Privacy

What we collect

Almost everything here is something you typed in or chose to publish.

• Account: your email address, and either a password (stored only as a hash) or the opaque identifier Apple gives us when you use Sign in with Apple.
• Profile: the handle, display name, bio, avatar and header image you set. These are public.
• Your books: shelves, titles, cover images, notes and availability. A shelf is private until you publish it; a private one is visible to you, and to us if we have to moderate it.
• Location: a coarse city area for each shelf, plus any pickup spot you deliberately publish. See below.
• Activity between neighbours: messages, exchange requests and ratings. Messages are visible to you and the person you sent them to. If either of you reports a message, we read that conversation to deal with the report.
• Launch notifications: if you ask us to tell you when the iOS app is out, we keep that email address until we have told you, and use it for nothing else.
• Billing: if you subscribe, Stripe handles the payment and we store only the Stripe customer and subscription identifiers plus the status. We never see or store your card details.
• Ordinary server records: our servers log requests, which includes IP addresses, in order to keep the service up and to rate-limit abuse. We also keep a record of the transactional emails we sent you.

Location, in detail

Abridgedly is about books near you, so location is the product. It is coarse by design.

• A shelf is placed on the public map at an area snapped to roughly one kilometre, and the map shows the area, never a pin on your door.
• We seed that area from the approximate city our network provider (Cloudflare) derives from your connection, so the map is useful on your first visit. It is only a suggestion: a shelf is private until you publish it, we ask you to confirm or correct the area when you do, and you can change or clear it at any time.
• If you tap "use my location", your browser or phone asks your permission first. The point is rounded on your device before it is sent, rounded again on our side, and the city name is looked up by our server rather than by your browser, so the geocoding provider sees us and a blurred point, never your device or your IP address.
• A spot you pick for a handover is stored at the same ~1 km precision, so even the person you are meeting sees an area plus whatever description you wrote, not a coordinate. You can take a spot off a book at any time, and spots you created that nothing else points at are deleted with your account.
• Full-precision coordinates exist only for public places: a community book box someone added, or a bookshop or library imported from OpenStreetMap. Those are places, not homes.
• We never ask for, store, or display a home address.

Who else sees it

We do not sell your personal data and we do not share it for anyone else's advertising. We do use a small number of service providers to run Abridgedly, and they only get what their job needs:

• Cloudflare serves and protects the site, and tells our servers the approximate city a request came from.
• Cloudflare R2 stores the images you upload and the book covers we cache.
• Stripe processes subscription payments, under its own privacy policy. It receives your email address and your Abridgedly user id so a payment can be matched to an account.
• Resend delivers sign-in links and notification emails, so it handles your email address.
• Book lookup. An ISBN, a barcode or a search you type goes to our own lookup service, which asks book catalogues (Open Library, Google Books, ISBNdb) about the title. A shelf photo you scan goes to the same service, which passes it to an AI vision provider to read the spines. None of them receive your account or your IP address. The photo's own metadata is stripped before it leaves us, so the camera details and any GPS coordinates your phone wrote into the file do not go either. A scan photo is used for that lookup, not to train anything of ours.
• BigDataCloud turns a blurred coordinate into a city name, called from our servers, as described above.

Three things your browser fetches directly, which means those companies can see your IP address the same way any image or script on the web can: CARTO serves the map tiles (the map data itself is OpenStreetMap's, credited on the map), Apple serves the Sign in with Apple button, and Google Books serves some book covers. That last one is temporary: we are moving covers to our own storage, and the ones already moved come from us.

We will also hand over data where the law actually requires it, and we will say so publicly unless we are forbidden from saying so.

Where AI is and is not

One model reads spines in a photograph, and a title it read can end up on a shelf once you commit it. Past that, no model writes what you read here, recommends anything to you, or decides a moderation call. These five lines are the shape of the software rather than a promise about our intentions. (Our public pages stay open to search and answer engines the way any public page on the web is; line three is about what we sell, license or hand over, not about a crawler reading a page.)

1. Nothing you read on Abridgedly was written by a machine pretending to be a person. Notes, reviews and club posts come from neighbors, or from us and signed; a book's description comes from a library catalogue, not from either.
2. The camera reads, it does not write. A vision model turns a spine photo into text, a catalogue matches that text to a book where it can, and you confirm it before it reaches your shelf.
3. Your shelves, lists and messages are not training data. We do not sell them, license them, or hand them to anyone training a model.
4. No machine hides your books or judges a report. A person settles every hide and every claim, and we say so where it happens.
5. We build with AI tools and say so. The line we hold is about what you read, not about how we type.

Cookies

Two first-party cookies, both about staying signed in: one holds your session, the other remembers you for two weeks so you are not asked to sign in on every visit. No advertising cookies, no analytics, no third-party trackers, and nothing that follows you to other sites. That is why you do not see a cookie banner here.

Deleting your account

You can delete your account from your settings, without asking us. When you do, we erase your email address (including from our record of emails we sent you), handle, display name, bio, sign-in credentials and saved location; we delete your shelves and their books, cancel any exchange still in flight, and sign out every device. We also delete the profile photo and header image currently on your account from our image storage, though if that storage is unreachable at the time we log it and sweep it up by hand rather than hold up the deletion. Sign-in is blocked permanently after that, and your handle stops resolving.

Some things deliberately survive, and you should know which:

• A stub of the account, carrying none of the details above, so the other side of a conversation or a finished exchange still makes sense. You show up there as a former neighbour, not by name.
• Messages you already sent, in the thread of the person you sent them to, and ratings you left or received, which still count toward the other person's average.
• Other images you uploaded: photos of your books, photos of a little library, a picture attached to a claim on a place, a club picture, and any earlier profile photo you later replaced. Only the profile photo and header on your account when you delete it are removed from our image storage. The rest is work we have not finished, tracked in public with everything else, and we will update this page when it lands.
• Billing records, if you ever subscribed. We and Stripe keep those because tax and accounting rules say we have to.

You can also just correct things instead: your profile, your shelves, your location and your email preferences are all editable, and you can turn off notification emails without deleting anything. If you want a copy of your data, or you want us to delete something specific, email us and we will sort it out.

Children

Abridgedly is not for children under 13, and we do not knowingly create accounts for them. If you believe a child has an account here, email us and we will remove it.

Contact

Questions about any of this, or about your own data: [email protected]. If we change this policy in a way that matters, we will say so on What's new and move the date at the top.