Privacy Notice

Who is responsible for your data

The data controller for CitePatch is CitePatch S.L. (B28263838; Ramón y Cajal 107, 08024 Barcelona, Spain). For any privacy question or request, write to [email protected].

What we collect

We collect the data needed to run the accounts, billing, and product features described in the Terms of Service — not more.

• Account identity: name, business email, and authentication events (magic-link and Google OAuth sign-ins). We never see or store a password.
• Organization membership: which organization and role you belong to, and invitations sent or accepted.
• Billing identity: Stripe manages your card details directly; we hold only what Stripe returns to identify your subscription — plan, billing email, invoice history.
• Product usage and audit logs: the prompts monitored, patches drafted and approved, integrations connected, and the actions taken on your account, kept for accountability and support.
• Support correspondence: anything you send us when you ask for help.
• Content you control: your domain content, brand facts, and the data returned by integrations you connect (GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, WordPress, Webflow, Shopify, Contentful, Wix, Google Drive) or by Google Analytics 4 / Search Console once you authorize the connection. This content is yours; it may incidentally contain personal data belonging to your own employees, customers, or site visitors, and you are responsible for having a lawful basis to have us process it on your behalf.

Why we process it, and on what basis

Each purpose below rests on a specific legal basis under GDPR Article 6.

• Providing the service you signed up for — accounts, monitoring, patch drafting, publishing, billing — under the contract between us (Art. 6(1)(b)).
• Keeping the product secure, preventing abuse, and understanding how the product is used so we can improve it, under our legitimate interest (Art. 6(1)(f)), balanced against your right to privacy.
• Showing you analytics on the public marketing site and inside the product, only after you consent through the cookie banner (Art. 6(1)(a)).
• Issuing invoices and keeping accounting records, under our legal obligation as a business (Art. 6(1)(c)).

Who we share it with

We do not sell personal data, to anyone, ever. The vendors below are the ones who help us run CitePatch, kept current as the list changes.

• Infrastructure — DigitalOcean (DigitalOcean, LLC), Amsterdam region: the servers that run the application, the database, the cache and our own answer-capture service. Google Cloud Platform (Google Ireland Ltd.): object storage for exports and evidence and background jobs, in europe-west1 (Belgium); message queue, secret storage, logs and telemetry. Cloudflare: DNS for citepatch.com and delivery of the public marketing site; it does not carry traffic to the application. Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager (Google Ireland Ltd.): audience measurement on the public marketing site and inside the product; until you accept cookies, Analytics runs in Google's consent-denied mode and stores nothing in your browser. Contentsquare (formerly Hotjar): session replay and product-usage analytics inside the app, only after consent. Form fields are masked; invite tokens are never sent as page paths.
• Payments and email — Stripe: subscriptions, checkout, invoices and the customer billing portal. Resend: transactional email, including sign-in links, invitations and account notifications. MailerLite: the product newsletter, only for people who opt in to it.
• Model and search providers — OpenAI, Anthropic, Perplexity and Google (Gemini, via Google Ireland Ltd.) for answer measurement, together with DataForSEO and SearchAPI.io, which capture the answers AI assistants and search engines give in each market; TypeSafe for answer-type classification of measured responses; OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, DeepInfra, Groq and DigitalOcean (serverless inference) for analysis, content drafting, extraction and the Vera assistant; SerpAPI, DataForSEO, Brave Search and Open PageRank for search-engine, keyword and domain-authority data used as evidence. These receive the prompts and responses being measured and the content being drafted, not your account, your members or your billing data.
• Google Analytics 4 and Google Search Console data comes in under your own Google authorization, for the property you connect; we do not obtain it independently.
• Google user data. CitePatch's use and transfer to any other app of information received from Google APIs will adhere to the Google API Services User Data Policy and the Google Workspace API User Data and Developer Policy, including the Limited Use requirements. Data received from Google APIs (Search Console, Analytics 4, Drive) is used only to provide and improve the features you enabled, and is never used — raw, aggregated, or derived — to develop, train, or improve generalized or foundational AI or machine-learning models.
• Integrations you connect receive only the content you instruct CitePatch to publish to them, using credentials you control and can revoke at any time.
• We disclose personal data to anyone beyond this only if the law requires it, or with your consent.

Where your data is processed, and international transfers

CitePatch keeps your data in the European Union: the application and its database run on DigitalOcean in Amsterdam (Netherlands), and file storage and background jobs on Google Cloud Platform, operated by Google Ireland Ltd., in the europe-west1 region (Belgium). Google Cloud also carries our message queue and operational logs.

• Some of the AI model and search providers we send prompts and drafted content to are based in the United States — see the model and search providers listed above, under Who we share it with. Our infrastructure providers, DigitalOcean and Google, also have parent companies in the United States, although the database and your files are stored in the EU.
• For those transfers we rely on the safeguards each provider offers, such as the EU-U.S. Data Privacy Framework or standard contractual clauses, where applicable. We have not yet completed a documented, verified assessment of every provider's transfer mechanism, and we are not going to claim one before we have — write to [email protected] for the current status of a specific provider.

How long we keep it

Retention follows the product's actual configuration, not a policy written separately from it. These are the defaults in effect today, not a permanent commitment — if we change them, this notice will change with them.

• Archived agent threads: deleted 30 days after archiving.
• Idle agent threads: deleted after 365 days of inactivity.
• Public rate-limit counters, used to prevent abuse of public endpoints: deleted after 24 hours.
• Account, billing, and audit-log data: kept for as long as your account is active, and afterward only as long as needed for accounting, legal, or dispute-resolution purposes.

Automated processing, and why publishing is always a human decision

CitePatch's monitoring, contradiction detection, and patch drafting are automated. Nothing gets published, and no decision with a legal or similarly significant effect on you is made, without a human on your account approving it first.

Your rights

Under GDPR you can ask us to do any of the following. Write to [email protected] and we will respond within the timeframe the law requires; if you are not satisfied with our response, you can complain to the Agencia Española de Protección de Datos (AEPD) or to the data protection authority in your own EU member state.

• give you access to the personal data we hold about you;
• correct it, if it is inaccurate;
• delete it, subject to what we must keep for accounting or legal reasons;
• restrict or object to certain processing, including processing based on our legitimate interest;
• give you a portable copy of the data you provided us.

Children

CitePatch is a business product. It is not directed at children, and we do not knowingly collect personal data from anyone under 16. If you believe a child's data has reached us, write to [email protected] and we will delete it.

Changes to this notice

If we change what we collect, why, or for how long, we will update this notice and, if the change is material, notify account owners by email or in-product notice before it takes effect. The version and effective date are shown at the top of this page.