What happens to what you type

Vitark keeps your boards in its database, where only your account can open them — not other people using Vitark, and not its admins, who can see that an account exists and how much it has used, but none of what it holds. There is no advertising, and nothing you write is sold or shared for any purpose but the one below.

The one exception is a share link you make yourself. Anyone with a link you create can read that board — every card, its notes and its summary, and download it as a memo — without an account, until you turn the link off from the board’s Share menu.

What your account holds

You sign in with Google, which tells Vitark your name, email address and profile picture; no password is stored. Alongside those, Vitark keeps when you joined and were last seen, your role and whether your account is approved, a count of the model calls you make each day and of the searches you run each month — the counts, not their content — and a record of changes an admin makes to your account. If you pay for Pro, it also keeps your plan and when the period you paid for ends, Polar’s id for you, and a list of the billing events Polar sent about it — their type and when they came, not amounts or card details, which only Polar holds.

Who else sees it

Thinking about a goal means asking a model and searching, and Vitark is hosted and stored by others, so these services receive part of what you give it:

• Anthropic receives the goal, your notes and answers, and the cards a step needs in order to write the next ones, which include findings from your other boards when you search them, when you press something that asks the model, while an admin has chosen one of its models; the choice can change at any time.
• Google (Gemini) receives the goal, your notes and answers, and the cards a step needs in order to write the next ones, which include findings from your other boards when you search them, when you press something that asks the model, while an admin has chosen one of its models; the choice can change at any time.
• OpenAI receives the goal, your notes and answers, and the cards a step needs in order to write the next ones, which include findings from your other boards when you search them; for deep research, the question and the notes around it, when you press something that asks the model, while an admin has chosen one of its models; the choice can change at any time; and when you choose Deep research on Pro, while an admin has chosen one of its models for it.
• Exa receives the search queries written for a question; for deep research, the question and the notes around it, when you investigate a question, which searches the places that fit it by default, and when you choose the web, News or What people say from the Investigate menu; answering from memory sends it nothing; and when you choose Deep research on Pro, while an admin has chosen Exa for it.
• Reddit receives the search queries written for a question, when you investigate a question, which searches the places that fit it by default, and when you choose What people say from the Investigate menu; answering from memory sends it nothing.
• Algolia (Hacker News search) receives the search queries written for a question, when you investigate a question, which searches the places that fit it by default, and when you choose What people say from the Investigate menu; answering from memory sends it nothing.
• OpenAlex receives the search queries written for a question, and the title of a work a model named from memory, when you investigate a question, which searches the places that fit it by default, and when you choose Research papers from the Investigate menu; answering from memory sends it nothing; and when a board's citations are checked, to see whether a remembered work exists.
• Crossref receives the title of a work a model named from memory, when a board's citations are checked on Pro, after a search or when you ask, and OpenAlex has no work by that title.
• The DOI Foundation (doi.org) receives each DOI found in a report you give the citation checker, and nothing else from it, when you run a check at /check.
• Cloudflare (Turnstile) receives your IP address and signals from your browser, so it can tell a person from a program; never what you paste, when you open the citation checker at /check and when you run a check.
• U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (EDGAR) receives the search queries written for a question, when you investigate a question, which searches the places that fit it by default, and when you choose Company filings from the Investigate menu; answering from memory sends it nothing.
• Google (Data Commons) receives the search queries written for a question, when you investigate a question, which searches the places that fit it by default, and when you choose Facts & figures from the Investigate menu; answering from memory sends it nothing.
• Polar receives your name, email address and an id for your account when you start a checkout, and the card details you type into its page, which never reach Vitark; nothing from your boards, when you upgrade to Pro, buy more searches or manage billing, and while you pay for Pro: Polar is the seller, so it charges the card, handles tax and sends the receipts.
• Vercel receives every request to Vitark, which it hosts, and an anonymous count of page views for its Analytics, whenever you use the site.
• Neon receives your account and your boards, which it stores as Vitark's database, with the text of your documents, always: it is where they are kept.
• Vercel Blob receives the files you upload as documents, which it keeps privately: only Vitark's server can open them, and only for you, when you add a document to a board on Pro; a file is deleted with its document, its board or your account.

Nothing is sent until you press something that runs — typing into a box sends nothing. Each service handles what it receives under its own privacy policy.

The citation checker

The citation checker at /check needs no account. What you paste into it, or the report its link opens, is checked and answered and never kept: Vitark keeps only a count of how many checks the whole site ran each day. To check it, Vitark’s servers open each link the report cites, so those sites see a request from Vitark, not from you, and doi.org is asked about each DOI.

Removing it

A card, a wire or a board you delete is deleted from the database. Deleting your account, from the account page, deletes every board you own along with it, straight away; the same page gives you a copy of everything first. What remains is one line in the admin record saying that your address deleted its account. What was already sent to a service to answer a question is held under that service’s terms, not Vitark’s.