Privacy Policy

Citelink is operated by Hollow Prism LLC (“Citelink,” “we,” “us”). For anything in this policy, contact hello@citelink.news or use /contact.

Account data. If you sign in with Google, we receive your email address, name, profile image, and Google account ID. GitHub sign-in is reserved for internal editors and administrators and returns the same categories from GitHub. We store your email, display name, avatar URL, account role, and account timestamps, plus the OAuth tokens needed to keep the session active.

Verification submissions. The claim, URL, or social post text you submit to the verify tool, the report we generate from it, and the confidence and evidence data behind that report. Submissions made while signed in are linked to your account. If you use one of the free checks without signing in, the submission is instead tagged with a one-way keyed hash of your IP address and the date, used only to count your free checks for that day. The address itself is never stored, and because the date is part of the hash, one day’s tag cannot be matched to another’s.

Saved briefs and preferences. The briefs you save, the topics you follow, and the profile details you choose to set (display name, verification lens, personal mark). These are private to your account and only used to build your member desk.

Newsletter signups. The email address you submit to subscribe. Nothing else you send with that request is stored.

Outbound link clicks. When you click a source or evidence link from an article or report, we record the destination URL with its query string and fragment removed, which article or verification it came from, and a category label. This record is not linked to your account or to any identifier that would let us tie it back to you.

Operational logs. Our logging layer only accepts primitive values (no request bodies, headers, or stack traces) and strips fields like tokens, secrets, and passwords before anything is written, so operational logs carry route names, status codes, and error codes rather than personal data. The verify endpoint is rate-limited per account when you are signed in. Endpoints used without an account, including free checks, fall back to limiting by IP address; where that happens the address is held in server memory only for as long as the limit window lasts and is never written to a database.

When you submit a claim, URL, or post, the text is sent to third-party AI services to produce your report: Google’s Discovery Engine searches our curated evidence corpus, Google’s Gemini generates and extracts the claims and checks them against the sources returned, and the Typesafe Jev classifier determines whether the located sources support or refute the claim. This means the text you submit leaves Citelink’s infrastructure and is processed by these providers as part of generating your report.

Without an account the verify tool allows two free checks per visitor per day. With an account it is capped at 25 verification requests per account per rolling 24-hour period. Site-wide, requests are capped by count and by estimated cost per day, and free checks have a smaller site-wide cap of their own. Requests are also short-window rate-limited. These caps exist to control the cost of the services above and to prevent abuse; they are enforced automatically and a request that exceeds a cap is rejected, not queued.

The Citelink browser extension sends Citelink only what you choose to check: the text you highlight or paste, and the address and title of a page you ask it to verify. Those checks use the same session as the website, or the free-check allowance when you are signed out, and are covered by the “Verification submissions” and rate-limit terms above.

When the side panel is open on an article, the extension sends that article’s address to Citelink to see whether we have published a story on it. If you turn on the optional “Mark articles Citelink covers” setting, it does the same for every page you open, which is why Chrome asks you for permission to read your tabs; turning the setting off removes that permission. These lookups are sent without your session cookie, are not linked to your account, and are not stored in our database.

• Supabase hosts our Postgres database. Every table described above lives there.
• Vercel hosts and serves the application.
• Google Cloud (Discovery Engine) receives verification submission text to search the evidence corpus, as described above.
• Google (Gemini) receives verification submission text to generate and ground your report.
• Typesafe (Jev) receives the located sources and the claim text to classify whether they support or refute it.
• Google (sign-in) provides Google OAuth for account sign-in.
• GitHub provides OAuth sign-in for internal editors and administrators.
• Amazon Associates receives an affiliate tag appended to outbound Amazon product links, which tells Amazon the click came through Citelink’s affiliate account. No account or personal data is sent with that tag.

We do not sell personal data.

Strictly necessary. A session cookie keeps you signed in, for a 30-day session backed by our database, along with the cookies that protect the sign-in form against cross-site request forgery. Citelink does not function without these; they are not optional.

Citelink does not run an automated retention schedule: records are kept until you delete your account or ask us to remove them.

Deleting your account. You can do this yourself at any time from Settings, by typing your account email to confirm. It immediately and permanently removes your profile, your linked sign-in connections, your active sessions, your saved briefs and followed topics. Two things are not deleted: verification requests you submitted, and any articles you authored. Both remain, but are detached from your identity in the same operation, so nothing about them continues to reference your account. This cannot be undone and there is no recovery window.

Newsletter. You can unsubscribe at any time. Each message links to a private per-recipient page; opening it and clicking to confirm removes your address immediately. The confirmation is a separate deliberate step, so a link scanner or email preview cannot unsubscribe you by fetching the link. You can also email hello@citelink.news and we will remove the entry by hand.

Under the GDPR and similar frameworks, you can ask us to access, correct, delete, restrict, or export your personal data, and you can object to processing based on our legitimate interests. We process account data to provide the service (contract necessity), verification and click data to run and improve the product and prevent abuse (legitimate interest), and newsletter email to send the briefing you asked for (consent, given at signup).

Under the CCPA/CPRA (California), you can ask what personal information we hold, request deletion, and request correction. Citelink does not sell personal information, and we do not share personal information for cross-context behavioral advertising.

Deletion, newsletter unsubscribe and data export are self-service: see “Data retention” above, and use Settings → Download your data for a copy of your profile, preferences, saved briefs and verification history. For anything else on this list, including correction and objection, email hello@citelink.news. Those are handled by hand and we will confirm with you once complete.

Supabase, Vercel, and Google operate infrastructure in the United States and may process or store data there and in other countries where they run infrastructure. By using Citelink you understand your data may be processed outside your own country.

Citelink is not directed at children and we do not knowingly collect personal data from anyone under 13. If you believe a child has provided us data, contact hello@citelink.news and we will remove it.

We update this page when our data practices change and update the date at the top when we do. Continued use of Citelink after a change means you accept the revised policy.