Privacy Policy

Last updated: 27 October 2026

This policy explains what IsolatedStudy stores, why, and what you can do about it. We collect only what the service needs and never sell your data.

1. What we store

• Account: your name, email address and a protected (hashed) password – never the password itself. Your role (student, instructor, administrator) and classes you join.
• Documents and reports: the text of documents you check, the uploaded file (so the PDF report can show your original pages), and the report.
• Stored papers: only if you (or your institution) choose “Standard repository” – the text and fingerprints are kept so that later documents can be compared with it.
• Technical data: your IP address with each check (for the daily limit and to prevent misuse), and download times of report PDFs (shown on the public verification page).
• Support messages you send us.

2. Cookies

We use one essential cookie to keep you logged in. There are no advertising or tracking cookies.

3. Services that receive data

• Search engines and research databases (for example web search providers, OpenAlex, Crossref, arXiv, PubMed, CORE) receive short sentences from your document to find matching sources – never the whole document or your name.
• Reference check: the references of your document are looked up in Crossref, OpenAlex and Google Books.
• AI-writing detection and grammar check (only when used and set up by the administrator) send the document text to the configured provider.
• Hosting: data is stored on the operator's own computer or storage disk and/or in a MongoDB Atlas database, as chosen by the administrator; the site is reached through Cloudflare.

4. Who can see your reports

You, your instructor (for work submitted to their class) and the site administrator. Other users never see your document; if their paper matches a stored paper of yours, they see only the matching passage and an anonymous label (e.g. “University name on date”). The public verification page shows a report's title, date, word count and score – never its text – to anyone who has its Submission ID.

5. How long we keep data

• Reports and stored papers: until you, your instructor or the administrator delete them.
• Downloaded web pages that never matched anything: deleted automatically after a few days.
• Saved search results: up to 30 days. Data of checks in progress: up to 2 days.

6. Your rights

You can see your reports on your dashboard and delete any of them (this also deletes a stored paper). You can ask us for a copy of your data, to correct it, or to delete your account and all your data, through the Support page or isolatedinfo@isolatedstudy.com (topic “Privacy / delete my data”).

7. Security

Passwords are hashed, reports are only available to logged-in owners, and access is limited to what each role needs.

8. Changes

We will show a notice on the site when this policy changes in an important way.