Privacy Policy

PaperTrail is an independent project run by an individual. It is not a company, and it is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or operated on behalf of any university, department, or funding body. Where this policy says “we”, that is who it means.

It is early access software. The practices below describe it as it works today, and this page is versioned so you can see when they change.

Everything in this list comes from you:

• Your email address. Signing in sends a one-time code to it. There is no password to store, so we do not store one.
• Your profile. Name, university, year, majors and minors, research interests, an optional GPA, and an optional LinkedIn link.
• Documents you upload. Your resume, and any other files you add for attaching to messages. These are held as files, not just as extracted text.
• Your experience. The research, work and project entries you write out, including their descriptions.
• People you mark as connections, and how you tell us you know them.
• Your trail and your outreach. Who you have saved, the drafts you write, whether each was sent and replied to, and, for a connected Outlook account, the text of any reply that arrives on a thread you started here.

We do not run analytics. No advertising or measurement SDK is loaded by the site, and we do not build a profile of your browsing. Our hosting providers keep ordinary server request logs, as any web host does.

Your data is used to:

• build your profile and keep you signed in;
• compare what you have written about your interests against researchers’ published work, which is what produces a match score;
• read your resume so the onboarding form can be filled in for you;
• draft outreach messages you then edit and send;
• show you the state of each message you have sent, including the replies you mark, or that we notice on a connected Outlook account;
• answer you when you write to us.

It is not used for advertising, not sold, not rented, and not shared with anyone for their own purposes.

PaperTrail is built on services run by other companies. They process your data on our behalf, for the purposes below and no others:

• A cloud database, authentication and file storage provider. This is where your account, your profile and your uploaded documents live.
• An AI provider. Two things go to it. Your resume is sent as the file itself, not as extracted text, so that its layout can be read correctly. And when you generate or revise a draft, the material that goes into that draft is sent too: your name, year, university, interests, and the experience and project descriptions you wrote, along with details of the researcher you are writing to. Your profile text is also converted into a numeric representation used for matching.
• An open catalogue of scholarly publications. We query it for researchers and their papers. Nothing about you is sent.
• Your email provider, if you connect a mailbox. See below.
• Hosting providers for the site and the API, which see ordinary request logs.

We may also disclose data if the law requires it, or where it is necessary to investigate abuse or protect someone’s safety.

Connecting a Gmail or Outlook account is optional, and you can use everything else without it. If you skip it, PaperTrail hands you a pre-filled compose window in your own mail client instead, and you mark the message as sent yourself.

If you do connect one, what we ask for depends on the provider:

• Gmail: send mail on your behalf only (gmail.send). Your messages go out from your own address, so a researcher sees mail from you rather than from a product. We cannot read your Gmail, so when a researcher replies you mark the message as replied yourself.
• Outlook: send and read mail (Mail.Send and Mail.Read). Reading is what lets a message you sent move from sent to replied on its own. When Microsoft tells us new mail has arrived, we look at whether it belongs to a conversation you started through PaperTrail. If it does, we store that reply so you can read it here. If it does not, we do nothing with it and store nothing about it.

We store a refresh token so the connection survives, and nothing else about your account credentials. It is held in a table the browser cannot reach, separate from the rest of your profile.

You can disconnect at any time from your profile. Disconnecting deletes the stored token; for Gmail it also revokes our access at Google. Microsoft does not let an app revoke its own access, so for Outlook we also stop listening for new mail, and you remove PaperTrail in your Microsoft account settings (or at myapps.microsoft.com for a school account). You can revoke access from your Google or Microsoft account settings at any time.

Google Limited Use. PaperTrail’s use and transfer of information received from Google APIs adheres to the Google API Services User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements. We do not use Gmail data for advertising, do not sell it, do not transfer it except as needed to provide the features described here, and do not allow humans to read it except with your explicit consent, to resolve a specific problem you have reported, for security purposes, or where the law requires it.

If you connect Gmail, PaperTrail receives an access token from Google and, for each message you send, the message and thread IDs Google returns. It does not receive your mailbox, contacts or Google profile.

That data is shared only with the hosting and database providers that run PaperTrail, which store and process it on our behalf so that your messages can be sent, and with Google, which delivers each message to the recipient you chose. It is not shared with our AI provider, advertisers, data brokers or other users, and it is never sold. We would disclose it otherwise only where the law requires it.

PaperTrail sets a session cookie so that you stay signed in between pages. That is the only cookie it uses.

There are no analytics cookies, no advertising cookies, no third-party or cross-site trackers, and no consent banner, because there is nothing to consent to. The app stores nothing in your browser’s local storage. Blocking the session cookie will stop you being able to sign in.

PaperTrail is only useful if it knows who is doing what research, so it holds records for people who have never signed up. These come from public sources: an open catalogue of published work, publicly listed faculty and lab pages, and a search of the public web used to confirm that someone is still where the catalogue says they are.

A record can include name, institution, department, position, publication history and citation metrics, lab website, and a publicly listed work email address. Co-authors who appear on those papers are held as names and affiliations only, so that the network view can show how people are connected.

This information is shown to signed-in students, and the email address is what a student uses to write to someone. Some of it is assembled automatically and may be wrong or out of date.

If you are a researcher and you want your record taken down, use the removal form. If the address you give is the one we hold, we email it a link to confirm; otherwise a person checks the request. Once removed, you are hidden from students and never added again. To have your record corrected or just your email address removed instead, write to privacy@mypapertrail.org. Either way, you do not need an account and you do not need to explain why.

Your data is kept while your account exists. There is no scheduled purge and no fixed retention period; we are not going to claim one we do not enforce.

You can delete your account from your profile. Doing so disconnects any connected mailbox as described above, deletes your uploaded files from storage, and deletes your login. Everything attached to your account is removed along with it: your profile, experience entries, connections, trail, matches, drafts and sent history, and any replies stored against them. It is not recoverable.

Two things are designed to outlive an account. Records of administrative actions taken on the service are kept as an audit trail, and may contain the name and email address captured at the time the action was taken. Aggregate product usage counts, if we begin collecting them, are kept with the link to the account removed.

Deleting a draft or a message inside the app hides it from your view and it remains in the database until the account itself is deleted.

PaperTrail has an administrative interface used to build and check the researcher corpus. It can list student accounts and show a profile, along with the subjects and status of outreach messages and the matches generated for that student.

It is used for support and for operating the service, not for reading your mail. Access to it is restricted to the operator. We read nothing from Gmail; replies stored from a connected Outlook account are covered by the same restrictions as the rest of your outreach.

You can view and change your profile, your documents, your connections and your drafts at any time from inside the app, and you can delete your account outright.

Depending on where you live you may also have the right to ask for a copy of your data, to have it corrected, to have it deleted, or to object to how it is used. There is no automated export yet, so write to privacy@mypapertrail.org and we will put it together for you. We will not charge you for it and we will not treat you differently for asking.

Data is held with established cloud providers, sent over encrypted connections, and reachable only by an authenticated account. Mailbox tokens are kept in a table the browser has no access to at all.

No service can promise perfect security, and this one is run by one person. If you find a problem, please write to privacy@mypapertrail.org rather than publishing it, and you will get a reply.

PaperTrail is for university students and requires you to be at least 16. We do not knowingly collect anything from anyone younger. If you believe a younger person has an account, write to privacy@mypapertrail.org and it will be deleted.

This page carries a version and a date. If something material changes, the version goes up and we will say so in the app before it takes effect. Continuing to use PaperTrail after that means the new version applies.

Questions about privacy, requests about your own data, and requests from researchers who want their record changed or removed all go to privacy@mypapertrail.org.