Policy changes & re-notice

How miniterms flags material changes to a published document and helps you generate a notice, a data-subject email, and a changelog.

When you edit and re-save a published document, some changes matter to your users and some don't. [GDPR arts. 13–14] require you to keep your privacy information accurate and, when the change is material, to tell people about it. The policy-changes page compares your current draft against what you last published, flags whether the change looks material, and helps you generate the follow-up artifacts.

Materiality classification

Each of your four document types gets a badge:

BadgeMeaning
Material — likely re-noticeminiterms recognised a change to a section it treats as legally significant (e.g. a new data category, a new subprocessor, a changed retention period)
Cosmetic — minorChanges were detected but none matched a section miniterms treats as material
Up to dateYour draft matches what you last published — nothing to review

Under a flagged document, miniterms lists the specific sections it recognised as material, with the relevant citation. If nothing matched, it still lists what changed so you can judge for yourself whether a notice is warranted — the classifier only recognises sections it knows about.

Generating a re-notice

Click Generate re-notice on any pending (non-up-to-date) document. miniterms produces:

  • A notice of changes — a short document describing what changed, suitable to publish alongside your document or circulate internally.
  • A data-subject email template — a subject line and body you can send to your own mailing list. miniterms does not send this for you.

If provenance is configured, the generated notice carries a verify link so recipients can confirm it hasn't been altered after generation.

Changelog

Once you've generated at least one re-notice, Download changelog exports a markdown file listing every re-notice you've generated, across all document types, in one place — useful for your own records or to hand to counsel.

Limits

miniterms flags likely-material changes based on known section patterns — it does not replace your own judgment about whether a specific edit requires notifying users. Review the "cosmetic" and "no section recognised" cases yourself before deciding no notice is needed.