Privacy

This is a small library run by people, not a business with a data department. The short version: we keep what the site needs to work, we do not sell any of it, there is no advertising and no third-party tracking on any page, and the things you tell us in confidence are never shown to other readers.

Reading without an account

You can read here without telling us anything. No account, no email address, no name. Nothing is kept that is tied to you, because there is no "you" to tie it to — no library, no bookmarks, and no record of where you got to in a book, which is the trade: privacy in exchange for the site forgetting you between visits.

What we keep about members

An email address and a password you chose, so you can sign in. The password is stored as a hash — we cannot read it, and neither can anybody who steals the database. A username, which is the name other readers see next to anything you write. Your library: the books you have added, where you are up to in each of them, your bookmarks and notes, the shelves you have made and any reviews you have written. Reviews and shared shelves are meant to be seen; your reading position, your notes and your private books are not, and are shown to nobody but you.

Signing in sets one cookie. It holds a random token and nothing else, it is there so the site knows it is still you between clicks, and signing out deletes it. There are no advertising cookies, because there is no advertising.

What we count, and how we avoid knowing who you are

We count visits, pages opened and searches made, because a library that cannot tell how it is used cannot be improved. That counting is deliberately built so that it cannot be turned back into a person:

• Your IP address is never stored. It is mixed with a secret and the day's date into a one-way fingerprint that changes at midnight, which lets us count two visits from the same person on the same day without keeping anything that identifies them tomorrow.
• Rough location — country and region — is worked out on our own server from an offline address list. Nothing is sent to a geolocation service.
• There is no analytics cookie and no third-party analytics anywhere. If your browser says Do Not Track or Global Privacy Control, we do not count you at all, and the numbers are quietly wrong in your favour.
• Searches are kept, without your identity attached unless you are signed in, so that we can see what the catalogue is missing.

Ordinary web-server logs — the address a request came from, the page asked for, the time — exist too, because a server that cannot tell an abusive script from a reader cannot stay up. They rotate away after a few weeks.

What writers see about their readers

A writer who publishes here gets figures about their own books: how many people opened one, how far through people got on average, reviews, how often it was shared, and how many readers saved it. Alongside those, a rough breakdown of where their readers are.

Those breakdowns are aggregates only, and small groups are hidden entirely. If a bucket — a country, an age band — holds fewer than five readers, the writer is shown nothing for it rather than a number that would effectively name one person. A writer is never shown who read their book.

What we ask of writers, and what happens to it

Publishing your own work here asks for three things a reader is never asked for: your legal name, your age and your postcode or ZIP. They are collected because a book published under a pen name still has a person behind it. If a rights holder writes to us about something you published, we need to know who we are talking about, and "an account called E. M. Whitfield" is not an answer.

None of those three is ever shown on the site. Not on your profile, not on your books, not in search results, not to other members and not to anybody who asks. The pages that show a writer to the public are built from a list of columns that does not include them. What the public sees is the name you chose to publish under, your biography if you wrote one, your books, and whichever contact details you deliberately turned on — each of them off until you switch it on, and never the address you sign in with.

Administrators of this site can see them, because somebody has to be able to answer a legal complaint. We will hand them over outside that circle only when we are legally obliged to, or where somebody is in danger.

Your age is used in one other place: it can contribute to the anonymous age breakdown a writer sees about their readers, under the five-reader rule above.

When you publish, we also record which version of the writer's agreement you accepted, when, and the address the request came from. That is an audit trail: an agreement nobody can produce later is not an agreement.

Messages from us

The site has an inbox. When we write to everybody, to all writers, or to you, a copy is delivered there and we record whether it has been opened — that is all the message system knows about you.

Your files

Books you upload are stored on our server, outside the public web root, and served only to people entitled to see them. A manuscript sent to the writing desk is converted to EPUB and the file you sent is kept beside it, unaltered, so that a conversion can be redone and so there is always a record of what you actually submitted.

Who else is involved

The site runs on a rented server in a data centre; the company that rents it to us can technically reach the disk, as is true of every hosted service anywhere. Search runs on the same machine, not a service. Email — confirming an address, and little else — leaves our server directly to your provider. Nothing on any page loads from a third party, so no third party learns what you are reading.

How long

For as long as you have an account. Delete your account and your library, your notes, your positions and your files go with it. Published books are the one exception worth stating plainly: a book that has been the subject of a rights complaint is kept out of public view rather than destroyed, because destroying the evidence the moment somebody objects serves nobody. Visit counts are kept for a year and searches for two, both without identities attached.

What you can ask for

A copy of what we hold about you, a correction, or deletion. Write and ask. If you are in the UK or the EU those are rights rather than favours, and we will treat them that way wherever you are.

Children

There is no minimum age to read here, and none to write here unless an administrator sets one. We collect the same three details from a fourteen-year-old novelist as from anybody else, keep them just as private, and if a parent or guardian asks us to remove a child's account we will do it without argument.

Writing to us

About your own data, or anything on this page: privacy@adb4.com. About a book that should not be here: copyright@adb4.com.

If this page changes in a way that matters, the date at the top changes with it.