Formatly's Privacy Promise: What Happens to Your Documents
Your thesis contains unpublished research. Here is exactly how Formatly handles documents: processing, retention, deletion, and training.
Scholarly manuscripts frequently contain proprietary empirical findings, patentable data, or embargoed research that have never appeared in public circulation. Maintaining a privacy-first formatting architecture eliminates manual security risks, ensuring user documents are processed through deterministic parsing pipelines without exposing sensitive data to third-party AI training corpuses.
Handing over unpublished research takes trust
A document you upload for formatting may contain months of original research that has never been published anywhere. Treating that file casually would be a betrayal of the workflow — so the privacy model is worth stating in plain terms rather than burying in a policy page.
Here is the complete lifecycle of a document in Formatly: what happens at upload, during processing, and after you download.
The Document Lifecycle, Stated Plainly
| Stage | What Happens |
|---|---|
| Upload | Your .docx is transferred over an encrypted connection and attached to your account only. |
| Processing | The rule-based engine reads structure and citations to apply the selected style. Deterministic rules — your content is not sent to third-party AI services for formatting. |
| Output | The formatted document is stored in your dashboard for you to download, with every change tracked. |
| Retention | Documents are not kept permanently, and you can delete any document at any time from the dashboard. |
| Model training | Never. Your documents are not used to train AI models — there is nothing to train, since formatting is rule execution, not learning. |
Let Formatly apply these rules for you
Upload your document and get a correctly formatted APA, MLA, Chicago, or Harvard document in seconds — with full tracked changes.
Why Rule-Based Design Is Also a Privacy Decision
Formatly’s engine applies deterministic rules rather than generative models, and that architectural choice has privacy consequences beyond speed: your text does not need to leave the processing pipeline to be sent to an external model, because no external model is involved in formatting.
The same design keeps the Citation & Structure Audit™ predictable — it checks structural formatting errors, heading hierarchy gaps, missing in-text citations, and citation–reference mismatches, and it reports what it finds without inventing anything. The reasoning behind the architecture is in why rule-based formatting beats AI.
Expert Tip: Before uploading to any academic tool, check two things: whether documents are used for model training, and whether you can delete on demand. Formatly’s answers are no and yes — hold every other tool to the same standard.
Your Controls
You own the lifecycle: upload what you choose, download when you want, delete when you are done. The deletion control is covered in our guide to managing multiple documents, and institution-facing readers can see how this extends to research integrity in how privacy-first formatting protects your research.
Eliminate Formatting Stress with Formatly
Spending hours adjusting indents, citation punctuation, and margin settings pulls focus away from your actual research and arguments. Formatly automates your paper’s layout to ensure 100% compliance with official style guides before you submit.
Ready to save time and eliminate grading penalties? Upload your document to Formatly to generate a perfectly formatted paper with tracked changes instantly.
Format your manuscript in seconds
Stop fighting with margins, headings, and lists. Upload your document and let our engine instantly apply APA, MLA, Chicago, or Harvard standards — with full tracked changes.