Terms of service

Beutler Wiki Brief: Terms of Service and Privacy

Version 2, effective September 25, 2026. Until then, version 1 (August 9, 2026) governs.

The Beutler Wiki Brief is a free service of Beutler Enterprises Inc. d/b/a Beutler Ink (“Beutler Ink”), a Delaware corporation operating under Pennsylvania law. These terms are short on purpose. By clicking accept, you agree to them.

What this service is

You give us a company name and its website, and we send you a brief on the current state of its Wikipedia article. If there is no article yet, we watch for one and email you the moment it appears, including if it starts as a draft. Unless you tell us to stop, we then watch that subject for you and email you when something meaningful happens on Wikipedia, plus a periodic digest. Your email address is your account. There is no password and no login; every email we send includes a link to manage or stop what we watch for you.

Who is agreeing

You are agreeing for yourself, as an individual using your work email at a firm we’ve approved. You are not agreeing on behalf of your firm, and nothing here creates any obligation for your employer.

What briefs are, and are not

Briefs are informational documents generated from publicly available data, primarily Wikipedia’s own records, with automated accuracy checks. We work hard to make them reliable, and every figure in a brief is checked against source data before it ships, but we do not warrant that any brief is complete, current, or error-free.

Nothing in any brief is legal, financial, or investment advice. Wikipedia’s decisions are made by its volunteer community, and no one, including us, controls them.

What we collect

When you use Wiki Brief we hold your email address, the companies you search for, the briefs we generate for you, and the articles you have asked us to watch. Your email address is your account. There is no password, so there is nothing for us to lose.

We do not use cookies to track you across other sites, and we do not build a profile of you.

Who else handles it

Generating a brief means sending the company name outside our systems. We cannot avoid that, so here is exactly who receives what:

The Wikimedia Foundation receives the company name as a search, and the article title for every page we read on your behalf. This is a public API and the request carries no information about you.

Anthropic receives the article’s content and title so that a model can write the brief. It does not receive your email address or anything identifying you or your firm. Anthropic does not train on it.

Mailgun delivers our email. It receives your address and, in the subject line, the company name — so Mailgun is the one provider that sees the two together. Its message logs are subject to its own retention schedule, not ours.

Render hosts our servers and database. Our application logs record which account took an action, by an internal account number rather than by email address, so those logs stop identifying anyone once an account is deleted.

If we add a provider, we will update this list and tell you before it starts handling anything of yours.

How long we keep it

Today we keep your account and its history until you ask us to delete it. Ask, and we will.

We are putting automatic deletion on a schedule, so that briefs and watches expire on their own rather than waiting for anyone to ask. When that is running we will publish the exact periods here and tell you before it takes effect.

Deleting your account and its history

Ask us, from the address on the account, and we will delete it.

What goes: the account itself, every brief we generated for you, every watch you set, every record of what you searched for, and all of it at once. Every link we ever emailed you stops working, because those links are derived from the account record.

What we also delete, which is less obvious: the company itself. If you were the only one watching an article, the record of that company disappears with you rather than staying behind unattached. If another firm is watching the same article, that record stays, because it is theirs.

What we cannot delete, and would rather say than imply otherwise:

• Briefs you have already downloaded or forwarded. Deleting the record kills the link, not the copies.
• Mailgun’s record of the emails we sent you, which sits on their retention schedule.
• Our own application logs. They identify accounts by internal number, so once your account is gone those entries no longer point to you, but the entries themselves persist for the hosting provider’s retention period.

Confidentiality, and what we will not do with what you search

Your search and watch history is visible only to Beutler Ink administrators, and it is never visible to anyone at any other firm.

We will not use it in our marketing.

We will not approach a company because you looked it up. Specifically, for twelve months after the most recent time you search for a company, we will not contact it about Wikipedia services on our own initiative.

The clock runs from your most recent search, not your first. Every time you look that company up again it restarts, so the protection holds for as long as you are actively working with them, and the twelve-month bound only bites for a company you looked up once and never returned to.

That commitment has four limits, and they exist so the promise cannot be used against us:

1. It covers the companies you look up in ordinary use of the service, within the usage limits on your account.
2. It does not apply to any company already in our pipeline on the date you first searched for it. We keep dated records and will show you the relevant one if it ever matters. This limit is fixed at your first search and does not move with the rolling clock — otherwise adding a company to our pipeline after the fact could cancel a protection you already had.
3. It does not apply if the company approaches us.
4. It runs for twelve months from your most recent search for that company, not indefinitely.

You can stop any watch, or everything at once, from the manage link in any email, and it takes effect immediately.

What we cannot promise

We generate your brief, so we can see what you search for. Any claim that we cannot would be false, and we would rather tell you what we have actually done about it.

Access to the link between an account and the companies it searched is restricted to a small number of administrator accounts — three, at the time of writing.

A brief lives at a long, unguessable web address that reveals nothing about who requested it. Anyone you forward that link to can read the brief. We cannot control where it goes after you share it.

If you would rather we kept nothing at all, run a brief without a watch and then ask us to delete it. We will.

What you can do with briefs

Share them. Briefs are made to be forwarded: send the link or the PDF to colleagues and clients as you see fit, with the Beutler Ink attribution intact. Anyone you share a brief with can read it.

What we ask you not to do: query the service in bulk or by automated means, resell access to it, or strip our name from briefs and present them as your own product. If your firm wants brief-style analysis under its own banner, talk to us; that is a conversation we’re happy to have.

Housekeeping

The service is free and provided as is. We may change its features, its limits (including how many briefs you can request in a month), or these terms; if we change these terms materially, we’ll email you before the change takes effect, and continued use after that is acceptance. Access is granted at our discretion and we may suspend or end it, or the service itself, at any time; our confidentiality commitments above survive for any history we retain.

To the extent permitted by law, Beutler Ink’s total liability arising from this free service is limited to one hundred dollars, and we are not liable for indirect or consequential damages, including any consequence of a Wikipedia editorial outcome.

These terms are governed by the laws of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, without regard to conflict-of-law rules. If any part of these terms is unenforceable, the rest stand.

Questions, deletion requests, or anything else: reply to any email we’ve sent you, or write to us at the contact address on any brief.