Privacy
Prodromos sends a weekly email digest of newly published research papers, selected against a topic description you agreed with me, and gives you a private online library of the papers it has sent you. This notice explains what personal data I hold about you, why, and what you can ask me to do with it.
I am, personally. Prodromos is currently run by me as an individual, not by a company or other legal entity, so I am the data controller.
Thomas Samuels
hello@prodromosdigest.co.uk
| Data | Where it came from |
|---|---|
| Your name | You, when you agreed to join |
| Your email address | You, when you agreed to join |
| Your answers on the join form, if you joined through it | You, on this website |
| The digests you subscribe to, the score threshold used for each, and how many papers a digest can hold | Agreed with you, then adjusted as we calibrate, or set by you in the app |
| Your ratings of papers, the papers you save, and any comments you send back | The buttons in your digest and in the app, your replies to digests, and review sheets |
| A record of which papers were sent to you and when | Generated automatically, so you are not sent the same paper twice |
| Your folders in the app, and the papers in them | You, in the app |
| Your CPD log, if you use it: the papers you logged, the time you spent, your reflections, and which entries you confirmed | You, in the app, on the CPD logging page, and in the monthly CPD email |
| Your app settings, such as the month your appraisal year starts | You, in the app |
| Sign-in records for the app: a scrambled form of each sign-in code, and of each signed-in browser’s cookie, with when it was made and last used | Generated when you sign in |
| If you pay: your plan, when it renews, and a reference number Stripe gives your account | Stripe, when you subscribe or change plan |
| Your email replies | Sent by you, held in an email account I control |
| When you tap a button in a digest: the time, the paper and button, and the kind of browser and network the tap came from (not your IP address). Used only to tell your taps apart from your email provider’s security scanner, which opens every link in an email; deleted after 28 days | Recorded when the link is opened |
I never see or store your card details. Stripe holds those.
Your data is not sold, and is not used for advertising.
Papers are scored by a large language model against a written rubric for each topic. That process reads the papers and the rubric. It does not receive your name, your email address, your ratings or your reflections.
Your ratings are used to calibrate your own digests. If your ratings suggest you would like more or fewer papers in a digest, I may suggest a change, and you decide. If you switch on “Let Prodromos adjust my digest sizes” in the app, the change is made for you, one step at a time, and your next email tells you each time.
No automated decision is made about you that has a legal or similarly significant effect.
The app at app.prodromosdigest.co.uk shows the papers you have been sent, your ratings, saved papers, folders and CPD log.
Logging a paper as CPD is optional, and nothing else depends on it. If you use it, I hold, for each entry: the paper, the time you say you spent on it, the reflection you write, when you logged and last changed it, and whether you confirmed it. I also hold whether the monthly CPD email is switched on for you, and which months it has been sent.
Your reflections are for your own record and your appraisal. They are not used to score or choose papers, they are never sent to Anthropic or any other AI service, and they do not change your digest.
Please keep patient details out. A reflection is about a paper. Don’t write anything that could identify a patient, even indirectly (a rare case, a date, a place). If you realise you have, edit or delete the entry, or email me and I will remove it.
Where it goes.
Who reads it. Nothing in the system needs a person to read your reflections. As the person who runs the database I am technically able to; I don’t, unless you ask me to (for example, to correct an entry or send you a copy), or a fault you’ve reported can’t be fixed any other way.
How long. Until you delete it, or your account. Unsubscribing from the digests does not delete it: it stays in the app for your appraisal, and when you unsubscribe I email you a copy.
Payments are taken by Stripe on its own secure pages. Stripe holds your card details and payment history under its own privacy policy; I never see your card number. I hold your plan, when it renews, and the reference number Stripe gives your account, so I know which digests you’ve paid for. Changing plan, updating your card and cancelling happen on Stripe’s pages, reached from the app.
Running this involves a small number of service providers. All are based in the United States or operate globally, so your data is transferred outside the UK. The main database is stored in London, but the company that runs it is US-based. Those transfers rely on the providers’ standard data protection terms and the safeguards required by UK data protection law.
| Provider | What they do |
|---|---|
| Neon | Hosts the database that holds the subscriber list, your digests and thresholds, your ratings, saves, folders and CPD log, and the record of what you have been sent. Stored in London |
| Resend | Delivers the digest emails, the monthly CPD email and app sign-in codes |
| Cloudflare | Routes email sent to Prodromos addresses, hosts this website and the app, records your clicks on the rating buttons, and runs the CPD logging pages |
| Stripe | Takes payments and holds card details, if you pay for a plan |
| Google (Gmail) | Holds the mailbox that receives your replies |
| GitHub | Private code repository. Runs the weekly digest and builds the monthly CPD email, and keeps the weekly database backup and the record of each run for 90 days. Older copies of some data are in the repository’s history: see below |
| Anthropic | Scores papers against each topic rubric. Receives paper text and rubrics only, not subscriber details |
The database is backed up every week. Every backup copy that contains your data is deleted within 90 days: GitHub’s copies, the recent copies on my own computer, and an encrypted offline copy. (The one exception is older data from before October 2026: see below.) A separate monthly archive keeps only the published papers and how they were scored, with nothing about any subscriber in it, and that is kept indefinitely.
If I ever had to rebuild from a backup, I would re-apply every deletion made since that backup was taken, so nothing you asked me to delete comes back.
While you are subscribed, and then until you ask me to delete it, with these exceptions:
You can ask me to:
Email hello@prodromosdigest.co.uk and I will action it. There is no form and no process to navigate. Deleting covers the database, my email accounts, and my own computer straight away; backup copies follow within 90 days, as above.
Deleting your account in the app works the same way, with a safety catch: your account locks at once and your emails stop, and everything is erased 14 days later unless you cancel. Before it is erased, I email you your saved papers, folders and CPD log so you keep a copy. If you want it gone sooner, email me and I will do it straight away.
If you are unhappy with how I have handled your data, you can complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office at ico.org.uk/make-a-complaint.
Use the app, email unsubscribe@prodromosdigest.co.uk, or simply reply to any digest and say so. Every digest also carries a standard unsubscribe header, so your email client may offer a button. When you unsubscribe in the app, you can ask for one last email with your saved papers and folders (as spreadsheet and reference-manager files) and your CPD log, so nothing is lost.
Several subscribers receive Prodromos at an NHS, university or other employer address. Those mailboxes are administered by your employer, who may be able to access them under their own policies. That is outside my control, so if you would rather this did not arrive at a work address, send me a personal one and I will switch it over.
Paper data is retrieved from PubMed®, a database of the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM), part of the National Institutes of Health. NLM does not endorse this product. See NLM’s disclaimer and copyright notice for its own terms.
The form on this website asks for your name, email, role and what you want to keep up with. Your answers are held separately from the subscriber list until I have read them and set your digest up. If that doesn’t happen, they are deleted within 6 months of being sent. You can ask for them to be deleted sooner at any time.
Until October 2026, the subscriber list, the database of ratings and a weekly record of which papers were sent to whom were kept as files alongside the code, in a private GitHub repository. That has stopped: nothing about any subscriber is added to the repository now. But the repository keeps its history, so older copies of those files remain there, and I keep an archived copy of that old database on my own computer and the encrypted offline copy. Only I can access any of these, and nothing reads them. They hold names, email addresses, topics and thresholds, lists of papers sent, and ratings and comments given before October 2026.
If you subscribed before October 2026 and ask me to delete everything, I will remove you from those older copies as well, and confirm when it is done.
This website sets no cookies and uses no analytics or tracking. Cloudflare, which hosts it, processes the standard technical information any website receives (such as your IP address) in order to deliver the page. The app sets the one sign-in cookie described above, and nothing else.
If what I do with your data changes materially, I will email you about it rather than quietly updating this page. The version and date at the top will always tell you which version you are reading.
Nothing about what is collected, why, or your rights has changed.