This page describes what the site actually stores, not what it intends to.

If you only read and watch

A first-party cookie holds a random id so the site can remember where you got to in a video and avoid suggesting the same paper twice. Against that id we store which pages you opened, which videos you played and how far through you got, which files you downloaded, the searches you ran, the topics you chose as interests, and any rating or note you send. If you ask for a paper or a field to be added, we keep that request and any email address you attach to it. We record the broad device type — phone, tablet or desktop — from the browser's own user-agent string.

Your IP address is not stored in our database. The application holds it only in memory, to apply rate limits. It is, however, necessarily visible to the server and will appear in ordinary web-server and hosting logs, as it does for any site. There is no fingerprinting, no advertising identifier and no third-party analytics.

The visitor cookie lasts up to 365 days. Clearing it in your browser stops the site recognising you again; it does not delete the rows already recorded against the old id. Ask us to remove those.

If you have an account

Accounts are not open yet. When they are, the account itself is your email address — that is the only thing we ask for, and the sign-in link is the only credential. Your watch history, topic interests, feedback and uploads are then linked to that account so they follow you between devices. Email is the only personal information we ask for, but it is not the only thing linked to you.

If you send a takedown request

The form on /takedown asks for your name, your email address, which paper, and what you would like done. All four are stored so a person can read the request and reply to you; the email address exists only for that reply. The request is visible to whoever operates this site and to nobody else. We keep the decision indefinitely — we want to be able to answer “why did this come down?” years later — but your name and address are removed 12 months after the request is settled, leaving the decision without the person. An open request is never anonymised, however old.

Papers you send us

The PDF and everything made from it stay private to you. Nothing appears in the public library unless you ask and the paper's licence permits it. You can delete an upload and its video, deck and reel from your account; a paper already published is a takedown request instead, because other people may have links to it.

Third parties

We do not sell your data and we run no advertising. That is separate from the services the site needs to work, which do receive some things:

Page fonts are served by Google Fonts, so your browser requests them directly and Google receives your IP address and user-agent when it does. Nothing we hold is sent with it. We intend to serve these fonts ourselves and remove that request.

Generation uses AI providers, which receive the paper's text and figures. Note what that means for an upload: a paper usually contains its authors' names, affiliations and often an email address, so if you send us a paper, that content goes to those providers. They receive nothing about you as a visitor — no cookie id, no history.

The site is hosted on infrastructure we rent, so the hosting provider necessarily handles the traffic and whatever its own logs record. Sign-in email, once accounts open, will go through a mail provider. We will name both here when they are chosen rather than guess now.

How long it is kept

Which pages you opened, what you played and how far you got — the rows tied to your cookie id — are kept for 180 days. After that they are counted into totals and the rows that named you are deleted. Two kinds of row are involved and both go: the log of individual events, which becomes a daily count per paper, and the per-paper progress row holding how far through a video you reached, which becomes part of a running total. What remains says that a paper was played so many times and watched so far through on average; it does not say by whom.

A rating or note you send keeps the rating and the words, because they are about the paper — but the link to you is removed on the same 180-day schedule, so after that the note is genuinely anonymous rather than merely described that way.

Sign-in links and sessions are deleted once they expire — a link lasts 30 minutes, a session 90 days. An expired one cannot sign anyone in, so there is no reason to keep the address attached to it.

Your visitor cookie lasts up to 365 days and the row it points at is kept while the account or visitor exists. A paper you send us, and the video, deck and reel made from it, are kept until you delete them; job records for finished renders are kept for 30 days.

A note is free text, so if you have put something in one you would rather we did not hold at all, ask and we will remove it rather than waiting for the schedule.

Asking what we hold, or to have it removed

Use the request form and choose Something else as your relationship to it — it reaches the same place and the same person, and asking about your own data is as valid a use of it as asking about a paper. Say whether you want to know what we hold, have it deleted, or both. If you are asking about activity recorded against a cookie rather than an account, say so: we will tell you how to give us the id, because without it we cannot tell your rows from anyone else's.