Privacy Policy

Last updated: May 3, 2026

PaperCat is a Chrome extension that tracks your research reading activity to generate personalized paper recommendations. This policy explains what data we collect, how we use it, and how you can control or delete it.

What we collect

• Your Google account email address, used to identify your account
• URLs of research paper pages you visit (arXiv and supported journal sites)
• Time spent reading and scroll depth on those pages
• Whether you clicked a PDF link during a session

How we use your data

• To resolve visited URLs to paper metadata (title, authors, abstract) via arXiv, Crossref, and OpenAlex APIs
• To build a short-term and long-term interest profile using paper embeddings
• To generate daily paper recommendations matching your interests
• To send a daily email digest to your registered email address

What we do not do

• We do not sell your data to any third party
• We do not track your browsing outside of supported research paper sites
• We do not store full page content or any personal notes

Third-party services

PaperCat uses the following third-party services to operate:

• Google OAuth — for sign-in
• OpenAI — to generate paper embeddings for recommendation matching
• Resend — to deliver daily email digests
• arXiv, Crossref, OpenAlex — to fetch paper metadata

Data retention and deletion

You can view and remove any tracked paper or interest at any time from your dashboard. You can permanently delete your account and all associated data from the extension popup. Upon deletion, all reading sessions, interest profiles, and recommendations are removed from our servers.

Contact

For any privacy-related questions, contact us at contact@papercat.xyz.