Privacy Policy
How your reading, your library, and your identity are stored, used, and protected.
Effective April 23, 2026
The short version: we store what you bring us — your books, your answers, your portrait — and we use it only to draw your Reading Portrait and to connect you with readers you choose. We never sell it. You can export your library or delete everything at any time from your Account page — and email us anytime for a full copy of what we hold.
1. Who we are
Reading Portrait is a reading app that composes a private literary portrait from the books on your shelves. For the purposes of the UK GDPR and EU GDPR, the data controller is the Reading Portrait team. You can reach us at [email protected].
2. What we collect
Information you give us
- Your account: email, display name, username, password (hashed — we never see the plain text), and an optional avatar.
- Your library: the books you add, their shelves (Now Reading, My Collection, Next to Explore, Did Not Finish), your reactions (Enjoyed / Not for Me), and any notes you write.
- Your answers: the portrait questionnaire, onboarding suggestions, and any prompts you complete to shape your Reading Identity.
- Your shares: Reading Lists, shared shelves, field trips — anything you actively publish.
- Your settings: privacy toggles, notification preferences, who you follow, your friend list.
Information we generate about you
- Your Reading Portrait: the AI-composed literary identity, reading year, monthly letter, by-country view, and year-in-review — all drawn from the data above and stored against your account.
- Activity timestamps: when you added a book, started reading it, viewed your portrait, signed in.
Information we collect automatically
- Error logs if something crashes. These do not contain your book data.
3. Why we use your data (legal basis)
Under GDPR, we process your data on these grounds:
- Performance of a contract: drawing your portrait, showing your library, delivering the core product — the reason you signed up.
- Legitimate interest: preventing abuse and keeping the service reliable.
- Consent: marketing emails (if we ever send any) and any feature you explicitly enable from your Account page (public reader page, share-what-you're-reading, share-reactions, etc.).
4. Who we share it with
We share your data with the following service providers, each contractually bound to process it only on our instructions:
- Supabase (database + authentication) — hosts your account and library. Servers in the US / EU depending on region.
- Cloudflare (hosting + CDN) — serves the site and runs our backend worker.
- Anthropic (AI portrait generation) — receives a minimal summary of your library + answers at the moment your portrait is drawn. Inputs are not used to train their models (per Anthropic's API terms).
- Resend (transactional email) — sends password resets and contact-form emails.
- Google Books / Open Library — when you search for a book, we query these open APIs. No personal data is sent.
We do not sell your data. We do not share your library with other readers unless you explicitly share it (Reading Lists, shared shelves, public reader page, friend-to-friend recommendations).
5. Where your data lives
Your data is stored primarily in the United States (Supabase and Cloudflare regions). When data moves out of the UK / EEA, we rely on Standard Contractual Clauses and supplementary measures approved by the European Commission.
6. Your rights
If you are in the UK, EU, or another jurisdiction with similar rights (California's CCPA, Brazil's LGPD, etc.), you have the right to:
- Access your data — download your library as JSON from your Account page, or email us for a full copy of everything we hold against your account.
- Rectify inaccurate data — edit your profile, library, or answers in-app at any time.
- Erase your account — delete everything from your Account page. Erasure is immediate and permanent.
- Restrict processing — turn off any sharing toggle in Account.
- Port your data — your library export is in machine-readable JSON; a full export is available on request.
- Object to processing — email us and we'll stop.
- Lodge a complaint with a supervisory authority (for UK: the ICO at ico.org.uk).
To exercise any of these rights outside the in-app controls, email [email protected].
7. Cookies
We use a single first-party session cookie to keep you signed in. That's it — no analytics or advertising cookies, so there's no cookie banner to click through.
8. Retention
- Active accounts: we keep your data as long as the account exists.
- Deleted accounts: everything erased immediately from live systems. Backups are purged within 30 days.
- Server logs: retained for up to 30 days for security and abuse prevention.
9. Children
Reading Portrait is intended for readers 16 and over. If you believe someone under 16 has signed up, email us and we will delete the account.
10. Security
Passwords are hashed by Supabase using bcrypt. All traffic is TLS-encrypted. Row-level security in our database enforces that only you can read your own books, answers, and portrait.
We're a small beta team. We don't yet hold SOC 2 or ISO 27001 certification; if your organisation requires formal attestation, please reach out.
11. Changes to this policy
If we make material changes, we'll notify you by email and inside the app before they take effect. Non-material changes (typos, clarifications) will be reflected by updating the date at the top.
12. Contact
Questions, requests, or complaints: [email protected].