ReadingRate Privacy Policy

Last updated: October 31, 2026

This policy explains what personal data ReadingRate collects when you use readingrate.com, the ReadingRate iPhone and Apple Watch apps, the ReadingRate chat bot, and ReadingRate in AI assistants such as ChatGPT and Claude: what we collect, why, who receives it, how long we keep it, and what you can do about it.

ReadingRate is run by Simon Stawski ("we"), who is responsible for your personal data as its controller. We do not sell your personal data, and we do not use it for advertising.

1. Information We Collect

Account information

Your email address, display name and username, and a profile photo if you add one. When you sign up, your username and profile address are made from the part of your email address before the @; you can change them in your settings. You sign in with an email and password, or with Google or Apple; with Google or Apple we receive your name and email address (Apple's Hide My Email is supported), not access to those accounts. Passwords are handled by our sign-in provider and are never stored in plain text.

Your reading

What you record in ReadingRate: the books in your library and their status, ratings, dates and reflections; reading sessions (date, pages, and time when you use the timer); the page you reach in each book, with the date and time of each change; quotes and highlights; journal entries and notes, and photos you attach to them; reviews you write; reading insights you save; your reading goal; book clubs you join; poems you read, save or annotate; your quote-review history; what you tell us you want from your reading (your answer to 'Tell us about your reading', what you tap when you finish a book, the reading domains you focus on and what draws you to them, and what you are reading toward); and the recommendations you dismiss.

Book files, photos, imports and voice

Imports: a Goodreads or StoryGraph export you upload is read to add your books, and the file is kept with your account.
Book files: an EPUB or PDF you upload is stored, its text is extracted, and excerpts are checked with Anthropic to confirm the file is the book it says it is. The text becomes ReadingRate's copy of that book: it is used to score the book's difficulty in the public catalog, and other readers who upload their own copy of the same book can get passages from it in our AI features. The first upload of each book is the one kept, and ReadingRate records which account uploaded it.
Photos: a photo of a page or a bookshelf you scan is sent to Anthropic to read its text or the book spines, and is not stored. Photos you attach to a journal entry or a review are stored with it.
Voice: when you speak a quote, a page number, a note or a command, the audio is transcribed by Deepgram on the website and the Apple Watch, and by Apple's speech recognition in the iPhone app. The transcript is then sent to Anthropic to work out what you asked and to correct transcription mistakes. Audio is not stored. When we cannot understand a spoken command, we keep its first 100 characters to improve recognition.
Omi: if you add the ReadingRate app to an Omi wearable, Omi sends us the transcript of each conversation it records. A transcript that mentions reading is sent to Anthropic to find book quotes, books you mention and discussions of books, which are saved to your account; the transcript itself is not stored.

Health data from earlier Apple Watch versions

Until February 2026, if you allowed it in the Health permission prompt, the Apple Watch app recorded your heart rate, heart rate variability, respiratory rate and blood oxygen, and the ambient noise level, during timed reading sessions. Current versions record none of these. Readings recorded earlier stay with their sessions in your account and are shown only to you. We do not use them for advertising, do not send them to AI providers, and do not return them to AI assistants. Deleting a session, or your account, deletes them.

Usage, device and technical data

Product analytics: we record how you use ReadingRate: the pages and features you use, linked to your account once you sign in (and, in the iPhone app, to your email address). On the website we also record sessions: what the pages show, with everything you type masked. In the EU, the rest of the EEA, the UK and Switzerland, analytics start only if you agree: on the website when you accept in the cookie banner, and in the iPhone app when you say yes to the question after you sign in (from version 1.99; earlier versions have Usage Analytics on until you turn it off). Elsewhere they are on until you turn them off. To turn them off, choose Decline in the website's cookie banner (closing the banner also stops them in that browser), use Disable Analytics in the website's privacy settings, or turn off Usage Analytics in the iPhone app's settings. A choice made while signed in applies to your account on the website, in the app and on our servers, and you can change it at any time.
Logs: our hosting providers log each request (the time, the page or endpoint, your IP address, and your browser or app version) to run and protect the service.
Error reports: when something fails, we record what failed and where; from the website, also the page, your browser and your account identifier.
Email: whether our emails to you were delivered, opened and clicked.
Suggestions: which books we suggest to you in each reading domain, and on which days, so we can see whether you start them. Since 21 October 2026 we record this only while analytics are on; nobody else can see it, and it is deleted with your account.

Payments

Payments are handled by Stripe on the website and by Apple in the iPhone app. We store your plan, its status and the payment provider's customer or transaction reference, never your card details, and delete them with your account. Stripe and Apple keep their own payment records.

Messages, the chat bot and recommendations

When you use the contact form, we receive your message and email address. When you chat with the ReadingRate bot on WhatsApp or Telegram, we receive your messages and your WhatsApp or Telegram account identifier. The bot keeps the most recent 30 messages of your chat and sends them to Anthropic to write each reply, letting Anthropic look up your reading data through ReadingRate's tools while it does; it saves to your account only what it tells you it is saving. If you mention ReadingRate in a post on Threads, the bot may answer a question about a book with a public reply written from our catalog; we keep the username and text of the most recent 500 mentions. If you send someone a book recommendation by email, we send it to the address you give, with your note.

2. ChatGPT, Claude and Other AI Assistants

You can use ReadingRate inside AI assistants that support the Model Context Protocol, such as ChatGPT and Claude. The assistant calls ReadingRate's tools to answer you. The book catalog tools work without an account. To use the tools for your own reading you connect your ReadingRate account: you sign in on mcp.readingrate.com and approve the permissions listed there, and the assistant receives an access token, never your password.

What ReadingRate receives

Only what a tool needs for the task you asked for: the words of a search, a book or poem identifier, or the quote, note, page or rating you asked the assistant to save. ReadingRate does not receive your conversation, your chat history or your messages to the assistant, and no tool asks for them. The assistant's provider (OpenAI for ChatGPT, Anthropic for Claude) receives what each tool returns, as part of your conversation, under its own privacy policy.

What each group of tools receives, stores and returns

Tools	Receives	Stores	Returns and shares
Book catalog: search_books, get_book_details, compare_books, get_award_winners, get_top_books, lookup_books_batch, get_poem, search_poems	Search words, titles, authors, ISBNs, book and poem identifiers, and list filters such as a country or a genre	Nothing about you	Book and poem data from the ReadingRate catalog. A title or ISBN the catalog does not hold (lookup_books_batch) is looked up in Open Library, without any account information.
Your reading: get_currently_reading, get_reading_history, get_reading_days, get_reading_stats, get_reading_goals, get_personalized_recommendations, list_saved_quotes, list_quotes_due_for_review, get_reading_notes, find_related_passages, get_monthly_reading_summary, get_poetry_reading_stats, list_reading_domains, get_reading_domain, get_poetic_form_mastery	Filters and identifiers, such as a book, a year, or a topic to look for among your saved insights	Nothing new	The reading data you asked about: books, statuses, ratings, dates, reflections, reading pace, the page reached each day, goal progress, quotes, notes and saved insights. Never health data.
Book clubs: list_book_clubs, get_book_club, get_book_club_current_read	A club identifier	Nothing new	Your clubs, their books and reading schedules, and other members' roles, with the usernames of members whose profiles are public; not their email addresses or account identifiers.
Book text: search_book_content, get_passages_near_reading_position	The words to look for, or a topic	Nothing new	Passages only from books you uploaded yourself, and lines of poems, up to your reading position unless you ask otherwise. Your search words are turned into a search vector by Cloudflare Workers AI and are not saved.
Generated insights: get_reading_trajectory, get_daily_reading_connections, summarize_reading_period	Nothing beyond the request, or a date range	The result, in your account: reading-pattern insights expire after 7 days and are replaced when new ones are made; daily connections and period summaries stay until your account is deleted	To write reading-pattern insights, your past year of finished books (titles, authors, genres, themes, ratings and dates) is sent to Anthropic; for daily connections, a few passages from your books, quotes and notes. Period summaries are computed without AI.
Recording your reading: add_book_to_library, add_matched_books_to_library, update_book_status, log_reading_session, save_quote, record_quote_review, log_poem_read, save_poem_line, annotate_poem_line	The book, status, rating, page, quote or note you asked to record	That record, in your account, as if you had entered it in the app	A title the catalog lacks (add_book_to_library) is looked up in Google Books and added to the public book catalog, without any account information. Quotes you save and books you are reading show on your profile while it is public (new accounts start private; section 7). Books you start, and books you finish if you show finished books, also appear in the feed of readers who follow you.
Saved insights: save_reading_insight, delete_reading_insight	The summary and takeaways you asked to keep, and the books they are about	The insight, until you delete it with delete_reading_insight; its search vector is deleted with it. A copy of its summary, kept to make that vector, and the record of it in our change log (section 6) stay for now	Copied to your Notion if you connected Notion to ReadingRate. Deleting an insight in ReadingRate does not delete its Notion copy.

Connection records

For each assistant you connect, we keep which assistant it is, when you connected it, when it first and last used a tool for your account and which tool it used last, which permissions it holds, and the tokens that let it act for you. The tokens are deleted when the assistant revokes the connection, or after 12 months without use. The rest is deleted with your account.

Logs

Each tool call is logged with the tool's name, your account identifier, your plan, the time and whether it succeeded; these logs are kept for up to 7 days. A result may be cached for up to 10 minutes to answer a repeated request, and a counter that limits how often period summaries can be made is kept for 2 hours. Whether your account is on the Reader plan is kept for up to 5 minutes, and the last answer for 30 days, in case a later check fails. Error reports name the arguments a failed call had, never their values. Daily counts of tool use, without account identifiers, are kept for product statistics. For calls made without an account, the caller's IP address is used for up to 2 minutes to limit request rates.

Your choices

Use only the book catalog, without connecting an account.
Tools that change your data are labeled as such, so your assistant can ask you before using them.
Disconnect at any time in the assistant: in ChatGPT under Settings → Apps & Connectors, in Claude under Settings → Connectors. The assistant can then no longer act for your account.
Delete a saved insight by asking the assistant.

3. How We Use Your Information

To provide ReadingRate: store and show your reading, and compute your statistics, difficulty comparisons and reading-time estimates.
To compare readers, if you choose: with 'Count me in the comparisons, anonymously' on, your finished books are added, without your name, to the group figures behind the Dashboard's comparisons with other readers (section 7). It is off unless you turn it on.
For the features you use: recommendations, the AI features in section 4, and syncing to services you connect.
To email you: sign-in and account emails, and emails about using ReadingRate (getting started, the end of a trial, what is new). Every email that is not about your account has a one-click unsubscribe link.
To keep the service safe: rate limits, abuse prevention and diagnosing faults.
To improve ReadingRate: product analytics, when they are on (section 1).
To meet legal obligations: for example, tax rules for payments, and lawful requests from authorities.

4. AI-Powered Features

These features send your content to an AI provider to produce their result. Most run when you use them; the ones marked as automatic run on their own. On the website and in the iPhone app, Insight Lab, the reading companion, debriefs, writing help, quotes, photos, voice and images ask before they first send anything, and what runs on its own keeps running until you say Not now. Not now keeps all of these off for your account, on the website, in the iPhone app, on the Apple Watch and in Siri, and also stops the automatic insights, the search vectors made from your journal and quotes, and Omi, until you allow them in Settings › Privacy. Book files and book analysis, which use the books rather than your reading, do not ask, and the chat bot does not ask yet.

Insight Lab, the reading companion and debriefs: your question or selected passage, with relevant passages, quotes, notes, journal entries and reflections, goes to Anthropic. When you finish a book, or reach 90% of it, Anthropic writes debrief questions from what you wrote while reading it, the insights you saved about it and a few of your answers to earlier debriefs. On iOS 27 with Apple Intelligence on, Lab answers are written by Apple's on-device model or Private Cloud Compute instead, and so are debrief questions when Anthropic cannot write them.
Your reading interests: your answer to 'Tell us about your reading' goes to Anthropic, without your account identifier, to match it to our themes and reading domains.
Automatic insights: every night, for readers with enough journal entries and quotes, your recent journal entries, quotes and notes and your finished books with their ratings go to Anthropic to find the themes and patterns in your reading. Follow-up questions are written each day from your debrief answers and quotes, and a reading wiki, for members who have it, from your ratings, reflections, journal, quotes and saved insights.
Writing help: review drafts and captions, monthly and yearly summaries, reading lists made for you, book-club talking points and picks, and recommendations for a friend send what each one needs (your ratings, journal entries, quotes and reading history; for a recommendation, also the last ten books your friend finished, if they read on ReadingRate) to Anthropic.
Quotes: each quote you save goes to Anthropic to suggest its themes and who said it, and quotes you paste in bulk are split into separate quotes by Anthropic.
Photos: photos of pages, covers, underlined passages, bookshelves and reading-progress screens go to Anthropic to read them.
Voice and spoken commands: recordings, including Siri, Shortcuts and Apple Watch commands, are transcribed by Deepgram or Apple's speech recognition, and the transcripts go to Anthropic to work out the command and fix transcription mistakes.
Chat bot: your recent messages, and the reading data the bot looks up through ReadingRate's tools, go to Anthropic to write its replies.
Omi: transcripts that mention reading go to Anthropic to find quotes and books. A transcript can include what other people said near you.
Book files: the text of a book you upload is split into passages and turned into search vectors by Cloudflare Workers AI; Anthropic checks excerpts against the book's identity, lists its characters, and analyses it for the public catalog.
Search by meaning (automatic): every journal entry and quote you save or edit, with its notes, and the words you search for are turned into search vectors by Cloudflare Workers AI, to find related passages.
Images: pictures for reading summaries and illustrated passages are made by Cloudflare Workers AI from what the summary or passage says.
Book analysis: difficulty scores and descriptions of catalog books are produced with Anthropic from the books themselves, including text readers uploaded, never from your reading data.

These providers process this content on our behalf. We do not use your content to train AI models, and Anthropic, Deepgram and Cloudflare are not permitted to use it to train theirs (we send Deepgram's opt-out with every recording). Apple's speech recognition in the iPhone app can process audio on Apple's servers under your iPhone's Siri and Dictation settings. Our backend's requests to Anthropic go through Cloudflare's AI Gateway, which records each request's model, size and cost but not what it says; the chat bot's requests, the book-file checks and your reading-interests answer go to Anthropic directly. If Anthropic is unavailable, a text-only request can be answered instead by an open model (Llama) on Cloudflare Workers AI, through a service we run on Cloudflare.

5. Who Receives Your Data

We share personal data with these recipients, for the purposes above:

Cloudflare: hosts the website, our APIs, our main database and the AI-assistant server; stores files, search vectors, backups and caches; runs search by meaning, image generation and the fallback AI model; and sends most of our emails.
Supabase: sign-in and storage for the files you upload, such as photos, hosted on Amazon Web Services in Ireland, and some of our server functions. It also holds our database as it was before we moved it to Cloudflare on 16 October 2026 (section 6).
Anthropic, Deepgram and Apple: the AI processing described in section 4.
Modal: extracts the text from book files you upload.
Amazon Web Services: renders review cards and videos in the United States, automatically when you finish a book and when you make one, from your rating, verdict, quotes, captions, reading pace, dates and any photos you add. The finished card is stored where anyone with its link can open it.
PostHog: product analytics, website error reports and session recordings, while analytics are on (section 1). Our servers also send it when you sign up and when you log a reading day, unless you turn analytics off.
Resend and Loops: Resend sends contact-form messages, the book recommendations you email to others, some account emails, and internal reports to us. Loops holds your name, email address, account identifier and how you signed up, and receives events such as the books and pages you log, for emails about using ReadingRate.
Apple Push Notification service: delivers notifications to your iPhone, which can include book titles, quote text and the names of other members of your clubs.
Stripe and Apple: payments. Stripe receives your email address and account identifier with a payment on the website.
Google and Apple: sign-in, if you use it.
Google: the fonts and videos on our website, which see your IP address, and our support mailbox.
wsrv.nl: resizes profile photos and book covers shown on the website, so it receives the image's address and your IP address.
Google Books, Open Library and Wikidata: book searches, book details and cover images. Our servers send only titles, authors and ISBNs; searches your browser or iPhone makes directly also show them your IP address.
GitHub: runs our scheduled jobs on its servers. Some of them read our main database, and the weekly backups pass a full copy of it, with the sign-in accounts held at Supabase, through GitHub's servers. Error reports we file there as issues include the page and browser, not your account.
Services you connect: Notion, Readwise, Obsidian, Omi, WhatsApp, Telegram and Threads receive what you send or sync to them.
AI assistants you connect: OpenAI (ChatGPT), Anthropic (Claude) and other assistants receive what ReadingRate's tools return in your conversations.
Other readers and the public: what section 7 describes.
Authorities: if the law requires it, or to protect someone's safety.

6. How Long We Keep Data

Data	Kept for
Your account and reading data	Until you delete them, or your account. Quotes, journal entries and reading-list items you delete are hidden at once and erased 30 days later, with the photos, quote cards and videos attached to them, and reading interests you remove or replace are erased 30 days later too. A book you remove from your library keeps its readings and page history, so adding it again brings them back; all of this is erased with your account
An account you asked us to delete	Deleted 30 days after you ask, with its reading data, the files you uploaded (book files, photos, quote cards), the chat bot's messages and its connection to your account, your AI assistant connections, your records at Loops and Stripe, and your PostHog records with their events and recordings. To cancel, sign in during those 30 days and choose Cancel Deletion in Settings. Book text you uploaded is deleted too, unless you agreed when you uploaded it that a shared copy may remain, you uploaded it before we began asking on 1 October 2026, or a later import replaced it; text that stays is ReadingRate's copy of the book. That text and error reports are kept without the link to your account. The rows below say how long copies stay elsewhere
Database history and backups	Cloudflare keeps 30 days of our main database's history. Every week we back up the main database, and the sign-in accounts held at Supabase (without sign-in sessions), to Cloudflare R2; up to 18 October 2026, our database at Supabase was backed up there each week. Each backup in R2 is deleted 90 days after it is made. Supabase keeps daily backups of its database, which holds the sign-in accounts and the copy, for 7 days. Data you delete stays in the history and the backups until they age out, and in Supabase's daily backups for as long as the copy holds it
The copy of our database at Supabase, from before 16 October 2026, and the log of changes since then	Kept so that our move to Cloudflare can be undone, until we delete them; no date is set yet. The log holds the changes made through our API, with what they contained, including those of accounts deleted since. Data you delete stays in both until then; deleting your account also deletes its rows in the copy
Search vectors of your journal entries, notes, quotes, saved insights and reading profile	Kept in Cloudflare Vectorize with your account identifier until the item itself is erased or your account is deleted, then removed, normally within a minute. A quote or journal entry you delete is erased 30 days later; a saved insight, at once
Health data from earlier Apple Watch versions	With the reading session, until you delete it or your account
Scanned photos, voice recordings and Omi transcripts	Not stored after processing. The first 100 characters of a spoken command we could not understand are kept until your account is deleted
Import files	With your account, until you delete it
AI assistant connection tokens	Until the assistant revokes the connection, or 12 months without use
Request and tool-call logs	Up to 7 days
Error reports	90 days; if your account is deleted before then, they lose the link to it
Cached results and rate-limit counters	Up to 10 minutes; the counter for period summaries, 2 hours; the last plan check for AI assistants, 30 days. The counters for your reading-interests answer are kept under a hashed account identifier, and erased within two days of their last use or when your account is deleted
Product analytics	Events up to 7 years; session recordings 30 days
Chat bot messages and Threads mentions	The most recent 30 messages of your chat, older ones replaced as you write; the most recent 500 Threads mentions
Payment records	Ours are deleted with your account; Stripe and Apple keep theirs as tax law requires

7. Public and Private Information

Public or private profile

Accounts created since 13 October 2026 start private; accounts created before then started public. You choose in Privacy settings, on the website or in the iPhone app ("Friends only" currently works the same as private). While your profile is private, nobody else sees your profile page, you do not appear in other readers' feeds, in 'Readers like you', among the others reading a book or in a book's popular highlights, and nobody can follow you or send you a friend request. What others can still see is listed below, under 'Also seen by other signed-in readers' and 'Shared by link'.

What a public profile shows

Anyone, including people who are not signed in, can see your display name, username and photo; the bio, location, website and X handle you add; the month you joined; your member number (shown unless you turn off the Member number switch, which hides it from everyone but you); and how many readers follow you and how many you follow, with the names of those whose profiles are public. The rest depends on the switches in Privacy settings:

Currently reading (shown unless you turn it off): the books you are reading, with start dates, progress, ratings and reflections. Signed-in readers of the same book see you among the others reading it.
Reading activity (shown unless you turn it off): the timeline of your readings, with dates, the page you reached and your pace, for the books the other switches show. With Currently reading also on, books you start appear in the feed of readers who follow you.
Reading queue (shown unless you turn it off): the books you want to read, with your notes on them.
Completed books (hidden unless you turn it on): your finished books, with dates, ratings and reflections, and the books you stopped reading. Readers who follow you also see the books you finish in their feed and on the book's page, and, if you allow following, 'Readers like you' can show two of them.
Reading stats (hidden unless you turn it on): words per day, pages per day and books this year.
Reading journal (hidden unless you turn it on): your journal entries, with each day's pages.
Quotes (shown unless you turn it off): your saved quotes, poem lines included, with their notes and themes; quotes you log in your journal follow this switch too. Signed-in readers also see which quotes you starred, and readers who follow you see your quotes, with your name, on the book's page and in their feed. A passage that two or more readers with public quotes saved can appear among the book's popular highlights, without names.

The comparisons with other readers on the website's Dashboard come from a public file of group figures. Its figures come only from readers who choose 'Count me in the comparisons, anonymously' in Privacy settings or on the Dashboard, and who have at least 10 finished books still in their library. It is off unless you turn it on, and if you turn it off you are left out of the file from its next weekly update. The file is made from those books: their average difficulty and literary regard, the share of translated books and of books by women, and how many countries their authors come from. It names no one and lists no book; its counts, including how many readers qualify, are rounded to the nearest 5, and it publishes a comparison figure only when at least 20 of those readers have that measure, and only when at least five of them are at or below it and five at or above it. Being counted shows nothing on your profile, whether it is public or private, and other readers cannot see whether you chose it.

Also seen by other signed-in readers

While your profile is public: your reading streak, when you last read, the weekdays you usually read and how many days you have logged.
Unless you turn off Allow following, anyone signed in can follow your public profile without your approval; we tell you when someone does.
Members of a book club you join see your role, when you joined, your progress in the club's book, the club settings you choose (reading pace, session length and notifications) and your posts, with your display name and photo. Members of a reading group you join see your display name and photo too. Both show even while your profile is private, and nothing else of your profile does. Signed-in readers can also see which public clubs you belong to, with your progress, even while your profile is private.
Someone who recommends a book to you through ReadingRate can see when you start and finish it, and your rating.

Shared by link

Anyone with the link can open what you share: quote cards (your note on a card stays private), shelves, anthologies, journey posts and quote videos. Photos you attach to journal entries and reviews are stored at unlisted addresses that anyone who has the address can open. The button in the email we send about a day after you sign up, if you have not logged a reading day yet, opens a page that shows the book you are reading, or one from your shelf, and whether you have logged a reading day today. On that page you can log a reading day and the page you reached, without signing in; anyone with that email's link can do this for 14 days.

Covers, images and book text

A book cover you upload is shown on the book's page. Your account is recorded as its uploader; no other reader can see which account that is, and your name is not shown with it.
Images you generate of a book's characters appear on that book's public image page, without your name or the prompt.
Book text you upload is used to analyse the book for everyone: scores, summaries, characters and other insights in the catalog. The text itself is shown only to readers who uploaded their own copy of the book, in the app and through AI assistants (section 2), and anyone can read the short passages that the catalog's analyses and reading trails quote on our public pages. The book records which account uploaded it; no other reader can see which account that is.

Always private

Your email address
Your individual reading sessions, and the dated history of the page you reached in each book (a journal entry you make visible still shows that day's pages)
Your saved reading insights
Your health data
Your payments and founding-member details
Tokens for services you connect

A change to your privacy settings reaches every page within about 15 minutes; a book's page can take up to 6 hours to drop a highlight.

Public book catalog

Our book catalog (titles, authors, difficulty scores, cover images) is public. Its data comes from public sources, our own analysis and text readers upload, and is not personal information.

8. Your Rights and Choices

See your data: everything you record is in the app.
Export: download your books, journal and quotes as Markdown under Settings → Import / Export on the website. The iPhone app also exports everything as Markdown, and your books as a CSV file you can import into Goodreads or StoryGraph.
Delete: delete individual items in the app, or your whole account in Settings on the website or in the iPhone app. The account is deleted 30 days after you ask; to cancel, sign in and choose Cancel Deletion in Settings.
Disconnect: remove connected services and AI assistants at any time.
Analytics: turn analytics off with Decline in the website's cookie banner, Disable Analytics in the website's privacy settings, or Usage Analytics in the iPhone app's settings.
Email: unsubscribe from emails that are not about your account with the link in each one.
Visibility: choose what is public in the privacy settings on the website.

9. Cookies and Local Storage

We use cookies and browser storage that keep you signed in, remember your settings, including your analytics choice, and keep what you have not saved yet, such as books you tick on a best-books list. PostHog, our analytics provider, sets a cookie and browser storage only while analytics are on: in the EU, the rest of the EEA, the UK and Switzerland after you accept in the cookie banner, and elsewhere from your first visit until you choose Decline. We do not use advertising cookies or tracking pixels from ad networks. Our emails contain a pixel that records whether they were opened.

10. Storage, Transfers and Security

Our main database is in Cloudflare D1, in western Europe. Sign-in, the files you upload and the copy of our database from before 16 October 2026 are at Supabase, in Ireland; copies are kept in Cloudflare R2, book files when they are imported and other files as they are served, and R2 also keeps our backups. Cloudflare and our other providers may process data in other countries, including the United States, under their data protection terms.
Data is encrypted in transit and at rest.
Our API applies access rules to every database request, so each account can read only its own data and what other readers' privacy settings make visible.
Notion and Readwise tokens are encrypted in our database, and passwords are never stored in plain text.

11. Your Regional Rights

European Economic Area and United Kingdom (GDPR)

You have the right to:

Access, correct or delete your personal data
Object to or restrict processing
Receive your data in a portable format
Withdraw consent at any time, without affecting processing before you withdrew it
Lodge a complaint with your data protection authority

We process your data to provide the service you signed up for (contract); with your consent for analytics in your browser and the app, health data, counting your finished books in the comparisons with other readers (consent you give by ticking 'Count me in the comparisons, anonymously' in Privacy settings or choosing 'Count me in' on the Dashboard, and withdraw by turning it off), the AI features that ask first (consent you give by choosing Allow when the website or the iPhone app asks, and withdraw in Settings › Privacy) and optional features; and on our legitimate interests in keeping the service secure and working and in counting sign-ups and reading days on our servers, which you can stop by turning analytics off.

California (CCPA/CPRA)

California residents have the right to:

Know what personal information is collected, used and disclosed
Request deletion or correction of personal information
Opt out of the sale or sharing of personal information; we do not sell or share it for advertising
Not be discriminated against for exercising these rights

12. Children

ReadingRate is not directed at children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect personal data from them.

13. Changes to This Policy

We update this policy when what we collect or how we use it changes. Significant changes are announced by email or in the app before they take effect. The date at the top shows the latest revision.

14. Contact

ReadingRate is run by Simon Stawski, the controller of your personal data. For privacy questions, data requests or concerns, write to [email protected] or use our contact form.