Effective date: September 7, 2026
ScholarWidget is an iOS home screen widget app that displays publicly available citation metrics from Google Scholar profiles. We are committed to protecting your privacy.
We do not collect, store, or share any personal data beyond what is described below, and we never sell data or use it for advertising or tracking.
The Google Scholar user ID that you voluntarily enter is stored locally on your device and is used to fetch publicly available citation data from Google Scholar.
If you turn on Milestone alerts (free) or Citation alerts (part of Fast Updates), our backend stores: your device's Apple push notification token, the Google Scholar profile ID you configured, which alert types you enabled, and your app version. To detect changes it also keeps a snapshot of that profile's publicly available metrics and per-paper citation counts, and a history of the alerts sent to you (deleted after 90 days). This data is used solely to deliver alerts to your device. The registration expires about 30 days after the app last refreshed it — for example after you turn alerts off, let the subscription lapse, or delete the app — and turning both alert toggles off removes it immediately.
If you ask for a rating, the app opens the App Store; we never see whether you rated. Purchases are handled entirely by Apple, and we do not receive or store your payment details.
When you configure a Scholar profile, the app requests the following publicly available information from Google Scholar via our backend service:
This data is cached locally on your device to display in the widget and the app. Our backend also caches it — for up to 7 days (publication lists, citing papers) and 2 days (profile totals) — keyed only by the public profile ID, so repeated requests don't re-fetch it from Google Scholar. It is not transmitted to any third party beyond what is necessary to fetch it from Google Scholar.
The app uses a backend service hosted on AWS to fetch Google Scholar data. Aside from the alert registration data and the short-lived caches described above, this service does not retain any user data; operational logs and rate-limit counters contain request metadata (such as IP addresses) and are kept for a few days for reliability and abuse prevention. It uses Bright Data as a proxy service to access Google Scholar pages, SerpApi to read the rest of your publication list when a profile has more papers than fit on the first page, and Apple's push notification service to deliver alerts. Bright Data and SerpApi receive only the public Google Scholar profile ID being looked up.
ScholarWidget does not include any analytics, tracking, or advertising frameworks.
ScholarWidget does not knowingly collect information from children under 13.
We may update this privacy policy from time to time. Any changes will be reflected on this page with an updated effective date.
If you have questions about this privacy policy, email support@snizyx.com.