Privacy policy

Who runs BookPocket?

BookPocket is run by one person, R.J. LaCount. "We" on this page means R.J. For any question about your data, email privacy@bookpocket.app.

BookPocket is in early testing. We may change this policy as it grows. If a change affects what we do with your data, we email you before it takes effect.

What do we store about you?

• Your account: your email address, your display name and full name if you give them, your picture if you add one, your time zone and your preferred format. We store your password only as a one-way hash, so nobody can read it.
• Your books: what is on your shelf, statuses, reading dates, ratings, reviews, private notes, pause notes, tags and the sources you credit.
• Your imports: the Goodreads or StoryGraph file you upload, and what we read from it. We keep the file in private storage that is not publicly readable, and delete it as soon as we have read it.
• Where you are signed in: for each signed-in device, the IP address and browser it signed in from, so the session can be checked and ended.
• Your phone, if you turn on notifications in the iOS or Android app: a device token Apple or Google gives us, which is how a notification finds your phone. Turning notifications off in your phone's Settings stops them.
• Your friends: who you are friends with, and friend requests you have sent or received.
• A message you send us through the contact form: your email address, your name if you give one, and what you wrote. It is emailed to us and kept in our inbox so we can reply. BookPocket itself does not store it.
• The waitlist: your email address, your name if you give one, and, if the link you followed had one, a short word saying where the link was shared, like a flyer or an event.

We count how many times each page of this website is opened each day, and which website linked to it. The count holds nothing about you: no IP address, no browser details and no cookie.

We use no advertising or tracking tools, and we do not sell or rent your data to anyone.

What do we store about other people?

Recording who recommended a book is the point of BookPocket. So you can store details about people who have not signed up and have not agreed to anything. We treat that data with extra care.

• Sources you record: a name, what kind of source it is, how you know them, your note about them, a link and a picture. Only you can see them.
• When you share who recommended a book, a person shows only as "someone they know", unless they have linked their own BookPocket account to your source, and then by the name they chose. Podcasts, publications, bookshops and videos are shown by name. Your notes about a source, and their picture, are never shown.
• Pictures of sources are kept in private storage that is not publicly readable. Your own picture is in public storage, at an address nobody can guess.
• Pictures and covers you upload are made smaller before we store them, and we keep only the image. Anything else in the file, such as where a photo was taken, is removed.
• Email addresses you send books or invitations to. The person gets one email, which names you, the book and your note. They can accept it or ignore it.

A source is only connected to someone's BookPocket account if that person agrees. Nobody can link your account to their source without you.

Who can see your data?

• Anyone: book pages are public. They show the reviews readers write, with the reader's name, and an average of readers' ratings with how many there are. To hide your review of a book, press the lock on it.
• Anyone with the link to your page sees your name and any part of your reading you set to Public. Nothing is Public unless you choose it.
• Your friends see your name, that you are friends, and the parts of your reading you share with them. By default that is what you're reading, the books you've finished with your ratings, your To be read list, and who recommended each book. Change it on your profile's Friends tab, for every friend or for one. Books you've locked are never shown. If you decline a friend request, the person who sent it is not told.
• Only you: your reading dates, private notes, pause notes, tags and the sources you record, and anything you haven't shared.
• People you send a friend request to see your full name, or your display name if you haven't given one.
• People you send a book to see your name and your note. You see whether they accepted it and whether they have finished it, and nothing more.
• Support: if you ask for help, a support account can look up counts and states on your account, such as how many books you have or whether an import failed. It cannot see titles, notes, reviews, tags or sources, and every lookup is logged. A support account can also ban an account that breaks the terms.
• R.J. can reach the database to keep the service running and fix problems, and only does so for that.

Who else handles your data?

We use a few services to run BookPocket. Each one gets only what it needs.

• Hetzner hosts the servers and the database.
• Cloudflare R2 stores pictures, book covers, import files and nightly database backups.
• Apple delivers notifications to the iOS app, so it receives the device token and the notification's text.
• Google delivers notifications to the Android app, through Firebase Cloud Messaging, so it receives the device token and the notification's text.
• Resend delivers our emails, so it receives the address and the message.
• Open Library and the Library of Congress receive the words you search for and book identifiers such as ISBNs. They never receive your name or email address.
• A cover address you paste is fetched once by our server. That website sees a request from BookPocket, never from you.

What do we keep in your browser?

• A cookie that keeps you signed in.
• A cookie that tells this site you have signed in before, so a button can say "Dashboard". It cannot sign you in.
• A cookie that remembers whether you view My Books as a list or a grid.
• A cookie that remembers you hid the "Start with a few books you loved" list on your dashboard.
• Your theme and motion choices, stored in your browser only.

None of these track you across other websites.

How long do we keep it, and how do you delete it?

• Your account stays until you delete it. To delete it, open your profile and use Delete your account. Everything goes, including the sources you recorded and their pictures.
• Books you typed into the catalogue stay for everyone else, without your name on them.
• An application to be a librarian, and what we decided, stays until you delete your account.
• A ban records when it was placed and by which account, until it is lifted. While it lasts, your account can't be signed into and nothing from it is shown to anyone. If we delete an account instead, everything goes, as it does when you delete it yourself.
• A review we remove for breaking the terms is deleted. We keep when it was removed and by which account, and your rating stays.
• Deleted data can remain in nightly backups for a short time, until those backups are replaced.
• An account whose email address is never confirmed is deleted a week after sign-up, if nothing was added to it.
• An unconfirmed waitlist signup is deleted once its confirmation link expires. To leave the waitlist, use the link in the email that confirmed your signup.
• To get a copy of your data, or to ask us to correct or delete something, email privacy@bookpocket.app.