Privacy Policy

PubMind is provided by AA1 Labs ("PubMind", "we", "us"). We are the controller of the personal data described in this policy.

You can reach us about privacy at info@pubmind.app. We have not appointed a Data Protection Officer.

• We collect what we need to run your account, sync your library across devices, provide AI features and manage subscriptions.
• When you use an AI feature, the relevant article text, abstract, PDF text or question is sent to an AI provider to produce the answer.
• We do not sell your personal data, we do not show ads, and we do not use your data for advertising.
• Payments are handled by Apple or Google. We never see or store your card details.
• You can delete your account from inside the app at any time, which erases your account and your synced library.

Account information

When you create an account we collect your email address, a password and, optionally, a display name. Your password is never stored in readable form: we keep only a salted cryptographic hash of it. We also record whether your email address is verified, when you last signed in, and the time your account was created.

Profile and personalisation

If you choose to, you can tell us your occupation, your research interests and your answers to the reader profile questions in the app. We use these to tailor AI summaries and your For You feed. They are optional and you can change or clear them in Settings.

Your synced library

To keep your devices in sync, we store your library in a separate database dedicated to your account. This includes saved articles, collections and tags, saved journals, saved searches and their filters and scoring questions, your saved questions, Ask AI conversations, AI reports, For You feed and brief snapshots, your read history, your institutional or full-text access settings, and app preferences. The cloud copy of your read history is limited to the last 180 days.

AI requests

When you use AI features, we process the content needed to answer you, such as article titles, abstracts, full text or PDF text, search results, and the questions or prompts you type. See section 6 for details.

Usage and limits

For each AI request we log your account ID, the time, which feature was used, which AI provider and model handled it, the number of tokens processed, the estimated cost and your plan. We use this to enforce plan limits and fair use, to bill and budget for AI costs, and to detect abuse. We also keep short-lived daily counters for features with daily limits.

Subscriptions

If you subscribe, Apple or Google processes the payment. Through our subscription provider RevenueCat we receive and store your subscription status: plan, store, product, a store transaction reference, renewal status and expiry date. RevenueCat identifies you by your PubMind account ID, not by your name or email.

Sign-in sessions and security data

For each signed-in device we keep a session record with a device label and timestamps so you can stay signed in and sign out of other devices. To protect accounts against brute-force and abuse, we temporarily use your IP address to rate-limit sign-in, sign-up and similar requests. Our hosting provider also keeps standard technical logs (such as IP address, request time and error details) for security and troubleshooting.

Emails

We send transactional emails, such as email verification and password reset messages. We do not send marketing emails to app users unless you have asked to receive them.

Website waitlist

If you join the waitlist on pubmind.app, we store your email address, the page you signed up from, your browser's user agent and your approximate country (derived by our hosting provider from your IP address). We use this only to tell you about PubMind's launch and major updates. The website does not use advertising or tracking cookies.

What we do not collect

We do not collect your precise location, contacts, photos, health records or payment card details, and the app does not contain third-party advertising or advertising trackers.

Some information is stored only on your device and is not uploaded:

• PDF cache. Downloaded PDFs are cached on your device. PDFs you saved, uploaded or annotated are kept; PDFs fetched in advance but never opened are removed after about a day, and other cached PDFs are removed about 30 days after you last opened them.
• Local read history. Your device keeps its own read history; only the last 180 days is synced to the cloud.
• Saved web pages. When you use "save page to article" in the in-app browser, the page is captured on your device. Pages you visit in the in-app browser are loaded directly from those websites, which have their own privacy policies.
• Notifications. New-article digests are built on your device by checking PubMed for your saved searches in the background. We do not run a push notification server and do not receive your notification preferences beyond your synced app settings.
• Sign-in tokens. Kept in your device's secure storage (Keychain or Keystore).

We use personal data to:

• create and secure your account and keep you signed in;
• sync your library and settings across your devices;
• provide search, AI summaries, one-line previews, Ask AI, scoring questions, reports and the For You feed, personalised to the interests you share;
• find and retrieve full text and PDFs from open-access sources and publishers;
• manage subscriptions, plan limits and the fair-use AI allowance;
• send verification, password reset and other service emails;
• prevent fraud, abuse and security incidents, and fix problems;
• understand overall costs and usage so we can improve the service;
• comply with legal obligations, such as tax and accounting records.

We do not use your personal data to train AI models, and we do not make decisions about you that have legal or similarly significant effects based solely on automated processing.

AI features run on our servers, which forward each request to an AI provider. Depending on the feature, the request contains article metadata, abstracts, full text or extracted PDF text, search results, and the questions, prompts or messages you write. Your profile interests may be included to personalise the answer. Your email address and password are not included.

AI outputs that depend only on the article, such as an article summary, a one-line preview or the answer to a scoring question, may be stored in a shared cache keyed to the article (and to a fingerprint of the question or prompt) so they can be reused for other readers. These cached outputs are not linked to your account.

Please do not enter information that identifies a patient or any other person into AI features. PubMind is designed for reading published research, not for processing patient records.

We use the following service providers (processors) to run PubMind. They may only use your data to provide their services to us.

• Cloudflare (Workers, D1, KV, Pages, Access): hosting of our servers, the account database, configuration, this website and staff access controls.
• Turso (libSQL): hosting of the per-account database that holds your synced library.
• AI providers: Anthropic, OpenRouter (which routes requests to the model providers it hosts), Groq and Cerebras for summaries, chat, reports and embeddings, and TypeSafe (Jev) for reranking your For You feed and scoring articles against your questions. The provider used for a feature can change as we choose the best model for the job.
• Amazon Web Services (Simple Email Service, London region): sending transactional emails.
• RevenueCat, together with Apple App Store and Google Play: subscriptions and purchase validation. Apple and Google process payments under their own privacy policies.

Research and publisher sources

To search and retrieve articles, the app or our servers send queries (search terms, PubMed IDs, DOIs or titles) to NCBI PubMed and PubMed Central (E-utilities), NIH iCite, Europe PMC, OpenAlex, Semantic Scholar, Unpaywall, CORE, Crossref, LibKey and publisher APIs or websites such as Elsevier, Springer Nature and Wiley. These requests do not include your name or email address, but the services can see the IP address of whichever device or server sends the request. Each of these services has its own privacy policy.

If you are in the UK, the European Economic Area or Switzerland, we rely on the following legal bases under the UK GDPR and EU GDPR:

• Contract: to provide your account, sync, AI features you request, subscriptions and service emails.
• Legitimate interests: to keep the service secure, prevent abuse, enforce limits, track AI costs and improve PubMind. We balance these interests against your rights, and you can object (see section 13).
• Consent: for optional profile and persona answers, device notifications and the website waitlist. You can withdraw consent at any time.
• Legal obligation: to keep records required for tax, accounting and legal compliance.

We do not sell your personal data, and we do not share it for cross-context behavioural advertising, as those terms are defined in the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) and similar US state laws. We do not use your data for advertising at all. We share personal data only with the service providers listed above, when you ask us to, or when required by law or to protect the rights, safety and security of our users and the service.

If PubMind is involved in a merger, acquisition or sale of assets, your data may be transferred as part of that transaction, and this policy will continue to apply to it.

Our providers operate globally, and your data may be processed in the United States and other countries outside the UK and EEA. Where that happens, we rely on appropriate safeguards such as the UK International Data Transfer Addendum, the EU Standard Contractual Clauses, or adequacy decisions (including the EU-US Data Privacy Framework and its UK extension where the provider is certified). You can ask us for more information at info@pubmind.app.

• Account and synced library: for as long as your account exists. Deleted when you delete your account.
• Read history: the cloud copy keeps the last 180 days; older entries are pruned automatically.
• Sign-in sessions: until you sign out or the session expires (up to about 30 days of inactivity).
• Rate-limit records and daily counters: a few days at most.
• Usage logs: while your account exists. When you delete your account, they are detached from your account ID and kept only as anonymous cost totals.
• Subscription records: for as long as needed for billing, refunds, tax and fraud prevention, which may extend beyond account deletion.
• Shared AI caches: kept as long as useful; they are not linked to any account.
• Waitlist emails: until you ask us to remove you or we no longer need them for launch updates.
• On-device data: until you delete it, sign out or uninstall the app, subject to the PDF cache rules in section 4.

You can delete your account in the app from Settings, then Delete account. For your protection you will be asked to confirm your password. Deletion then:

• permanently deletes your per-account synced library database;
• deletes your account record (email, password hash, name and profile), your sign-in sessions and any pending verification or password reset links, which signs you out everywhere;
• detaches your usage logs from your identity.

Deleting your account does not cancel a subscription bought through Apple or Google. Cancel it in your App Store or Google Play subscription settings to stop future charges. Data stored only on your device is removed when you uninstall the app. If you cannot access the app, email info@pubmind.app from the address on your account and we will help.

Depending on where you live, you may have the right to:

• access the personal data we hold about you and get a copy;
• correct inaccurate data;
• delete your data;
• restrict or object to certain processing, including processing based on legitimate interests;
• receive your data in a portable format;
• withdraw consent at any time, without affecting earlier processing;
• know what categories of personal data we collect and disclose, and not be discriminated against for exercising your rights (California and other US states);
• complain to a data protection authority, such as the UK Information Commissioner's Office or the authority in your EU country.

You can update most information and delete your account directly in the app. For anything else, contact us at info@pubmind.app. We may need to verify your identity, and we will respond within the time required by law (usually one month, or 45 days under the CCPA).

We protect your data with encryption in transit (HTTPS), hashed passwords, short-lived access tokens, per-account database credentials, rate limiting and restricted staff access protected by single sign-on. No system is perfectly secure, so please use a strong, unique password and tell us at info@pubmind.app if you suspect a problem.

PubMind is not intended for anyone under 16, and we do not knowingly collect personal data from children under 16. If you believe a child has given us personal data, contact us and we will delete it.

We may update this policy as PubMind changes. We will change the "Last updated" date above and, for material changes, tell you in the app or by email before they take effect.

Questions or requests about privacy: info@pubmind.app.

See also our Terms of Service.