Privacy policy

What we collect

• Account details — your name and email address, and a hashed password if you sign up with email. If you sign in with Google or ORCID we receive your name, email address (Google) or ORCID iD and profile name from that service; we never see your password there.
• What you submit to a tool — the text and files you paste or upload (papers, theses, drafts, references, LaTeX projects, images) and the results we produce from them.
• Usage records — which tools you ran, token use, and the pages you opened while signed in or using a guest session (page address, title, referring page, IP address and browser user agent).
• Payments — your plan and payment status. Card and PayPal details are entered on and kept by Stripe or PayPal; we do not receive or store card numbers.
• Messages — what you send us through the contact form, the chatbot or email.

How we use it

• To run the tools you ask for and show you your history and results.
• To keep your account working: sign-in, one-time codes, plan and token balance, billing receipts.
• To keep the service safe: rate limits, abuse and fraud prevention, security logs.
• To fix problems and improve the tools, using aggregated usage figures.
• To email you about your account. Product emails are only sent when they are switched on, and each one can be unsubscribed from.

We do not sell your personal data and we do not use it for third-party advertising. The site runs no third-party analytics or advertising trackers.

The plagiarism comparison vault

PlagLab, our plagiarism checker, keeps the papers it checks in a comparison vault — sentence fingerprints with short snippets — so that later checks can find text that was submitted before, even when its web source has disappeared. Your own earlier checks are excluded when you re-check a revised draft, so revising your work never counts as self-plagiarism.

Deleting a check from your history removes it from your history and case list. To also remove a paper from the comparison vault, email researchguruai@gmail.com and we will erase it.

Who processes your data

We use these service providers to run the site. Each receives only what it needs for its job:

• Google Cloud (Belgium, EU) — hosting of the web application.
• Cloudflare R2 (EU jurisdiction) — storage of uploaded files and the documents our tools export.
• Managed database and cache providers — account records, history and job data.
• AI model providers: Google (Gemini), Groq and Cerebras — the text a writing tool needs (for example the paragraph being rewritten or summarised) is sent to one of these models to produce the result.
• Open scholarly databases: OpenAlex, Crossref, Semantic Scholar, CORE, arXiv, Unpaywall, Europe PMC, DOAJ and similar — search queries built from your text or references, to find sources, verify citations and suggest journals.
• Stripe and PayPal — payments.
• Resend — sending account emails such as one-time sign-in codes.
• Google and ORCID — only if you choose to sign in with them.
• Google Fonts — the fonts on our pages load from Google's servers, which see your IP address.

Some of these providers process data outside the European Union, including in the United States, under their own data-protection terms.

Cookies and local storage

• rg_session — keeps you signed in.
• rg_uid — identifies a guest session so your free tokens and history work without an account.
• rg_ref — remembers an invite link you arrived through.
• rg_oauth_state — a short-lived security check during Google or ORCID sign-in.
• Your light/dark theme choice is kept in your browser's local storage.

These are all needed for the site to work. We set no advertising or cross-site tracking cookies.

How long we keep it

• Page-view records: 120 days.
• Account details, history and uploaded documents: while your account exists, unless you delete them sooner.
• Comparison-vault entries: until you ask us to erase them.
• Payment records: as long as tax and accounting law requires.
• Guest sessions that are later turned into an account are merged into that account.

Your choices and rights

You can delete individual checks and clear your history from your account. You can also ask us to give you a copy of your data, correct it, delete your account and everything linked to it, remove your papers from the comparison vault, or stop processing for a purpose you object to — email researchguruai@gmail.com from the address on your account. We answer within 30 days. If you are in the EU or UK you can also complain to your data-protection authority.

Security

Connections are encrypted (HTTPS). Passwords are stored hashed, session tokens are stored hashed, and access to production data is limited to the people who operate the service. No system is perfectly secure; if a breach affects your data we will tell you without undue delay.

Children

ResearchGuru.AI is meant for students, researchers and professionals. It is not directed at children under 16, and we do not knowingly collect their data.

Changes to this policy

When this policy changes we update the date at the top of this page. If a change materially affects how we use your data, we will tell signed-in users before it takes effect.

See also our terms of service.