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Discova Privacy Policy
Effective date: April 20, 2026 Last updated: April 20, 2026
Discova ("the app", "we", "us") is a research paper discovery app that suggests new academic papers based on the papers you view and save. This policy explains, in plain language, what data the app handles and what it does with it.
The short version: Discova does not ask you to sign in, does not collect personal information, and does not track you. Your reading history stays on your device. The only information that ever leaves your device is a set of anonymous mathematical vectors (used to find similar papers) and anonymous, aggregated save counts (used to rank popular papers). Neither is tied to you, your device, or any account.
Discova is an independent research app. If you have questions about this policy, you can reach the developer through the contact method listed on the app's App Store page.
Discova has no user accounts, no sign-up, and no login. We never ask for your name, email address, phone number, date of birth, gender, location, photos, contacts, or any other personal information.
All of your activity in the app is stored locally on your device using iOS's standard on-device storage (UserDefaults). Nothing in this list is uploaded anywhere:
- Papers you have viewed (stored as arXiv identifiers so the app can avoid recommending the same paper twice)
- Papers you have saved (the paper's metadata such as title, authors, abstract and summary, kept so you can open it offline)
- Your personal recommendation profile — a set of mathematical vectors and tuning parameters that the app builds on-device to learn which topics you tend to read
- App settings and the currently displayed paper (so the app can resume where you left off) This data never leaves your device. If you delete the app, this data is deleted with it.
To suggest new papers, the app occasionally contacts a server-side function hosted on Google Cloud / Firebase (project region: europe-west3). Only the following is sent:
- Anonymous topic vectors. These are numerical vectors derived on your device from the papers you have interacted with. They represent topic preferences in an abstract mathematical space. They contain no names, no identifiers, no text about you, and cannot be traced back to you or your device.
- A list of recent calendar dates (up to the last 14 days), used only to ask the server how often other users saved papers on those dates, so popular recent papers can be ranked higher. No user ID, device ID, IP-derived identifier, account, or any identifier we control is attached to the request. The request is stateless: after the server returns candidate papers, nothing about the request is retained on our side in a form linked to you.
When you save a paper, the app increments a single counter on our backend (Firestore) of the form "paper X was saved once on date Y". This counter is purely aggregated — it is a number attached to a paper, not to a user — and is used solely to rank papers that are trending among readers.
Because there is no user identifier sent with this increment, it is not possible for us, or anyone else, to link a saved paper back to you or to any specific device.
A curated set of papers, summaries, embeddings and the clustering structure used by the recommendation engine is bundled with the app itself at release time, as static resources. Using this bundled content does not involve any network request and does not transmit any data.
When you open a paper's PDF, the PDF is downloaded directly from arXiv.org. That request is made by the standard iOS networking stack to arXiv and is subject to arXiv's own privacy practices; Discova does not see or log those requests.
Discova does not use, collect, or transmit any of the following:
- Analytics (Firebase Analytics is explicitly disabled in the app configuration)
- Crash reporting SDKs (e.g. Crashlytics, Sentry)
- Advertising or tracking SDKs
- The iOS Advertising Identifier (IDFA) or Identifier for Vendors (IDFV)
- Push notification tokens (the app does not send push notifications to you)
- Location data, contacts, photos, microphone, or camera access
- Cookies or web tracking technologies
- Any form of cross-app or cross-site tracking The app does not perform any App Tracking Transparency prompt because it does not track.
Discova uses Google Firebase solely as infrastructure to host the recommendation endpoint (Firebase Cloud Functions) and the aggregated save counter (Firestore). Google acts as a technical service provider. As described above, the data sent to these services is limited to anonymous topic vectors and anonymous save-count increments, with no user or device identifier attached.
Standard, transient network metadata (such as your IP address) may be visible to Google at the moment of an HTTPS request, as is the case for any internet service. Discova does not log, store, or associate this metadata with any user record, and has no user record to associate it with.
Paper PDFs are fetched directly from arXiv.org. Refer to arXiv's own privacy notice for details on that service.
Discova is not directed at children under 13 and does not knowingly collect personal information from anyone, including children.
Because Discova does not collect personal data, there is no personal data to retain or delete on our side.
All on-device data can be removed at any time by:
- Clearing saves inside the app, or
- Deleting the app from your device (this removes all locally stored data, including your recommendation profile, views, and saves) Aggregated save counts stored on the backend are statistics about papers, not about people, and are retained as long as the app operates.
Network requests between the app and Firebase use HTTPS/TLS. Because no personal data is ever transmitted or stored, the risk to you in the event of a security incident is limited to anonymous aggregate numbers that cannot be traced back to you.
Backend requests are served from Google Cloud's europe-west3 region (Frankfurt, Germany). If you use the app from outside that region, network requests necessarily transit to that region. Since no personal data is sent, no international transfer of personal data takes place for the purposes of the GDPR, CCPA, or similar laws.
Under regulations such as the GDPR and CCPA you have rights to access, correct, delete, and port your personal data, and to object to processing. Because Discova does not collect or hold any personal data about you, we have no personal data to access, correct, port, or delete. You remain in full control of the on-device data described in Section 3, which you can remove at any time by deleting the app.
If this policy ever changes in a way that affects how data is handled, we will update the "Last updated" date at the top and, where appropriate, notify users inside the app or on the App Store listing before the change takes effect.
For any questions about this privacy policy, please use the contact details listed on Discova's App Store page.