Privacy, Cookies, and Your Data

This is the practical answer to "who can see this?" — written for the person using Scholarly, not for a lawyer. It covers what is private, what changes when you share, what your cookie choices actually do, and how to remove things.

The legally binding detail lives in the Privacy Policy. This page explains the same product in everyday terms; where the two differ, the Privacy Policy governs.

Private by default

Everything you put into Scholarly, and everything Scholarly makes from it, starts private to your account:

• Sources you upload — PDFs, Word and PowerPoint files, images, audio, links, and anything imported from a connected account.
• Chats — every conversation, including the sources attached to it.
• Creations — study guides, SOPs, reports, slides, video lectures, podcasts, flashcard decks, spreadsheets, meeting notes, and everything else you generate.
• Projects — the project, its sources, its instructions, its memory, and its chats.

Nothing becomes visible to anyone else until you deliberately make it visible. There is no "discoverable by default" state, no shared-by-accident state, and no feed your work appears in.

Sharing is an explicit choice

Open Share on any item and you pick one of three states:

You choose this per item. Sharing one document does not share the folder around it, the project it sits in, or anything else you own. See Sharing and Collaboration for invites, access requests, and view stats.

Cookie choices

On Scholarly's public pages — the home page, feature and pricing pages, the blog — a short cookie banner appears the first time you visit. It has two buttons:

• Accept — optional advertising cookies and ad measurement are switched on.
• Deny — they stay off.

Product analytics stays active either way. That is the measurement we use to see which parts of the product work and which are broken — how many people finished an upload, where a create window was abandoned. It is never used for advertising, and denying advertising cookies does not turn it off.

Changing your mind

Open Cookie preferences in the footer of any public page, or the same control in Settings, and switch your choice. It takes effect immediately.

Your choice is stored in the browser you made it in. A different browser, a different device, or a private window starts fresh and shows the banner again — so if you want advertising cookies off everywhere, set it everywhere.

Global Privacy Control

If your browser sends a Global Privacy Control signal, optional advertising stays off regardless of what is stored — including if the Accept button was pressed on that browser earlier. The cookie preferences panel says so plainly when it detects the signal, so you are never left guessing which setting won.

Project chats and project memory are never shared

This is the exception people are most often surprised by, in a good way.

Sharing a project shares its contents, not its conversations. Invited people and teammates can open every file, page, folder, recording, and creation inside a project. They cannot see your chats with the project's assistant, and they cannot see the project's memory.

The same holds for a project owned by a team: every member works in the same shared material, and each member keeps their own private chats and their own private memories inside it. Nobody — including the project owner and a team admin — reads anyone else's conversation.

See Projects.

What a team admin can and cannot see

If you are a member of a Scholarly team, your admin gets adoption reporting, not a window into your work.

They can see, under Team → Overview → Activity:

• How many members were active.
• How many creations were completed, broken down by type.
• Counts of AI generations, chat messages, and study sessions.
• The same numbers broken down per member.

They cannot see:

• The titles of anything you made.
• Your prompts, your instructions, or your chat messages.
• Any source you have not shared with the team.
• The contents of your private work, by any route in the product.

The Team library shows exactly one thing: what members deliberately chose to share with the team. An admin can also decide which AI models the team may use and can require Zero Data Retention — those are policy controls over the model list, and they do not grant access to a member's content. See Data, Privacy, and Model Controls in Teams.

Leaving a team, or being removed from one, ends your access to the shared library. Everything you personally made stays in your own account.

Connected accounts

Connecting Google Drive does not hand Scholarly your Drive.

• Access is per file. You pick files through Google's own picker, and Scholarly can use only the files you picked (plus files it creates there when you export something).
• It cannot browse the rest of your Drive — not folders you did not choose, not files a colleague shared with you, nothing outside your selections.
• It is read-only on what you pick: Scholarly reads those files to answer questions and build creations. It does not edit, rename, re-share, or delete anything in your Drive.
• Disconnect at any time from Settings → Connections, or revoke access from your Google account.

Disconnecting stops future access. It does not delete files you already imported, chats, or anything you generated — remove those separately. See Connections.

Sharing a link, and taking it back

A public link is best treated like an unlisted page: anyone holding the URL can open it, and they can forward it.

To end that access, open Share and switch the item back to Private. Access ends immediately — the next time anyone opens the old link they get the request-access screen instead of your content, whether or not they had opened it before.

You can also revoke a single emailed invite from the Share window without changing anything else, and approve or deny individual access requests as they arrive.

Deleting content

Deleting an item in Scholarly is reversible. It leaves your Home page, library, search, and folders, and moves to the Deleted tab in All Content, where Restore brings it back exactly as it was. Nothing auto-empties, so there is no countdown to beat.

Because deletion is reversible, turn sharing off first if your goal is to make sure nobody can reach something through a link you already sent. See Deleting and Restoring Content.

Deleting your account

If you want everything gone rather than one item, go to Settings → My Account → Delete account. Scholarly asks for a confirmation and an optional reason, then:

1. It confirms straight away and signs you out — of that browser and of every other session on your account.
2. Removal finishes in the background. Settling billing and erasing your content across the product takes longer than a button press, so Scholarly does not hold the screen while it runs.
3. Signing in again waits for it to finish. Until removal completes, a sign-in attempt — or creating a brand-new account on the same email address — is held back and tells you deletion is still in progress. Try again shortly and the fresh account works normally.

Account deletion cannot be undone. If you only want to stop paying, cancel the subscription instead — see Billing and Subscriptions.

Questions this page does not answer

For anything contractual — retention periods, legal bases, sub-processors, regional hosting, or a review by your security or procurement team — read the Privacy Policy and then contact us. We would rather answer a specific question directly than have you guess from a help article.

Related

• Sharing and Collaboration — the Share window, invites, access requests, and view stats.
• Data, Privacy, and Model Controls in Teams — the version of this page for a team, an admin, or a security reviewer.
• Connections — connecting and disconnecting Google Drive.
• Deleting and Restoring Content — the Deleted tab and restoring an item.
• Settings — where cookie preferences, connections, and account controls live.