Privacy Policy
Last updated: October 2026
Overview
Unkwn42 ("we", "our", or "us") is committed to protecting your privacy. This Privacy Policy explains how we collect, use, and safeguard your information when you use our service.
Information We Collect
We collect the following information:
- Account Information: Email address, name, role (PhD student, postdoc, etc.), and research area when you sign up.
- Research queries and ideas: The topics and research ideas you enter into the search and the terminal. These are stored so we can return results, cache them, and improve the product.
- Feedback: Your answers to feedback questions and surveys, how you rate the papers in your results, and any paper you tell us should have appeared. Survey answers are stored with your role and with how you found us.
- Contact messages: The name, email address, role, organisation (if you give one) and message you send through the contact form, and the page it was sent from. We use these only to read and answer your message. We also keep a one-way hash of your IP address to limit repeat submissions. The address itself is not stored.
- Usage data: counts of page views, and a short log of a few events such as a checkout opened. Neither uses cookies. See Analytics.
If We Write to You About Your Work
We sometimes email researchers about their own paper or preprint, and journal staff about their journal, to share closely related work our search tool found. This is how that works.
- Where your details come from: the name and correspondence address printed on your paper or preprint, or the work address your journal publishes. We do not buy lists or collect addresses any other way.
- What we keep: your name and that address, the paper's title and identifier, the private report page we made for it, when we wrote, any reply, when the report page is opened, and any feedback you leave on it (for example, which papers were new to you). With feedback we keep a one-way hash of your IP address, only to limit repeat clicks.
- Why: our legitimate interest in showing researchers work related to their own, and in learning whether our tool helps. We write to each person individually, at most three times, and never add you to a mailing list or newsletter.
- The report page: private, reachable only through the link we send, not listed in search engines, and taken down after 120 days, or sooner if you ask. To make it, your paper's abstract (not your name or email) is processed by our language-model provider, as described under Data Sharing.
- Saying no: reply "no thanks" or write to hello@unkwn42.com. We take down any report made for you and add your address to a do-not-contact list, which holds only the address, the date and the reason, so that we never write again.
How We Use Your Information
We use your information to:
- Provide and improve our service
- Understand researcher needs and priorities
- Send you updates about your searches and our product
- Analyze aggregate trends in research interests
- Respond to your inquiries and support requests
Data Sharing
We do not sell your personal information. We may share data with:
- Payments: if you buy a paid plan, Paddle.com (our reseller and merchant of record) collects your payment details and billing address directly. We receive your email address, the plan, and the payment status, never your card details.
- Service providers: Supabase (database), Vercel (hosting and page-view counts), Railway (the analysis engine), and Resend (email) who help us operate our service.
- AI processing: When you run an idea through the terminal, the idea text (together with abstracts of candidate papers) is sent to our language-model provider, Alibaba Cloud Model Studio (DashScope), processed in the Singapore region, to compare it against the retrieved papers. We send only the idea and paper text, not your name or email. We do not use your ideas to train third-party models.
- Legal requirements: If required by law or to protect our rights.
Data Security
We implement industry-standard security measures to protect your data, including encryption in transit (HTTPS) and at rest. Your password is hashed and never stored in plain text.
Your Rights
You have the right to:
- Access your personal data
- Request correction of inaccurate data
- Request deletion of your account and data
- Export your data
To exercise these rights, contact us at hello@unkwn42.com
Analytics
We measure how the site is used in two ways. Neither sets a cookie or stores anything on your device, and neither is used for advertising or to follow you to other sites.
- Page views: our host, Vercel, counts page views for us (Vercel Web Analytics). For each view it records the page address, the site you came from, your country and region, and your browser, operating system and device type. It tells visits apart with a code made from your request, which it throws away after 24 hours, so it cannot recognise you on a later day. Before an address is sent, we take out anything private: the code in a private report link, the number of a saved result, and everything after the "?" except the link tag. We see the results only as totals, never per visitor.
- Our own event log: a short record of a few events: a view of the home, about, contact, signup and blog pages and of the pages for each kind of user; a view of the pricing page, with the version of the page you saw; a checkout opened, with the plan; and a view of a private report page we sent. Each record holds the event, the page, the time, the link tag you arrived with if you let us keep it (see Cookies), and your account if you are logged in. It holds no IP address, no hash of one and no browser details. We leave out visits from search engine robots and link scanners that identify themselves.
- What we do with it: with the records we already keep about accounts, runs and feedback, we count how many people sign up, try the product, come back and pay, and which of our links and pages bring them. We report these as totals.
- Why: our legitimate interest in knowing whether the site and our outreach work, measured in a way that stores nothing on your device and identifies nobody who is not logged in.
- How long: we delete event records after 24 months. Vercel keeps its page-view totals under its own terms.
Changes to This Policy
We may update this privacy policy from time to time. We will notify you of significant changes by email or through a notice on our website.
Contact Us
If you have questions about this privacy policy, please contact us at hello@unkwn42.com