Privacy and Your Photos
This is how Grapevine handles your family’s photos and stories today. Where something is still being built, we say so.
Who can see it
Only the people invited to the paper, and anyone an editor has added to its email list. Nobody else can read it, and search engines are told to stay out. Papers never share anything with each other, even when you belong to more than one.
The link in each email opens that one issue without a sign-in, and it’s made for you alone. It stops working if you leave the paper. Anyone you forward the email to can open that issue too, so only forward it to family.
The paper’s editors can see who sent each piece, so they can deal with anything that shouldn’t be in the paper.
What happens to your photos
Photos you send are kept with the paper they were sent to, and shown only to the people on it. They’re never used for ads, and neither they nor your words are used to train software of any kind.
The stories are drafted by software run by Anthropic, working only from what was sent in. It’s given the words people sent, their names, how many photos came with them (never the photos themselves), and the paper’s settings. It isn’t given your other papers, your email account or anything you didn’t send. Grapevine uses Anthropic under its commercial terms, and those terms say Anthropic may not train its models on what we send it.
Every editor gets the draft before it goes out. If a story gets something wrong, reply and say so: the editors can run a correction in the next issue, and the story gets a note saying what was fixed.
How to leave
Stop a paper’s emails with the link at the bottom of any of them. It works without signing in. With an account you can also leave any paper from its newsroom, pick which emails each paper sends you, and keep yourself out of Hearsay.
A paper’s issues, and everything that went into them, are kept for as long as the paper exists, since they’re the family’s archive. If the Editor-in-Chief deletes the paper, it disappears from everyone’s list of papers straight away. When you delete a paper, you have 30 days to restore it. After that it’s erased for good, along with its photos, within the next 30 days. Backups that still hold it are gone within 90 days.
We’re still building a full export of a paper (PDFs and photos), a way to delete your account, and a way to ask to be taken out of past issues.
Hearsay, the tabloid
Hearsay is a gossip tabloid a paper can turn on, written in words only from the same mail. Before it prints, anything about health, money, relationships, a pregnancy, a death or anyone’s looks is dropped, along with anyone who has opted out. It’s left out of any issue with serious news, editors see it with the draft, and anyone with an account can keep themselves out of it, past issues included.
Money and passwords
Grapevine doesn’t use passwords, so it will never ask you for one. You sign in with a link sent to your email. The only person ever billed is the paper’s Editor-in-Chief, and only after they’ve agreed to it.