Privacy Policy

Our Core Beliefs About Privacy

The privacy of our visitors and customers is extremely important to us. Screenplay Readers’ founder booted up his first computer in 1984, and grew up in a time when privacy was not something one would thoughtlessly auction off to the highest bidder.

Although times have changed, and privacy, sadly, is something many people don’t seem to be too concerned about, we at Screenplay Readers still hold it dear, and not just because we deal with scores of screenplays and other sensitive literary material on a day-to-day basis.

The information contained in this Privacy Policy describes who we are, what information you may or may not provide us by visiting or purchasing a service from our company, and how that information is used or not used, based on your preferences. Key term worth repeating: based on your preferences. We feel we’ve struck a good balance between running a business in the modern world and safeguarding the privacy of our visitors and customers, but if you need us to make a custom tweak for you, all you have to do is ask.

Who We Are

We are Screenplay Readers, a sole-proprietorship internet business providing screenplay and filmmaking services, and operating out of Los Angeles, California, founded in 1999. We have a support staff and a reader team. The reader team reads largely off-site, or virtually.

Readers and support staff are vetted thoroughly via interview and background check, and are required to sign a binding Non-Disclosure Agreement and Employment Contract before starting work at Screenplay Readers. The NDA’s primary purpose is to guard the intellectual property of our customers. We do not utilize free interns or college students, or hire underskilled neophytes, unlike most other companies in the screenwriting services space, primarily because we hold our work to a higher standard, but also because we demand that our staff be capable of the highest degree of security and discretion, as the foundation of what we do is reading and critiquing works that have taken months or years for a writer or filmmaker to create.

Your Screenplay’s Privacy

Any screenplay or other literary material submitted to Screenplay Readers for evaluation, as well as any information about it or about the client or the writers or persons developing the project, will never be shared, sold, read, publicized, or in any way, shape, or form made available to anyone outside of Screenplay Readers staff. Further, Screenplay Readers will never hold any claim to your material, nor insist on any percentage or participation in any sale or production of your material.

Your material is safely stored at all times on a secure server, protected with SSH 256-bit encryption. We use secure world-class cloud file apps Dropbox and Google Drive to work with your files. When finished with your files, we archive them airgapped/offline on optical media or we securely delete them, depending on your preference.

Further, said screenplay or literary material is not distributed, made available, shared, sold, rented, or leased with any person or entity outside of Screenplay Readers, ever.

What Data You Provide When Using Our Service

Like all websites, when you visit any page on our website, certain details are automatically logged by our hosting company in our server access log. Those details include your IP, your browser type and version, and your OS and version. If you are concerned about your IP being revealed or logged, please consider using a free or paid VPN service.

Our website, using WordPress and Woocommerce and various plugins, uses cookies. Cookies are tiny files our website writes to your browser cache when you visit, and they serve a variety of purposes, including saving your login information for you in order to prevent having to type it in again when you return, saving your website preferences, etc. but also allows our plugins to do a variety of things that help track our website’s visitors (e.g. let us know what general part of the world you’re visiting from, how much time you spend on a certain page, etc.). If you don’t want our website to write cookies to your browser, we understand. Simply tell your browser to disallow cookies from our site, or from all sites, and you will not receive cookies from Screenplay Readers.

When you purchase services on our site, you provide billing data

Like all websites you buy things from, when you purchase services or products from Screenplay Readers, our e-commerce software (Woocommerce) and our merchant processor companies (Stripe, Paypal, Bitpay, Apple Pay, Chrome Pay, or whatever you choose to pay with) collects your billing information (name, address, credit card number you provide, etc.) in order to process your transaction.

It’s important to note that Screenplay Readers is able to log and retain your address and billing information, but we can never see your credit card number, card’s CVC, or expiration date, and while we can invoice you, we cannot initiate a charge without your explicit permission, and only if you’ve given us that permission in advance via opting into this ability on our e-commerce platform, Stripe. Your billing address, email, and other information you provide when purchasing a product or service from Screenplay Readers, is stored in Screenplay Readers’ secure e-commerce database via our e-commerce software, Woocommerce, and protected on our server. Only our admin staff has access to that information and we only use it to contact you in support situations, for example, to look up a past order.

Our email newsletter

If you opt-in to our email newsletter, we email you periodically with discount codes and other offers. Our email newsletter is hosted a secure third-party email service provider.

How We Share the Data You Provide

We don’t. With regards to any type of data about you, whether it’s a purchase, details about your website visit, or your email address when you join our newsletter, we absolutely do not give, sell, trade, rent, lease, or in any other way make your script or any of your personal data or browsing data available in any way to anybody or any company or any entity outside our company at any time whatsoever. Period.

How We Use The Data You Provide

• Providing services and products
• Personalization of your user experience
• Your account setup and administration
• Delivering transactional and support emails to you
• Delivering marketing emails (only if you opt in)
• Sending you an occasional survey (only if you opt in)
• When/if any government agency provides a court order and/or valid legal authority and demands that we provide information

As mentioned above, we do not share screenplay or literary material, at any time, with any entity. Ever. It remains 100% private and secure in-house.

With regards to script titles and coverage, as mentioned, we do use private, secure, non-public-folder-based cloud file services such as Dropbox and Google Drive to share internally with our staff and readers while working on your script. We do not share personal data with those third parties, but they may retain backups of those files. We delete those files from those cloud-based services when finished with your service.

How We Secure The Data You Provide

We employ daily backups of all our company’s e-commerce, hosting, and customer data via off-site backup and secure cloud-hosting services. All of these backups are secured by firewall, 256-bit encryption, and DDoS protection via a CDN (content data network).

Our website and all transactions via our merchant processors are secured by 256-bit SSL secure sockets layer protocol, firewall, DDoS protection, and other standard methods.

Depending on the service you order, we can keep data in our secure logs and secure database for up to 10 years. Any and all data may be deleted by any customer on demand. We dispose of data by secure deletion and removal of all back up copies of that data, both on-site and off and on any third-party services.

If you have any questions or concerns regarding our privacy policy please direct them to support (at) screenplayreaders.com. You may also send a letter to:

Screenplay Readers
254 N. Lake Avenue PMB 180
Pasadena, CA 91101

Screenplay Readers