Overview
Paper Trails (“Paper Trails”, “we”, “us”) helps you organize academic papers, track reading, and share insights. This Privacy Policy explains what information we collect, how we use it, and the choices you have.
Information We Collect
- Account and authentication data: when you sign in, we receive basic profile information from your authentication provider (such as Google or GitHub), like your name, email address, and profile image.
- Profile data you choose to add: such as a username, bio, institution, website, and privacy settings.
- Content and activity: papers you save or import, tags, shelves/lists, reading status, ratings, reviews, comments, and other in-product activity.
- Private notes: notes you write for yourself. These are intended to be private to your account.
- Files you upload: if you upload PDFs or other files, we store them to provide the service and associate them with your account.
- Technical and usage data: such as IP address, device/browser information, and logs used for security, rate limiting, debugging, and abuse prevention.
How We Use Information
- Provide and operate the service (accounts, libraries, shelves, reading tracking, and social features).
- Respect your privacy settings and display choices.
- Secure the service (fraud/abuse prevention, rate limiting, and troubleshooting).
- Improve product quality and performance.
- Communicate with you (support and important service messages).
Sharing and Visibility
Paper Trails is designed so you can choose what to share. Depending on your settings and actions, certain information may be visible to other users or the public (for example, public shelves).
- Privacy controls: you can control visibility of profile fields and activity (e.g., reading lists, reviews, and ratings) from your settings.
- Private profile: you can choose to make your profile private, which limits who can view it.
- Public shelves: if you mark a shelf as public, it can be discoverable by others.
Service Providers
We may use trusted third-party providers to help operate the service (for example: hosting, databases, object storage for file uploads, caching/rate limiting, error monitoring, and analytics). These providers process data on our behalf and are restricted to using it to provide services to us.
If AI-powered features (like semantic search) are enabled, your inputs (such as search queries and paper metadata) may be processed by an AI provider to generate embeddings and return results.
Data Retention
We keep information for as long as needed to operate the service and comply with legal obligations. You can edit or delete certain information in-product. If you want to delete your account and associated data, contact us.
Security
We use industry-standard security measures designed to protect your information, including access controls and encryption in transit. No method of transmission or storage is 100% secure.