Data Privacy
Beaver uses local storage for your library and PDFs, with server-side processing for AI features. Here's the breakdown:
| What | Where it lives |
|---|---|
| Zotero library & PDFs | Your device only. Never uploaded to our servers |
| Search index (embeddings) | Your device. Generated on our server from titles + abstracts, then stored locally |
| Chat history | Our servers. For cross-device access (you can delete anytime) |
| AI requests | Our servers. All AI requests route through Beaver's server, even with your own API key |
In short: Your library and PDFs stay on your device. Our servers process titles and abstracts (to create search embeddings) and your chat messages, which may include item metadata, document excerpts or page images the AI retrieves to answer your questions. We don't train models on your data without explicit opt-in.
Users of the Legacy Beta Plan have Cloud Library Sync enabled, where library data and PDFs are synced to our servers for enhanced features. See our Privacy Policy for details on how data is handled in each configuration.
For complete details, see our Privacy Policy.