Privacy

What we record about your reading

We record what we showed you and what you did next: which books we recommended (and where they appeared in the list), which ones you saved, started, finished, or set aside — and if you set one aside, roughly how far you got and the reason you picked from our list. We record the answers you give to our either/or book questions — including how long you took to answer, because hesitating between two books tells us something a click alone does not — and the short sentences we write about your taste along with whether you confirmed, corrected, or rejected them. We use this for exactly one thing: choosing better books for you, and honestly measuring whether we did. Our application records no IP address, no device, and nothing you type into a search box. Our web server, separately, keeps an access log; today that log does record the address you connect from, the identifying string your browser sends, and the full address of each page you ask for — which includes anything you typed into a search box — and it is kept for up to twelve months. We are changing it to record neither your full address nor your search terms, and to delete it after seven days. Until that change is live, this paragraph describes what actually happens rather than what we intend. A takedown request stores a one-way fingerprint of your address to prevent abuse. The detailed version of this record is kept for 18 months and then reduced to monthly totals — see below.

How long we keep it

The detailed record of what we showed you is kept for 18 months, after which it is reduced to monthly totals that are not tied to individual moments. This is enforced by a scheduled job, not by intention.

Backups are kept for 30 days. If a backup is ever restored, deletions you asked for are re-applied to the restored data — a restore does not bring back an account you deleted.

What stays if you delete your account

Deleting your account removes your reading log, your notes, your set-aside reasons, your taste profile, your confirmed phrases, anything you imported, and every recommendation we ever made you — permanently, with no way to restore them. Two things stay, with your name and account removed and no way to connect them back to you: the tags and content warnings you contributed (other readers rely on them), and an unnamed record of the reading decisions themselves, which is what lets us keep improving the recommendations. The key that could link that record to you is destroyed with your account.

What we do with a file you import

If you upload a Goodreads export, we keep the rows of that file so you can see which ones we matched and which we couldn’t. We use the title, author, identifier and your rating; we discard shelves, reviews and social data. Deleting your account deletes the file’s contents along with everything else.

What is private and stays private

How far you got into a book, and the fact that you set one aside, are never shown publicly. There is no public "finish rate" anywhere on this site, and there is no setting that would make one appear.

Content warnings and tags come from readers, never from software

Every trope, heat level, ending type and content warning on this site was entered by a person. We never generate them, guess them, or fill them in from a description. Where nobody has tagged a book yet, we say so — "no content warnings reported" means nobody has reported one, not that there is nothing to report.

Book covers

We keep a local copy of cover images so pages load reliably and we do not hammer the sources they come from. We do not claim ownership of them.

Authors who have verified a claim to their own books can send us a cover image for those books. When they do, we store the image, and we store the exact permission statement they agreed to, along with the date. A person reviews every such image before it appears anywhere on the site; until then it is not published and it is not reachable.

The takedown route below covers every image we host — the ones we cached and the ones authors sent us.

A rights holder who wants a cover removed can ask us to take it down and we will. Ask us to remove a cover.

Money never touches recommendations

Our recommendations are computed without any knowledge of whether we can earn anything from a book. Purchase links are attached after a book has been chosen, and if there is no link, the recommendation still stands.

Who to contact

Company name, registration number and registered address print here once the operating entity exists. They are deliberately not filled in with a placeholder.