Last updated 18 August 2026.
Your Data is Yours: porcupineResearch is a project committed to providing the best tool for managing your research, literature reviews, and thesis writing. Our philosophy is that what you put into porcupineResearch is yours, and one of our founding principles is to make sure you remain in control of your data and can share it how you like — or choose not to share it at all.
No financial interest in your data: we do not sell it, and there is no mechanism by which we could — porcupineResearch is free, has no billing code in it, and runs on infrastructure you control rather than ours. See the pricing page for what that means and what it costs you instead.
“Collect” below means stored in the database your instance runs against. On the hosted service at porcupineresearch.me that is a managed Supabase database administered by Dhrubojyoti Saha; on a copy you run yourself it is a database you administer, and none of it reaches us at all. In neither case is there telemetry, analytics or error reporting — the app contains no code that would report your usage anywhere.
There is no file upload. The reader works on abstracts, so no PDFs or other attachments are stored anywhere in the app today.
Four tiers, and the distinction that matters is not encrypted-or-not but who can read it. Since you run the server, the answer for the middle tier is your own database administrator. The security page has the full table and the threat model behind it.
When using third-party platforms, we request the most restrictive permissions available that still allow porcupineResearch to perform its advertised functions.
Restrictive Permissions: To provide seamless collaboration and identity verification, porcupineResearch integrates with Google Workspace and Google Authentication. When you connect your Google account, you grant porcupineResearch the following scopes: https://www.googleapis.com/auth/drive.file, email, and profile. The drive.file scope is a highly restrictive permission that only allows porcupineResearch to see, edit, create, and delete Google Docs and Sheets that the app specifically created or that you explicitly selected via the Google Picker. The email and profile scopes are used exclusively to securely identify you and create your account.
Limited Use Policy: porcupineResearch cannot read your previous browsing history, nor can it access other files in your Google Drive. We push formatted claims, citations, and generated bibliographies into your documents to streamline your writing process. porcupineResearch’s use and transfer of information received from Google APIs to any other app will adhere to the Google API Services User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements.
Vercel and Supabase, on the hosted service. The application runs on Vercel; the PostgreSQL database, and the authentication that issues your sign-in code, are managed by Supabase. Those two are the sub-processors, named here rather than in a list you have to request. Running your own copy, neither is involved — the data sits in the database you started. Everything else your instance talks to is on the data processing page, and it is a short list.
Bibliographic search: using the search screen sends your query to OpenAlex, Crossref, arXiv, Europe PMC and Semantic Scholar. They may log your instance’s IP address and the query under their own policies. No project data, member identity or screening decision is sent. If even the query is sensitive, use import instead and no request is made.
Only what you send us: if you email about a bug, we have your email address and whatever you chose to put in the message. Nothing is reported automatically — the app has no crash reporter and no analytics, so an error you do not tell us about is one nobody hears.
Right to erasure: the app has project deletion and account deletion, and because the database is yours, SQL covers anything the app does not. Nothing expires, nothing is archived on your behalf, and nothing is kept after you delete it. On the hosted service backups are the operator’s to schedule and purge; on your own copy they are yours. Removing a member, or a member deleting their account, flags the project key for rotation — and the rotation itself happens in a browser, when one of that project’s admins next unlocks it. Until then, somebody who kept a copy of the key could still read new messages. The server cannot rotate a key it does not hold.
Policy updates: this page changes when the software does, and the change lands before the feature rather than after. The changelog records what shipped and when.
Contact Us: If you have any questions or concerns regarding porcupineResearch’s privacy policies, please email dhrubojyoti.saha@g.bracu.ac.bd.