# PDR 002: Keep unpublished writing and editorial decisions private

- HTML version: https://robbiepalmer.me/projects/agent-first-writing/pdrs/002-private-editorial-evidence
- Project: Agent-first Writing Editor
- Status: Accepted
- Opened: 2026-09-06
- Decided: 2026-09-06

## Context

Evaluating an editor needs more than published text. Useful evidence may
include raw agent output, unpublished drafts, proposed rewrites, accepted and
rejected edits, and the final text. Those records can expose unfinished ideas,
private notes, and a detailed account of how an author works.

Git history is public and durable. General analytics, hosted browser sessions,
and model-training datasets can also create copies that outlive the evaluation
that needed them.

## Decision

Keep unpublished writing, generated passages, and editorial decisions in the
private evaluation boundary. Do not commit them to the public repository,
republish them, send them to general analytics, or use them for training unless
the author makes a separate explicit decision.

A browser handoff discards transfer data when the session ends. Add a
before-and-after pair to the private corpus only when the author selects that
document. Limit access to the author and the evaluation jobs that need it.

Removing a corpus entry removes its tracked object. Purge any unreferenced
remote cache within 30 days. Public source documents may remain public, but the
private review decisions attached to them keep this policy.

## Consequences

The evaluation can use authentic editorial evidence without turning private
drafts into public fixtures or an undeclared training corpus. The product will
have less data available for broad analysis, and every storage or browser
integration must account for retention and deletion.

Reproducibility relies on hashes, manifests, parameters, and private artifact
storage rather than checking the full corpus into Git. A collaborator or
hosted service does not receive the corpus merely because it can run the
editor.

## Evaluation

Tests must prove that public builds and Git contain no private source text or
generated passages. A selected corpus item must be traceable to its private
storage entry, and removing it must leave no referenced object after the purge
window.

## Migration note

This record extracts the privacy and retention policy first recorded alongside
the DVC pipeline and the proposed Grammarly handoff. ADR 004 retains the
artifact-versioning decision. ADR 007 retains the browser-integration proposal.
The migration does not broaden corpus use or authorize training.

## Related records

- Project: [Agent-first Writing Editor](https://robbiepalmer.me/projects/agent-first-writing.md)
- Implemented by ADR: [ADR 004: DVC writing evaluation pipeline](https://robbiepalmer.me/projects/agent-first-writing/adrs/004-dvc-writing-evaluation-pipeline.md)
- Implemented by ADR: [ADR 007: Playwright-assisted Grammarly handoff](https://robbiepalmer.me/projects/agent-first-writing/adrs/007-playwright-assisted-grammarly-handoff.md)

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