Privacy

Your questions are yours.

We built OpenNeedle for people who are already being watched too closely. The point is not to add another eye on you. This page says plainly what we handle and what we never do.

What we never do

No accounts, no tracking profiles. There is no signup, no log-in, and no persistent profile tied to you.
No selling of data. Your question text is not a product. We don't sell, rent, or license it to anyone.
No advertising trackers, with one exception. We run X's pixel to count how many first-time visitors ask their first question, so ad spend follows what actually works. It sees that a question was asked, not the question text, and we never receive or sell what it collects.

What we do hold

When you ask a question, we process it to search the scientific literature and write your answer. To keep the site fast and to power the public, shareable answer pages, we store the question text, the answer, and the list of sources used. If a question looks like it could identify you or anyone else, we mark that answer private and it is never indexed or publicly visible.

If you attach files or paste a link, the extracted text is held in temporary memory just long enough to write your answer, then discarded. Questions with attachments or links are always kept private and never shown publicly. We never store the files themselves.

We keep routine server logs (timestamp, IP address) for security and rate limiting. These are short-lived and are not combined with your question text for any profiling.

When we share

We share only what is needed to provide the service: the question is sent to our AI provider (OpenRouter) and to the scientific search service (BGPT) to find and weigh the evidence. Those providers do not receive your identity, because we have no identity to give them.

Your rights

Contact us at [email protected] to ask what we hold about your questions or to request removal. Because we don't build profiles, in most cases the answer is: nothing that identifies you.