).
Sharing a whole universe at once
As mentioned earlier, universes are treated a little differently. Because every page in Notebook.ai can exist within a universe (or in no universe at all), sharing a universe allows you to quickly share each of the pages within it from a single location.
Marking a universe public allows sharing that universe — and everything within it — with your friends, without having to go through and change the privacy of every page individually. As you’ll see on the share dialog of each of your non-universe pages, that page will be public if it’s set to public or if the universe it’s in is set to public.
You can change a universe’s privacy back to “private” at any time. When you do, only individual pages that you have marked “public” will remain public — everything else will immediately be private and only accessible to you. If you’d like, you can also change those individual pages to private at any time also.
Collaboration
The final piece of the privacy puzzle is universe collaborators.
Anyone you invite to be a collaborator in your universes will have full access to view and edit any pages in that universe. They’re treated as an owner to that page, just like you are, so they’ll have access to pages even if they’re private. Please only invite collaborators that you trust with that responsibility.
As an additional bonus, you will automatically share your Premium subscription with each collaborator. Even if your collaborators are on a free account, they will be able to create or edit any kind of premium page they’d like within your shared universe.
To get started with collaboration, simply edit any of your universes and click over to the “Contributors” tab. From there, you’ll be able to invite your friends by email address to help you with that specific universe. If they’re not a Notebook.ai user already, they’ll get an invitation stating that you’ve invited them to collaborate; if they already have an account with that email address, they’ll automatically be added and have full access to that universe. Of course, you can revoke those privileges by removing them as a collaborator at any time.
You own all of your content — forever.
Finally, the last topic I want to touch on privacy is a friendly reminder that, while Notebook.ai provides tools and storage to keep your ideas safe, those ideas are still wholly yours, owned by you, and won’t ever be shared without your permission to anyone. We don’t run ads, and we don’t share any user information with any third parties.
You are free to download your entire page collection at any time with the “Notebook.ai downloads” link at the top-right of every page. Unsubscribing from a premium subscription not only keeps your pages around, but you still have full access to read and edit them — forever.
Your pages are your pages, and I want Notebook.ai to feel like any other notebook — just with the benefits of being digital, too. Keep it forever, share it with (only) who you want, and grow your worlds to crazy-awesome proportions. Notebook.ai is a tool for you to use; not the other way around.
If you have any questions, comments, or concerns, please send me a direct email to andrew@indentlabs.com and I’d be happy to chat, any time.
Happy worldbuilding!
Andrew
What is Indent Labs?
Indent Labs is, at its core, a collection of ambitious open-source natural language processing projects aimed squarely at technological breakthroughs and moonshots in the field of writing. Wouldn’t it be awesome if you could generate quality stories from outlines, or automatically outline a story? What about generating a story as you make decisions on behalf of a character? Or talking directly with your characters?
The first word processor showed up in the 60’s and revolutionized writing through technology. Isn’t it time for another shift forward?
