Privacy Policy

Benchbook is operated by Play Plot Digital Solutions Ltd (United States), the data controller for the information described here. You can reach us at support@benchbook.app.

We collect only what the service needs to work.

• Account details — your email address, name, institution and research area.
• Research content — the protocols you create or import, including any document you upload; the experiments you run; and the measurements, timings, notes and deviations recorded during them.
• Reagent records — the reagents in your inventory, including manufacturer, catalogue number, lot number and expiry date.
• Feedback — anything you send us through the in-app feedback form, along with your browser user-agent string.
• Technical data — in production we record errors and a sample of performance traces so we can diagnose faults, and we log the volume of AI requests per account to enforce fair-use limits.

We do not ask for and do not want patient data, personal data about human research subjects, or any special-category personal data. Please do not enter it into Benchbook.

• To provide the service — storing your protocols and experiments, running the features you ask for, and signing you in. Legal basis: performance of our contract with you.
• To keep the service working and secure — error monitoring, rate limiting and abuse prevention. Legal basis: our legitimate interest in a reliable, secure service.
• To reply to you — answering feedback and support messages. Legal basis: our legitimate interest in supporting users.

We do not sell your data, we do not share it for advertising, and we do not use your research content to train AI models.

Some Benchbook features are AI-assisted. When you use them, the relevant content is sent to a third-party AI provider to be processed and returned:

• Importing a protocol — the text of the document you upload is sent to the AI provider so it can be turned into structured, runnable steps.
• Drafting a methods section — the details of the completed experiment are sent: the steps, recorded measurements and summary statistics, timings, deviations, reagent names and lot numbers, and the operator name and date.

These features are optional. If you never use them, none of your research content is sent to the AI provider. Using them requires a verified email address. We keep a short-lived cache of extraction results so that re-importing the same document does not need a second call, and we record the size and cost of each request — but not its content — so we can enforce fair-use limits.

We use a small number of service providers to run Benchbook. They process data only on our instructions and only to provide their service to us:

• A database and authentication provider, which stores your account and research data.
• A hosting provider, which runs the website and the API.
• An AI provider, as described in section 4.
• An error-monitoring provider, which receives diagnostic data when something fails in production.
• An email provider, which delivers sign-in emails and forwards your feedback to us.

We will also disclose data if we are legally required to, or where it is necessary to protect our rights or the safety of others.

Your account and research data are stored on servers located in the European Economic Area.

Play Plot Digital Solutions Ltd is established in the United States, so your data is accessible to us from outside the European Economic Area.

Some of the providers in section 5 also process data outside the European Economic Area. Where that happens we rely on the providers' standard contractual clauses or an equivalent transfer mechanism to protect your data.

If you create a share link for an experiment, that link is public: anyone who has it can view the shared experiment without signing in, and it may be forwarded on to people you did not intend. Only the experiment you shared is exposed — not your account, your other experiments or your reagent inventory.

Share links stop working automatically 90 days after they are created. You can revoke one before then from the experiment it belongs to. Treat a share link like a password, and do not create one for anything you would not want seen by a stranger.

Benchbook can be installed as an app and works partly offline. To do that, your browser stores your sign-in session and a copy of recently viewed data — including an experiment in progress — for up to 24 hours. This stays on your device. It is cleared when you sign out, so sign out before handing over a shared bench computer.

We use only what is required to keep you signed in and to run the service. We do not use advertising cookies, third-party trackers or website analytics, and there is no cross-site tracking of any kind.

We keep your account and research data for as long as your account exists. If you delete your account, your profile, protocols, experiments and reagent records are deleted immediately and are not recoverable — so export anything you want to keep first.

Share links expire after 90 days. Diagnostic error data and fair-use request logs are kept for a limited period for security and reliability purposes, and contain no research content.

Depending on where you live, you have the right to access your data, correct it, delete it, export it in a portable format, object to or restrict certain processing, and withdraw consent where we rely on it.

You can do most of this yourself and immediately: edit your profile in Settings, export experiments and protocols as PDF, CSV or spreadsheet files from within the app, and delete your account from Settings. For anything else, email support@benchbook.app and we will respond within 30 days.

If you are in the EEA or the UK and you think we have handled your data badly, you can complain to your national data protection authority. We would rather you told us first so we can put it right.

Access to your data is enforced at the database level, so one account cannot read another's records. Traffic is encrypted in transit, uploads are restricted by type and size, and requests are rate limited. No system is perfectly secure, and we do not claim otherwise — but Benchbook should not be your only copy of a result that matters. Keep your own records too.

If we change this policy in a way that materially affects you, we will update the date at the top of this page and tell you by email or in the app before the change takes effect.

support@benchbook.app
Play Plot Digital Solutions Ltd