1.Who we are

TrackImpact is a citation and impact tracker for working scholars, operated by Patrick McLaughlin. You can reach us at patrick@trackimpact.app. This page explains what we collect about you, what we do with it, and what we don’t do with it.

2.What data we collect

Three categories:

• Account data. Your name, email address, affiliation, and any public scholar identifiers you give us (ORCID, Google Scholar profile URL, personal website). We do not store passwords — sign-in is by magic link sent to your email.
• Activity data. Emails you forward to activities@inbox.trackimpact.app, attachments and links you submit, and the works / citations / media hits / policy impacts our discovery agents find for you.
• Operational data. Server logs (IP address, user-agent, route, response status) kept for 30 days for debugging and abuse investigation. Stripe billing metadata (subscription state, last 4 digits of the card you used to subscribe). We never see your full card number; Stripe handles it.

3.What we do with it

Power the tracker, run the discovery agents on a weekly schedule, send you the email summaries you opt in to, and charge your subscription via Stripe. That’s the whole list.

We do not sell, rent, or share your data with third parties. We don’t run ads on you, we don’t do behavioral profiling for advertisers, and we don’t hand your dataset to data brokers.

4.Who else can see your data

Only you (via the app, when signed in) and us (the maintainers, for debugging when you ask for help, or for abuse investigation). That’s it.

Public sharing pages at /p/<slug> are opt-in. You explicitly turn sharing on from the Share preferences page and you control which works and impacts appear there. Nothing is public by default.

5.Third-party services we use

To make the product work, we send certain narrowly scoped data to other services. None of them get your full profile or contact list. They are:

• Anthropic (Claude) — to draft op-ed pitches and email kits. We send the text the agent needs and nothing identifying.
• OpenAI — to compute text embeddings used for deduping. We send work titles and abstracts, no personal data.
• Postmark and Resend — to deliver transactional email (sign-in links, weekly digests, year-end summaries).
• Stripe — subscription billing.
• Cloudflare — DNS, plus email forwarding from inbox.trackimpact.app into our ingestion pipeline.
• Fly.io — hosting (the FastAPI app and Postgres).
• AWS S3 — mirror of the public-records corpora we scan (federal regulations, OIRA filings, etc). Public documents only.

6.Email

We only send transactional email: sign-in links, weekly digests if you opt in, and year-end summaries when you generate one. No marketing email. No purchased lists. Every recurring digest has a one-click unsubscribe link.

7.Data retention

Your data stays as long as your account is active. A self-serve delete-account button is on the roadmap; until then, email patrick@trackimpact.app and we’ll wipe your account and all associated works, impacts, contacts, and submission history within 30 days. We always honor account-deletion requests.

8.Your rights

• Access. Download a full snapshot of your data via the /export page.
• Correction. Every field on a Work or Impact is editable in-app.
• Deletion. Email patrick@trackimpact.app. We act within 30 days.

9.Cookies and analytics

We use a single cookie-based session to keep you signed in. We do not run third-party analytics. There are no tracking pixels, no fingerprinting, no remarketing tags.

10.Changes to this policy

If we make a material change — a new data category, a new third party that sees your data, a change in retention — we will email account holders 30 days before the change takes effect.

11.Contact

Questions, requests, or concerns: patrick@trackimpact.app. A real human reads every email.