Most scholarly platforms watch what you read and sell the trail. CiteStamp’s entire product is public records about papers — private records about you are a liability we refuse to hold. This page lists everything we touch. It is short because there is not much.
No tracking pixels. No fingerprinting. No ad tech.
Which is why there is no cookie banner to click away.
No reading list or interest profile, on the site or in the extension. We never learn what you read, only what you explicitly ask the graph about.
Open your browser’s network tab and count the trackers: the only third-party request a page load makes is to Google Fonts for typeface files. Google sees that request’s standard metadata (IP address, user agent); no analytics flow back to us from it. Using the health check or the picker additionally makes client-direct lookups to the open scholarly registries — listed below, under their own policies.
| item | what it is |
|---|---|
| cs_theme | localStorage — your dark/light choice |
| citestamp_token | localStorage — only if you paste an API key on the main page; never set otherwise |
| cs_staged:<name> | localStorage — claims you stage in the writing picker, keyed by manuscript name. These never reach our servers; export is a file download. |
| cs_claim | cookie — set only after you sign in with ORCID to claim a paper; HttpOnly, expires in 24 hours |
The CiteStamp extension reads the page you are on locally to find a paper identifier (a DOI). When it finds one, it sends only that identifier to api.citestamp.com to fetch the paper’s public citation record. That is the entire data flow. It collects no browsing history, runs no analytics, loads no remote code, and sells nothing — there is nothing to sell. Anything you stage through it stays in your browser, same as the table above.
You will only ever get one kind of email from us: a reply to mail you sent. There is no list to join and nothing to unsubscribe from — no newsletters you did not ask for, no “we miss you.”
We run an append-only log for a living — we are not going to quietly rewrite a privacy policy. When a change matters it appears here, and the change is dated.
Questions, deletion requests, anything: info@citestamp.com. A human reads it.