Privacy Policy
Effective date: July 15, 2026
LeanMarx ("we", "us") is a crowd-sourced article bias rating service, offered through the website leanmarx.com and the LeanMarx browser extension. This policy explains what we collect, why, and what we never do with it.
What we collect
- Account information. When you create an account we collect your email address and, where you enable multi-factor authentication, a phone number or authenticator registration. Sign-in is operated by Microsoft Entra External ID on our behalf; we never see or store your password.
- Ratings. The bias ratings you submit, together with the address and headline of the article you rated and the time of the rating.
- Access requests. If you request access via our form, we collect the name, email, institution, and reason you provide.
What the browser extension does — and doesn't do
- The extension reads the address and headline of the page you are viewing only when you click the LeanMarx button, in order to identify the article you are rating. It does not track your browsing, collect your history, or read page content in the background.
- Your sign-in tokens are stored locally in your browser's extension storage and sent only to our service and to Microsoft's sign-in service.
- The extension displays sponsor messages served from our own database. These are plain text, set by us, with no third-party tracking code.
How we use your information
- To operate your account and verify eligibility (for example, academic email domains).
- To compute anonymous, aggregate article ratings. Aggregates are only shown once an article has enough ratings, and never identify who rated what.
- To show you your own rating history and how it compares to the community.
- To review access requests and contact you about them.
What we never do
- We never sell your personal information.
- We never publish your individual ratings — only anonymous aggregates.
- There are no public comments, profiles, or follower systems on LeanMarx.
Advertising
Some pages of our website display advertising. Sponsor messages served by us contain no tracking. Where Google AdSense is used on the website, Google and its partners may use cookies to serve ads based on your visits to this and other sites; you can opt out of personalized advertising at Google Ads Settings. We do not place third-party advertising code inside the browser extension.
Service providers
We run on Microsoft Azure (hosting and database, United States regions) and Microsoft Entra External ID (sign-in). Email to us is handled by Zoho Mail. Each processes data only to provide their service to us.
Data retention and deletion
Account data is kept while your account is active. To delete your account and personal information, email admin@leanmarx.com from your registered address. Ratings already blended into anonymous aggregates remain in aggregate form after account deletion.
Children
LeanMarx is intended for users 13 and older. We do not knowingly collect information from children under 13.
Changes
We will post any changes to this policy on this page and update the effective date above. Material changes will be announced on the home page.