Privacy Policy
Last updated: October 13, 2026
1. Information We Collect
When you create an account, we collect your email address and optional profile information (name, institution). When you use our verification service, we process and store the citation text you submit, parsed citation metadata, and verification results so that you can access job history and exports. Citation records currently remain associated with your account until you delete the relevant job or your account.
Homepage demo (no account)
If you try the demo on our homepage without an account, we parse the references you paste and look them up in the scholarly databases listed in section 4. We do not store the text you paste. We store the parsed reference details (for example title, authors, year and identifier) and the lookup results in our database. They can be retrieved for 24 hours with an access token issued for that check. An automatic cleanup job then deletes them from the live service, at the latest after about 30 hours. Encrypted database backups that contain them are kept for up to 30 days. To prevent abuse, we use your IP address as a rate-limit key, which is held for one hour. Our web server's access logs record IP addresses and requested pages.
2. How We Use Your Information
We use your information to provide and improve Hallucite services, process payments via Stripe, and send transactional emails (verification results, password resets). We do not sell your data to third parties.
3. Data Storage & Security
Passwords are hashed with Argon2. Browser authentication tokens are issued in HttpOnly cookies, and production traffic is protected with TLS. Citation records are stored in the service database; Hallucite does not currently apply separate application-level encryption to individual citation fields.
4. Third-Party Services
We use Stripe for payment processing, Sentry for error monitoring, and academic databases (CrossRef, PubMed, Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Google Books, DBLP, CiNii, Open Library) for citation verification; queries may be sent to any of them. Each service has its own privacy policy.
5. Your Rights
You can export verification results, delete individual jobs, or delete your account through the service. Account deletion removes the associated records from the live service. Residual copies may remain in restricted backups until those backups are rotated.
Essential cookies
We use cookies for authentication and language preferences. A separate cookie remembers your notice acknowledgment for up to one year, so the notice stays dismissed on later visits. This acknowledgment does not enable analytics or advertising. You can remove the acknowledgment through your browser’s cookie settings.
6. Contact
Schötz It & Informatik UG (haftungsbeschränkt)
Kirchaitnacherstr. 5, 94234 Viechtach, Germany
For privacy concerns, contact us at info@schoetz-it.de.