Privacy Policy
Last updated: 8 September 2026
ShelfShare is an app where people swap, give away and sell books to each other. To work, it has to store certain data about you. This page explains exactly what that data is, why we keep it, and what you can do about it.
For anything concerning your data: [email protected].
1. What data we collect
Account data
- If you sign up with email and password: your email address and password. The password is never stored in plain text — we keep only a bcrypt hash, from which the password cannot be recovered.
- If you sign in with Google: your email address, display name, profile picture and Google account identifier. See section 4 for details.
Profile data you provide
Name, username, city, bio, profile picture, day and month of birth (deliberately without the year — a birthday greeting does not require knowing your age), the languages you read in, your favourite genres and authors, your reading pace and your annual reading goal. Almost all of these are optional.
Content you create
Book listings and their photos, reviews, shelves and collections, wishlists, price offers, auctions, groups and their posts, exchange requests, ratings you give other users, chat messages and reports you submit.
Data generated by using the app
The books you open, the searches you run, your Book Match choices, the taste profile computed from them, your streak of consecutive active days, your experience points and the time of your last activity. All of it exists so we can recommend relevant books and show you your progress.
Technical data
- Your IP address, kept in the security log, and only in connection with events such as failed sign-in attempts or account lockouts.
- Your device's notification token, if you accept push notifications.
- Activity logs for interactions between users and with administrators. Message content is not included in them.
2. Why we collect it
| Purpose | Legal basis |
|---|---|
| Creating your account, publishing listings, chat, exchanges | Performance of the service you asked for |
| Abuse protection: rate-limiting sign-in attempts, temporary account lockouts, the security log | Our legitimate interest in keeping the platform safe |
| Book recommendations based on your taste | Performance of the service |
| Push notifications | Your consent, which you can withdraw in your phone's settings |
| Usage statistics on the website | Your consent, given in the banner on your first visit — see section 5 |
| Usage statistics in the mobile app | Our legitimate interest in understanding which features get used. They are on by default and you can turn them off at any time in Settings — see section 5 |
We do not sell your data to anyone and we do not use it for targeted advertising.
3. What is public and what is not
Visible to other users: your username, profile picture, city, bio, reputation and exchange count, your listings and the reviews you write.
Never visible to others: your email address, password, IP address, date of birth and the content of your private messages.
You have granular control: in settings you can hide your listings from public results separately for each type — swap, sale, donation, auction — and you can hide your real name.
4. Signing in with Google
When you choose "Continue with Google", we receive exactly four things from Google: your email address, display name, profile picture and a unique account identifier. These correspond to the email and profile scopes, the only ones we request.
We never receive your Google account password, and we have no access to Gmail, Drive, Calendar, contacts or any other Google service.
ShelfShare's use of information received from Google APIs adheres to the Google API Services User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements. Data received through Google is used solely to create and identify your account — it is not transferred to anyone else, not used for advertising, and not read by humans, except where you ask us for support, the law requires it, or it is necessary to investigate abuse.
5. Third-party services
We deliberately keep this list short. The app runs on a self-managed server, not on a cloud platform.
| Service | What it receives | What for |
|---|---|---|
| The sign-in data described above | Google sign-in | |
| Resend | Your email address | Verification and password reset emails |
| Firebase Cloud Messaging | Your device token and the notification content | Delivering push notifications |
| Cloudflare | Traffic between you and the server, including your IP address | The secure connection to the server |
| Google Analytics / Firebase Analytics | Screens you open, actions such as “listed a book”, the terms you search for (title, author) and device identifiers, including the Android advertising ID | Usage statistics — see below for how to turn them off |
The two do not work the same way. On the website nothing starts until you press “Accept” in the banner shown on your first visit. In the mobile app the statistics are on by default and you can switch them off whenever you like, from Settings → “Send anonymous statistics”; from that moment nothing more is sent. We do not use this data for advertising, we build no ad profiles from it, and we give it to nobody other than Google, which processes it on our behalf.
When you add a book, we query Open Library and Google Books for the title, author, cover and list price. Those requests contain only book data — never anything about you.
The "About dev" page contains a PayPal link for donations. If you use it, the payment happens entirely at PayPal; we never see or store payment details.
6. Where the data lives and how it is protected
The database and the photos live on a personally administered server located in Romania. The server is not exposed directly to the internet — all traffic passes through a Cloudflare tunnel.
A GPG-encrypted backup is taken daily and kept for 14 days, plus a limited number of generations on an external drive. Passwords are stored as bcrypt hashes. Repeated failed sign-ins lock the account temporarily.
No system is perfectly secure. If a breach affects your data, we will tell you.
7. How long we keep the data
- Your account: until you ask for it to be deleted.
- After you request deletion: the account is disabled immediately, and actual deletion happens after 15 days. During that window you can change your mind by signing in again. After it expires, the data is permanently deleted.
- Backups: may still contain your data for up to 14 days after deletion, then it disappears with backup rotation.
- Security logs: kept separately, for investigating abuse.
Messages you sent to other users remain visible in their conversation, much like an SMS that has already been delivered.
8. Your rights
If you are in the European Union, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) gives you the right to request access to your data, its correction, its erasure, restriction of or objection to processing, and portability of your data in a machine-readable format. You can withdraw your consent at any time where consent was the basis for processing.
Most of this you can do yourself in the app: edit your profile, hide your listings and delete your account from Settings. For anything else, write to [email protected] — we reply within 30 days at most.
If you are unhappy with our response, you can lodge a complaint with the Romanian National Supervisory Authority for Personal Data Processing (dataprotection.ro) or with the supervisory authority in your country.
9. Children
ShelfShare is not aimed at children under 16 and we do not knowingly collect data about them. If you find that a child under 16 has created an account, write to us and we will delete it.
10. Changes
If we change this policy, we update the date at the top of the page. For significant changes we notify you in the app before they take effect.