Privacy Policy

Scholarized is a social product for discovering and discussing public patent publications. This policy explains what we collect, how we use it, and the choices you have.

Who may use Scholarized

Scholarized is not directed to children under 13. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 13. If you believe a child under 13 has created an account or provided personal information, contact privacy@scholarized.com and we will take steps to delete it. Users ages 13–17 may use Scholarized with parent or guardian permission; we store only limited age signals (birth year and/or an under-18 flag) for eligibility and ad settings—not a full birthdate.

Information we collect

• Account data you provide (email via our auth provider, handle, display name, bio, optional phone).
• Preferences such as favorite patent categories and onboarding answers.
• Engagement and product activity (saves, votes, comments, follows, feed impressions, dwell time, and similar signals about what you view or interact with).
• Approximate usage signals such as when you are active on the service (for example session or last-active timing), device/app technical logs, and diagnostics needed to operate the product.
• Advertising identifiers and ad interaction data on mobile via Google Mobile Ads (AdMob), subject to your device settings and any consent choices required in your region.
• Content you create or flag for safety (comments, articles, reports, and block lists used to hide other users' content for you).

How we use information

• To authenticate you and operate profiles, feeds, saves, comments, and creator tools.
• To personalize recommendations and ranking (Home, Global, and related surfaces).
• To measure product quality, prevent abuse, review reports, and improve Scholarized.
• To show advertising (including personalized or non-personalized ads depending on consent and platform rules) and, when separately enabled, paid options such as an ad-free subscription.

Advertising & consent (mobile)

The Android app uses Google Mobile Ads. In the European Economic Area, UK, and other regions where required, we present a consent form (Google's User Messaging Platform) before personalized ads. You can also reset advertising identifiers in your device settings. Ad requests may be served as non-personalized when consent is not granted.

Sharing & commercial use

Public profile fields (handle, display name, bio, links) and public comments/articles are visible to other users. We use service providers (hosting, database, auth, analytics, advertising including Google AdMob, and payment processors when enabled) to run Scholarized.

Like other social apps, we may use information about your interests, activity, and engagement—alone or combined with other data—to personalize content and advertising, and we may share or sell certain information with advertising, measurement, or business partners where permitted by law. Where a law gives you an opt-out (for example “Do Not Sell or Share” rights in some U.S. states), we will provide a way to exercise it. Contact privacy@scholarized.com for privacy requests.

Retention & deletion

You can delete your account in the app (Settings → Delete account) or on the website via Delete account (also linked from Profile). Deletion anonymizes your public profile, removes personal engagement data where required, soft-deletes comments as "Deleted user," and revokes sign-in. We may retain limited operational logs for security and abuse prevention.

Contact

Questions about privacy: privacy@scholarized.com