Privacy

In two sentences

PAL is a personal reading journal. It shows no advertising, neither sells nor shares your data, and does not profile you — what it stores is what you write in it yourself about your reading.

Who is responsible

The data controller is Dilé Baptiste, a private individual acting outside any professional activity. For any question or request about your data: baptiste.dile@gmail.com.

The full details of the publisher and its hosts are in the legal notice, and the rules of the service in the terms of use.

What is stored

• Your account — your email address, and your password in one-way encrypted form. If you sign in with Google from the website, your Google name and profile picture.
• Your profile — username, display name, monogram colour, favourite genres, and whether your library is visible to your friends or not.
• Your reading — the books on your shelves, their status, your ratings, your reviews, your progress, your reading dates, what you own or have borrowed, your saved quotes.
• Your exchanges — the people you follow, the messages left in reading threads, and your reactions.
• The covers you upload — kept in a private space, one folder per person, never listable by anyone else.
• Your feedback — if you write some from Settings: the text, the date, and the version of PAL it was sent from. Nothing else — no screenshot, no browsing history, no device identifier. It is read only by us, and disappears with your account.
• Books you add yourself— when search can't find a book and you describe it. The book joins PAL's catalogue once checked; the fact that you added it is visible only to you and to us, and that link disappears with your account.
• Notifications, if you accept them — the identifier your phone receives from Apple on iPhone, or from Google on Android, so that a notification can reach it. It says nothing about your reading, and it is removed as soon as you sign out. Declining notifications changes nothing in the rest of the app.
• A copy on your phone — in the app, your books, statistics and calendar as they were when last loaded, so you can see them without a connection. It stays on the device, is sent nowhere, is left out of backups, and is erased as soon as you sign out.

Who can see what

Your library is private by default. It only becomes visible to the people who follow you, and only if you have made your profile public. These rules are not enforced by the app: they are written into the database itself, which refuses to serve a row you are not allowed to read.

One deliberate exception: the book catalogue — titles, authors, covers, summaries — is shared by all users. It says nothing about anyone; it only contains what Google’s catalogue already says about a book.

Audience measurement

The website counts its page views with Vercel Analytics, which uses neither cookies nor persistent identifiers and cannot recognise you from one visit to the next.

The app, on iPhone as on Android, includes no audience measurement, no tracker and no advertising tracking tool. On Android, it uses Firebase Cloud Messaging, Google’s service, solely to receive notifications: no other Firebase module is included.

The services that host all this

• Supabase — database, accounts and cover storage.
• Vercel — website hosting and audience measurement.
• Resend — delivery of your account emails: sign-up confirmation, password reset, change of address. Resend receives only your email address and the message sent — never your library, your notes or your covers.
• Google Books and the BnF (the French national library) — queried to find a book by its title or barcode. These requests leave from our servers and not from your device: neither Google nor the BnF sees your IP address, and nothing tells them who was searching.
• Apple on iPhone, and Google through Firebase Cloud Messaging on Android — delivery of notifications to your phone, if you accept them. They receive your device identifier and the text of each notification, which says who follows you or wrote to you, or which book comes out — never the content of a message nor what your shelves hold.

Where your data is

Your account, your library and your covers are hosted in the European Union, on Supabase’s European servers. The website itself is served from Paris.

Your account emails leave from Resend’s Irish servers, also in the European Union.

Supabase, Vercel and Resend are, however, American companies: their technical teams may, from the United States, access the systems hosting this data in order to maintain them. Such access is governed by the European Commission’s standard contractual clauses, included in the data processing agreements of these three providers.

Queries to Google Books and the BnF leave from our servers and only carry what is searched for — a title, an author’s name, a barcode. They contain neither your identity nor your IP address, and do not say who was searching.

Notifications go through Apple’s or Google’s servers, which may be outside the European Union. These transfers are governed by the standard contractual clauses included in the terms of these two companies.

How long

• Your account and everything in it — profile, shelves, ratings, reviews, quotes, messages, covers — remain as long as the account exists, and are erased the moment you delete it.
• Inactive accounts are not deleted automatically: nothing today erases an account nobody signs in to any more. If such a deletion is ever introduced, an email will warn you beforehand.
• Technical logs — the access and error traces our hosts keep for security and troubleshooting — are kept temporarily by them, for their own retention periods. We do not use them for anything else.
• Hosting backups may contain a copy of your data for a few days after it is deleted, until the backup cycle has run. They are only used to restore service after an incident.

Your rights

You can view and correct your information at any time from the app. You can delete your account yourself, without asking and without delay: in the app, on the Settings page, under Account; on the website, on the Settings page. Deletion is immediate and permanent — your profile, shelves, ratings, quotes, messages and uploaded covers go with it. Only the shared book catalogue, which says nothing about you, remains.

You can take your data with you: on the website, the “Export my data” button on the Settings page gives you, in a readable file, your profile, your library, your ratings, your reviews, your quotes, your goals and the messages you wrote.

You also have a right of access, rectification and objection, and the right to lodge a complaint with the CNIL, the French data protection authority. To exercise them, write to the address given above.

Changes

If this policy changes, the date at the top of the page changes with it.