Privacy policy

open·intuition is a platform where people publish explanatory artifacts (videos and interactive explainer sites) about scientific papers. This policy covers the website at openintuition.org, its API, and the open-intuition browser extension.

• Account data: your Google account identifier, verified email address, profile information supplied during sign-in, and your Open Intuition handle. Google sign-in requests your basic identity, email and profile; it does not request access to your Gmail messages or Google Drive files.
• Membership: your account access and approval status. With open access enabled, a verified Google sign-in admits you without founder approval. In closed mode, signing in requests membership, and the administrator can review and approve it; approval-email delivery status is recorded.
• Your work: drafts, uploaded files, immutable artifact revisions, votes, comments and remix notes. Comments include notes you or your connected agent record on a revision (your feedback, decisions and preferences while creating it), and feedback you give on an explanation’s page or in the extension. Feedback is private to you and the explanation’s creator unless you choose to post it publicly; notes on your own work are private to you unless you make them public. Saved and recently visited papers are associated with your account so you and your connected agent can resume work.
• Reports and filed papers: when you report a paper or explanation, we store your account, the reason and your note so the administrator can review it; other members don’t see who reported. When your agent files a PDF that no registry lists, the paper record notes your account as the one that filed it, which the administrator sees when reviewing reports.
• Video playback activity: while signed-in members watch a video on the website or in a kept-open extension preview, we record each visit’s playback log, even with Feedback closed: play, pause, seek, speed changes, buffering stalls and whether the tab was in the foreground, each with the time, time zone and video position. Turn off “Share playback patterns” in the player’s reaction-settings menu to stop future recording on that surface in that browser; the website and extension have separate settings. Muted hover previews and signed-out visits are excluded. Visit logs and optional “I’m confused” / “This clicked” markers are linked to your account and the exact revision, kept for a rolling 30 days, and deleted in periodic batches after expiry. The creator and their agent receive only aggregate counts in ten-second sections (watched, replayed and sped-up time, rewinds, pauses, speed changes); viewer-facing counts and timelines are currently hidden. Individual visit logs are never shared with creators or other viewers. We do not send this data to AI labs through this feature.
• Feedback activity: while the Feedback box is open, we also record play, pause, seek, speed, dictated text and typing changes with the time, time zone and video position alongside submitted feedback. This detailed log is shared only with the creator and their connected agent, never publicly. Closing the box stops this detailed log; the separate playback-sharing switch controls the always-on playback log.
• Dictation uses your browser’s speech recognition. When you press Dictate, your browser turns speech into text; Chrome sends the audio to Google’s speech service for this, and Safari may do it on your device. Open Intuition receives only the resulting text and never receives or stores audio.
• X account (optional): if you link your X account on your account page, we keep your X user ID and username, nothing else from X, so a request you make by tagging or messaging @open_intuition can start your agent and credit you. You can unlink it at any time.
• Mentions on X: when anyone tags @open_intuition on X, we read that post and the posts it replies to or quotes to find the paper, keep a record of the request (the post, its author and the paper), and reply publicly on X with the explanation video.
• Direct messages to @open_intuition: we act only on DMs from members who linked their X account. From those we keep the first post the DM shares and any paper links in it, never the message text, and post the explanation video publicly from @open_intuition once it is made. From anyone else we keep only the sender’s X ID and username, to show that a DM arrived.
• Authentication: session cookies and the credential and grant records needed to sign you in and authorize connected agents. We do not ask you to create or paste an Open Intuition API key.
• Operational data: request information needed for security, rate limits and diagnosing failures. Sign-in records may include your IP address and browser information. Video visit summaries are described above; we do not set an anonymous view-tracking cookie.
• Activity: for each day you use the website or a connected agent, we record that your account was active that day (the first and last time, and whether it was through the website or an agent) so the administrator can see how many members use Open Intuition and who was recently active. This is one record per account per day, not a log of pages, and it is deleted after about 13 months.
• Aggregate page views: the website counts visits with Cloudflare Web Analytics, which sets no cookies, does not identify you and does not track you across sites. It reports totals such as page views, referring sites, countries and devices.

• Sign-in tokens are stored locally. When you connect your account, OAuth tokens are kept in your browser’s extension storage on your device. The extension never sees your password; account sign-in and connection consent happen in your browser.
• Paper lookups are explicit. While the extension’s side panel is open on a recognized scholarly page, or when you ask it to look up another page, the extension sends that page’s URL (and the page’s own title, author, date and abstract tags) to openintuition.org to look up the paper’s gallery. On other pages it sends nothing until you ask.
• Auto-tracking is whitelisted, toggleable, and minimal. If you leave “Remember papers I read” on, the extension sends the URLs of pages you visit only on a fixed whitelist of scholarly article pages (preprint servers such as arXiv, bioRxiv, SSRN and NBER; machine learning venues such as OpenReview, ICML, NeurIPS, ICLR, CVPR, PMLR and the ACL Anthology; PubMed and PubMed Central; and journal publishers such as Nature, Science, PNAS, Cell, PLOS, eLife, Elsevier, Springer, Wiley, Oxford, Cambridge, ACM and IEEE; and Substack posts; the full list is in the extension), together with that page's own title, author, date and abstract tags so papers the server can't read itself are still identified, to power “the paper I was just reading” in your AI agent. Nothing outside that whitelist is ever sent. Repeat visits are deduplicated for six hours. You can turn this off on your account page at any time; while it is off, nothing is recorded, and the extension sends at most one whitelisted URL an hour to learn the setting, which the server discards.
• Sharing on X happens only when you click. When you click Share on X on an explanation, the extension opens X’s post page in a new tab with the post text and link. In that tab only, it downloads the explanation’s video from Open Intuition and adds it to the post, which is why it asks for access to x.com. It never presses Post, reads nothing else on X, and sends nothing about your X account to Open Intuition.
• Paper context stays limited. The extension sends paper URLs, not the full contents of pages, to Open Intuition. It does not inject ads. Its interface may load fonts from Google Fonts.

• We do not sell or rent your data to anyone.
• We do not show ads or share data with advertisers or data brokers.
• We do not use your data for purposes unrelated to operating the platform.

The application runs on Cloudflare Workers, with account and application data in D1, OAuth protocol state in KV, files in R2, and transactional notices sent through Cloudflare Email Sending. Google provides sign-in and the website loads fonts from Google Fonts. Your chosen agent and video tools have their own data policies; they receive the information you provide or authorize them to access. When you ask us to import a finished video, our server retrieves that file from its delivery provider and stores a copy in Open Intuition storage.

When open access is enabled, anyone can browse the homepage, Explore, papers and public profiles. Google sign-in lets anyone participate without approval. When open access is disabled, these pages require Google sign-in and founder approval. A published explanation’s live revision is always viewable by anyone with its link. Voting, publishing, bookmarking and requesting explanations require sign-in. Comments are for members; earlier revisions and private feedback remain private. Published work and every file bundled into its live revision are shared under CC-BY, with downloading and remixing enabled. Drafts and saved papers are not gallery entries. Reviewing a draft requires membership and an unexpired review link, or ownership. Playback and downloads use temporary signed file links; anyone holding one can use it until it expires. Share review and file links only with people you want to see the work. Neither link grants permission to publish.

You can disconnect the extension, revoke connected agents in account settings, and turn off extension auto-tracking. To request account or content deletion, or ask a privacy question, email hello@openintuition.org. Published work may already have been downloaded or remixed by others; removing it from this service does not remove those independent copies.

If this policy changes materially, we will update this page and note the new effective date above.