Your documents and writing belong to you. This article is the short, practical version of where the controls are and what we do (and don't do) with your data.
Export everything
You can take all of your data with you at any time. In Account settings → Privacy and data, download everything as one ZIP (your documents as Markdown, your library as BibTeX and RIS, and a full JSON copy), or just the JSON, BibTeX or RIS file on its own. It's your data in a form you can actually reuse, not a locked PDF.
Your academic record (courses, grades, attendance and your verifiable certificates) is separate, and downloads from your academic record page.
Delete your account
In Account settings → Delete account, deleting your account removes your personal data and content. Deletion is real: within 30 days your data is gone, except where we're legally required to keep a record (for example, a billing invoice). Because it's permanent, Folio asks you to type DELETE to confirm, tells you first if published certificates or reviews will stop working, and asks you to cancel an active subscription before you go.
Analytics: off until you say yes
Folio uses privacy-friendly product analytics to see which features help and fix what doesn't. It never tracks you across other websites, and the data is never sold to anyone. It's off by default. On your first visit you'll see a cookie banner with two equal choices, Accept and Decline; nothing analytics-related is set unless you accept.
You can change your mind whenever you like with Opt out of product analytics in Account settings → Privacy and data, which applies on that device and to your account. Declining costs you nothing: every feature works the same either way. The only cookies that are always on are the ones needed to sign you in, which set no analytics.
Your public profile
Nothing about you is public until you choose it. Your profile page stays private until you turn it on, a public page can still be left out of the researcher directory, and your contact email is hidden unless you switch it on. See Your public profile.
What we never do
- We never sell your personal data. Not to advertisers, not to anyone.
- We never use your writing or documents to train AI models. When you use an AI feature, your content is sent to our model providers only to generate the result you asked for, and they're contractually barred from training on it.
- We don't use advertising or tracking cookies, and we don't share cookie data with advertisers.
Special-category data
If you use Folio Surveyor to run a survey, the survey you design may collect sensitive information from respondents: health, beliefs, and so on. In that case you're the controller of those responses and Folio processes them on your behalf, only with each respondent's explicit consent. You decide what your survey asks; we don't use those responses for anything of our own. Surveyor's AI tools, such as the low-effort check and theme analysis, send answers to an AI service only when you click to run them.
The full picture
This is the practical summary. The complete details (legal bases, international data transfers, retention, and your rights under the GDPR) live in the Privacy Policy, with a dedicated GDPR section for readers in the EEA, UK, and Switzerland. If you ever want something we haven't made self-serve, email hello@usefolio.co and we'll handle it.