Who we are
ReadSearch (readsearch.ai) is a research digest: every morning it picks the new papers that match your field and explains each one in a few short slides. In this policy "ReadSearch", "we" and "us" mean the team that runs readsearch.ai. You can reach us about anything here at [email protected].
What we collect
Your account. Your name and email address. If you choose a password, we store it only as a salted hash and never see it again. If you sign in with Google or Apple instead, we receive your name, your email address, the account identifier that provider gives us, and from Google your profile picture. We never see your Google or Apple password.
What you tell us about your work. Your field, interests, techniques, role, university, research focus and short bio, your timezone, and your display choices (theme, colours, reading goal, streaks, listening voice). All of these are optional and you can change them in Settings.
How you use ReadSearch. The papers you save to your library, the ratings you give, the papers you open and on which day, the digests we showed you along with the profile details used to choose them, your research threads and the papers or reference lists you add to them, and any job posting you publish.
ORCID, if you connect it. Your ORCID iD and an access token, which we store encrypted and use only to read the works listed on your ORCID record.
Technical information. To slow down password guessing we count sign-in attempts per IP address. Those counts live only in memory, for minutes, and are never written to our database. When something breaks, an error report is created (see Sentry below).
How we use it
- To choose your daily papers and tailor their summaries and audio briefings to your field.
- To send the codes that confirm your email address or reset your password. We send no newsletters or marketing.
- To keep accounts secure and the service working, and to fix errors.
We do not show advertising, we use no analytics or tracking tools, and we never sell or rent your information.
Services that help us run ReadSearch
A few providers process information on our behalf, each only for the job described here:
- Hetzner Online hosts our servers and database in Helsinki, Finland. Everything we store lives there.
- Cloudflare carries all traffic to readsearch.ai and protects it from attacks.
- OpenAI writes the paper summaries and audio briefings. For a summary it receives the paper's title and abstract, plus your field and the kind of work you do, so the summary fits you. To judge which papers match your interests it also receives your field, research focus, topics and the text of your research threads. It never receives your name or email address.
- Anthropic reads a search you type when the search looks like it names an author, a title or a year, so we can understand what you mean.
- Resend delivers our emails, so it receives your email address and the code in the message.
- Sentry collects error reports. We remove IP addresses, cookies, sign-in details and passwords before a report leaves our server, but a report can include what you had entered on the page that failed.
- Google or Apple, only if you choose to sign in with them, and ORCID, only if you connect it.
- Research databases: the words you search for are sent to OpenAlex and arXiv to find papers, without your name or email address.
Some of these providers are based in the United States, so your information may be processed there. We choose providers that protect it under their own published privacy and security terms.
How long we keep it, and deleting it
We keep your information for as long as you have an account. Sign-up and reset codes expire after 10 to 15 minutes, and a sign-in lasts 30 days from when you last used it.
You can delete your account at any time in Settings, under Account. That permanently removes your account and everything linked to it from our database, including your library, ratings, reading history, threads, ORCID connection and job postings, and it deletes your audio briefings from our server. Our encrypted backups are replaced on a 14-day cycle, so a deleted account disappears from them within 14 days.
Information already passed to a provider, such as an error report, is kept under that provider's own retention rules.
Your choices and rights
You can see and correct most of your information yourself in Settings and on your profile, disconnect ORCID on the Threads page, and delete your account in Settings. For a copy of your information, or for anything you cannot do yourself, email [email protected] and we will answer within 30 days. Depending on where you live, you may also have the right to object to or restrict how we use your information, and to complain to your data protection authority.
Security
All traffic is encrypted. Passwords and sign-in tokens are stored only as hashes, ORCID tokens are encrypted, and access to our servers is limited to the people who run them. No system is perfectly secure, and if a breach ever affects you, we will tell you.
Children
ReadSearch is made for researchers, clinicians and students, and is not meant for anyone under 16. We do not knowingly keep information about children, and we will delete any we find.
Changes to this policy
If we change how we handle your information, we will update this page and the date at the top. For a significant change, we will tell you by email or in the app before it takes effect.