Updates to Medium’s Terms of Service & Privacy Policy

We’ve made some changes to our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. The changes will go into effect March 7, 2016.

We’ve summarized changes below. We’re also emailing all users about them.

Mainly, we’ve simplified some of the language, clarified some points in response to questions from users, and removed some parts that were unnecessary or redundant. The bedrock relationship between you and Medium won’t change. You own your content. We won’t sell it or your personal information to third parties. We respect Do Not Track. And we make it simple for you to delete your content for good if you want.

Posting content. We’ve clarified the section about your rights to content you post. If you create something and post it to Medium, you own the rights, as you always have. We might use that content to promote Medium, and we might use it in connection with advertising on Medium. None of this is new. But, we’ve worked to make it clearer.

Deleting content. When you delete a post, or your whole account, it is gone after 14 days (it used to be 30).

Don’t break Medium. We’ve added a section listing some things you can’t do with Medium, such as spamming or scraping, manipulating our recommend system, and other ways of interfering with Medium that make the user experience worse.

Third-party analytics. We want to make clear all the things we do to build user privacy into Medium, like respecting Do Not Track. We also clarify what third-party analytics we use and what tracking they do.

U.S. Government-compliant Terms of Service. Some Medium users are posting on behalf of the U.S. federal government. They need government-compatible Terms. This is because the government has constraints in areas like ethics, privacy and security, accessibility, federal records, advertising and endorsements, and freedom of information. So, we added a government-compatible amendment for them.

All versions of the Terms and Privacy Policy are on GitHub so you can see what’s changed. Let us know what you think at legal@medium.com.