Privacy & Data Retention
Chat-lab.ai is built around a simple principle: your content passes through; it does not stay. This page explains exactly what that means for each kind of data.
What we do NOT keep
- Uploaded files (audio, video, PDFs, DOCX) are processed and discarded. Documents are handled in memory; audio is briefly written to temporary server storage during transcription, deleted as soon as processing completes, and swept by an automatic cleanup as a backstop.
- Results (transcripts, summaries, extracted metadata, and converted Markdown) exist only in your browser session. Closing or refreshing the tab discards them. There are no accounts, and nothing you produce is saved server-side.
- API keys you enter are held only in your browser session, never written to disk, and never visible to other users. You will need to re-enter them each session; that is by design.
What the tools necessarily share with third parties
Each tool relies on an external service to do its core work. Your content is sent to that service only for processing, under the provider's own terms:
| Tool | Data sent | Recipient |
|---|---|---|
| Audio Insights | Your audio; transcript text for summaries | AssemblyAI; Groq or OpenAI |
| Bibliobot | DOI or arXiv ID (if found); otherwise the first ~4,000 characters of the paper; first 5 pages of scanned PDFs (OCR) | CrossRef; Mistral or OpenAI; Google Gemini (scans only) |
| PDF-MD | Your PDF | Jina AI |
| URL-MD | The URLs you enter | Jina AI |
| Sitemap Crawler | The site URL you enter; mapped page URLs | Firecrawl; Jina AI |
If a provider's data practices matter for your material (e.g., unpublished manuscripts, confidential recordings), see the Third-Party Providers page for a detailed breakdown, including free-tier vs. paid-tier differences in model-training policies, or use your own API key with the provider settings you prefer.
Operational logs
Like most web services, the server keeps short-lived technical logs (timestamps, actions such as "transcription started", and file names) for troubleshooting. Logs rotate automatically and are not used for anything else. The contents of your files and results are not logged.
Questions
Reach out via Chat-lab.ai, or email [email protected] for problems with the apps.