1. Who we are and scope

SciLink is a startup team based in Los Angeles, California, United States. We are developing tools that help students and researchers find professors, labs, papers, and research opportunities that match their interests.

Our website and services are intended only for people in the United States who are at least 16 years old. This policy applies to services that link to it; it does not govern third-party websites or services that have their own policies.

2. Information we collect

Depending on the features you use, we may collect:

Contact and account information: your name, email address, account profile, login or authentication information, and communication preferences.
Education and research information: your school or university, role, degree or program level, expected graduation year, field of study, academic or research interests, skills, experience, goals, availability to start research, and other education-related profile details you choose to provide.
Content and product activity: searches, prompts, saved professors, labs, papers, or opportunities, matching preferences, feedback, optional survey responses, and other content you submit to the service. If you search without signing in, we keep the text of that search and the school you picked, stored with a scrambled network code rather than your IP address and with no account attached, to learn what people look for and improve results.
Product analytics: the pages you view, the searches you run (including their text and how many results they returned), the buttons you click, when you start checkout, your browser and device type, approximate location derived from your IP address (city and country), page load performance, and recordings of how you move through pages. Recordings show the page as you saw it, which can include your saved items, but not what you type: every text box is masked, so a recording shows that you typed, never the words. Your profile form, the emails you draft to professors, the help form, and the contact email addresses you have saved are left out of recordings entirely. Recordings also include technical messages the page logs, such as errors. We collect this through PostHog using a randomly generated identifier stored in your browser. If you later sign in or create an account in the same browser, we link the activity from that browser to your account so we can see how people find and use SciLink.
Billing information: if you buy a subscription, your name, email address, and billing address or postal code if Stripe asks for it, and the cadence, status, and renewal date of your subscription. Your card number is entered on Stripe’s checkout page and is handled and stored by Stripe; we never see or store it. We store the Stripe customer id, subscription id, and subscription status so that we know what your account has paid for.
Communications: messages, questions, support requests, and other information you send to us by email or through the service.
Signup and referral information: when you joined, your account status, campaign source and name, and where on our site you signed up, when those values are available. If you joined our waitlist, we also hold the email address, role, school, and survey answers you gave it, and the version of the signup notice you saw, until we delete them.
Technical information: IP address, browser and device type, operating system, request time, pages or features used, referring page, error information, and similar server or usage data. To enforce rate limits we use a salted, one-way fingerprint of your network address rather than the raw address, and keep it only for the length of the limit it counts against.
Public research information: professional and academic information about researchers, faculty, publications, labs, and institutions from public university pages, scholarly publications, and public research databases. We may combine this information with your profile and interests to generate matches.

When we ask. Creating an account with an email address asks for your school and department, because matching cannot work without them and they cannot be derived from an email address. After you first sign in, a short welcome screen asks for your level, expected graduation year, department, school, research interests, and when you could start. Every question on that screen is optional — you can skip it, and skipping is not held against your account. Whatever you give there, and anything you skip, can be changed or cleared at any time on your profile page.

Please do not submit health, financial, government-identification, confidential research, or other sensitive personal information unless a feature specifically requests it and explains why it is needed.

3. How we use information

We use personal information to:

create and manage accounts and provide the service;
take payment for a subscription, unlock what it includes, renew it, cancel it, and issue refunds;
match users with professors, labs, papers, and opportunities based on their education, research interests, preferences, and activity;
personalize searches, recommendations, saved items, and AI-assisted tools;
send account, service, and product-update emails;
if you turn on the weekly research digest, email you research openings that match your interests, such as labs taking students, newly funded labs and new matches. It is off unless you choose it, and every email has a one-click unsubscribe link;
respond to questions, support requests, and privacy requests;
understand how people find and move through the service, including which searches lead to useful results and where people stop, and follow the activity from one browser before and after it signs in;
measure use, troubleshoot the service, develop or improve features, and create aggregated or de-identified information that does not identify you;
protect users and the service, enforce usage limits, and prevent abuse; and
comply with law, protect rights and safety, and enforce our terms.

4. AI-assisted matching and features

Our matching and AI-assisted features may analyze the education, research, preference, search, and prompt information you provide together with public research information. This processing is used to generate recommendations, summaries, rankings, or other requested results.

Information needed to answer a request, such as your search and research interests, is sent to AI service providers that process it on our behalf. We do not use your content to train our own AI models without your consent. Do not submit confidential or sensitive information to an AI feature. AI outputs may be incomplete or inaccurate and should be independently reviewed. We do not use matching to make decisions that produce legal or similarly significant effects about users.

5. How we disclose information

We may disclose information to:

Service providers: Vercel for website hosting, server infrastructure, and privacy-preserving website analytics, PostHog for product analytics and session recordings, Supabase for database infrastructure and account services, Stripe for payment processing (Stripe receives your name, email address, billing address or postal code, and card details to take payment, renew and cancel subscriptions, and issue refunds, and handles them under its own privacy policy), Resend for email delivery (Resend receives your email address and the emails we send you), Google for email and communications, AI model providers for matching and AI-assisted features, and other providers that help us secure, support, and operate the service.
Professional advisers and authorities: when reasonably necessary to obtain advice, protect rights and safety, investigate misuse, comply with legal process, or enforce our terms.
A successor organization: in connection with a merger, financing, acquisition, reorganization, bankruptcy, or sale of assets, subject to applicable law and appropriate confidentiality protections.
Other parties at your direction: when you ask us to share information or otherwise provide consent.

We do not sell personal information. We do not share personal information for cross-context behavioral advertising or use it for targeted advertising.

6. Cookies, analytics, and browser signals

We use cookies and similar browser storage to operate the service: keeping you signed in, counting the free searches available to a signed-out visitor, carrying one-time notices such as a confirmation message, and remembering that you dismissed a message so it does not reappear. We also use one analytics identifier, described below. We do not set advertising cookies, and we do not use cookies to follow you across other websites.

We use Vercel Web Analytics to understand which pages are visited and which steps people complete. It is a privacy-preserving, cookieless service: it stores no cookie or other persistent identifier on your device and does not track you across other websites. Vercel also processes standard server logs as our hosting provider.

We also use PostHog, a product analytics service, to understand how people use SciLink and where they get stuck. PostHog stores a randomly generated identifier in your browser’s cookies and local storage so that visits from the same browser can be counted together, and records the activity described in section 2, including session recordings in which everything you type is masked. When you sign in, that identifier is linked to your account. Analytics requests are sent through our own domain and processed by PostHog on our behalf in the United States; PostHog does not use them for its own purposes or for advertising, and it does not follow you onto other websites.

Your choice. If your browser sends a Do Not Track or Global Privacy Control signal, we do not start PostHog analytics for that browser, and the service works the same without it. You can also clear the identifier by clearing your cookies and site data for scilink.io, or ask us to delete analytics data linked to your account. Because we do not sell or share personal information for targeted advertising, there is no sale or sharing to opt out of.

7. Retention

We retain account, education and research profile, saved preference, survey, and product-activity records while your account remains active and while the information supports the ongoing service. Records from our waitlist are kept until we delete them or you ask us to. Product analytics events and session recordings are kept for as long as our PostHog plan retains them, currently up to one year for events and about a month for recordings. This period may be indefinite unless you request deletion, close your account, or we determine that the information is no longer needed.

After a deletion request or account closure, we delete or de-identify information unless limited retention is reasonably necessary for security, fraud prevention, legal compliance, backup integrity, or dispute resolution. Copies in backups are removed as those backups expire. We periodically review whether retained information continues to serve a legitimate business need.

8. Security

We use reasonable administrative and technical safeguards designed to protect personal information, and our service providers are expected to protect information they process for us. No method of transmission or storage is completely secure, and we cannot guarantee that information will not be accessed, disclosed, altered, or destroyed. You are responsible for keeping your password confidential and for what you choose to submit.

9. United States service and processing

The service is operated from the United States and is currently intended only for people located in the United States. We and our service providers may process information in the United States and in other locations where those providers operate. If you use the service from elsewhere, you do so on your own initiative and understand that your information will be processed in the United States.

10. Your choices and privacy rights

You can unsubscribe from product emails using the link in an email or by contacting us. Depending on applicable state law, you may also have the right to request access to, correction of, deletion of, or a portable copy of your personal information, and to appeal a refusal of a request. A deletion request covers analytics data and session recordings linked to your account as well. We do not discriminate against users for exercising a privacy right.

Send requests to SciLink000@gmail.com. We may need to verify your identity and authority before completing a request. An authorized agent may submit a request where permitted by law, but we may require proof of authorization or direct confirmation from you. We may decline requests that are unfounded, excessive, or that the law does not require us to honor, and we will tell you why.

Researchers whose public professional information appears in the service can ask us to review, correct, or remove it at the same address.

11. Age requirement

The service is not intended for anyone under 16, and people under 16 may not create an account or use the service. We do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 16. If you believe a person under 16 has provided information to us, contact us so we can review and delete it.

12. Changes to this policy

We may update this policy as the product, providers, and our practices change. We will post the revised version here and change the effective date, and changes take effect when posted. If a change materially affects how we use information already collected, we will give additional notice, such as by email, before it applies to that information. Continuing to use the service after a change means the updated policy applies to you.

13. Contact us

SciLink is a startup team based in Los Angeles, California, United States. Questions, requests, or concerns can be sent to SciLink000@gmail.com.