Privacy Policy

What we store

• · Your email and password, to sign you in.
• · Whether you agreed to optional email — a plain yes or no, recorded when you signed up. It is no unless you ticked the box.
• · Your shelf — the title, author, cover and length of each book (the details, not the file).
• · Your reading: progress, streaks, highlights and notes.
• · Your profile: display name, username, a bio and, if you add one, a photo.
• · What you ask the reading assistant and what it answers, so the conversation is still there next time you open the book — and a running summary of the book so far, which is how it remembers without being sent the whole thing again.
• · Who you follow, the groups you are in, what you post in them, and the messages you send and receive.
• · How many questions you have asked the assistant, and roughly what each one cost us — counts, not the questions — so a plan’s limits can be kept.

What stays on your device

The book files themselves — your PDFs and EPUBs — are stored in your browser on your device and are never uploaded to our servers. We can’t see them, and they aren’t part of your account.

Who can see what

Your highlights and the notes you write on them are private by default. Nobody else can read them — not other readers, not the people in your groups, and not us.

• · Your profile — name, username, photo and bio — is visible to anyone signed in, unless you keep your account private: then nobody can find you by name or handle, and only people in a group with you can see it. Your plan is never shown: what you pay, when it renews and whether it was a gift are yours alone.
• · Your shelf and progress are visible to people who follow you and to members of groups you join.
• · A note becomes visible only if you say so, and you say so twice over: by sharing a single note, or by opening one book’s notes to one group. Both are off unless you turn them on, and turning them off again takes them back.
• · Anything you post in a group — a message, or a passage you send to it — is visible to that group.
• · Your rating and review of a book are yours alone.

Leaving a group, or a group being deleted, ends that group’s access to the notes you opened to it. Messages you posted in the group stay, the way a message you have already sent does — delete them first if you would rather they didn’t.

The reading assistant

When you ask the assistant a question, short excerpts of the book — not the whole book — are sent to our AI provider, Anthropic, to generate the answer. We send only what’s needed for that request. For a novel those excerpts come only from pages you have already read; for a book you have marked as one you’re studying, they may come from anywhere in it, because that is the point of studying.

If you have highlighted or annotated the passages involved, those highlights and notes may be sent along with the excerpt so the answer can take account of them.

Email

There are two kinds and only one of them is optional.

The account kind — confirming your address, resetting your password — is sent when you do the thing that needs it. It can’t be switched off without breaking the account, so we don’t offer to switch it off.

Everything else is optional, and it is off unless you ticked the box when you signed up. We keep that answer as a yes or a no. As it stands we send no optional email at all — the box exists so that if we ever do, it is because somebody said yes rather than because nobody said no.

There is no switch for it in the app yet. Until there is, write to support@marginaliareader.com and we will change it; deleting your account removes the record with everything else.

Where it lives, and who else touches it

We don’t sell your data, we don’t use your reading history for advertising, and the list of companies that see any of it is short enough to print:

• · Supabase — stores everything listed under “What we store” above.
• · Vercel — runs the site, and counts visits (see below).
• · Anthropic — answers what you ask the assistant, from the excerpts described above.
• · Resend — sends the confirmation and password emails, and therefore handles your address.
• · Whop (outside Egypt) and Paymob (inside it) — take the payment if you buy a plan by card, and PayPal if you choose to pay with PayPal.

These are servers in the United States and Europe, so using Marginalia means your account data is handled outside your own country. Where the law requires a legal basis for that, ours is that it is necessary to give you the service you asked for.

Paying

Your card and your PayPal login are typed into Whop, Paymob or PayPal, never into Marginalia. They send us back a message about the payment, and before we store it we cut it down to what we use: which plan, the amount and currency, when it was paid, whether it went through, and their reference numbers for it. Your name, email, billing address and card details are in that message and are dropped before it is written down — we don’t keep them. We keep the record of the payment because tax law requires it, which is why deleting your account does not delete a receipt.

Cookies, and what else is kept on your device

Marginalia sets one kind of cookie: the one that keeps you signed in. There is no advertising cookie, no tracking cookie, and nothing shared with another site — which is why there is no banner asking you to accept any. A cookie that is strictly necessary to do what you asked for does not need to be consented to, and that is the only kind here.

Rather more is kept on your device than in a cookie, and none of it reaches us: your book files, the text we have already read out of them so a page opens instantly the second time, and your settings. Clearing your browser’s data for this site removes all of it, including the books — so export anything you want to keep first.

Counting visits

We use Vercel Web Analytics to see how many people arrive and which pages they land on. It does not use cookies, it does not store your IP address, and it does not follow you to any other site — it counts visits, not people. There is no Google Analytics here and no advertising pixel anywhere.

Your browser does fetch a few things from other companies, and asking another website for a file tells that website your IP address, the way opening any web page does. Book covers come from Open Library, the Internet Archive and Google Books; a link to buy a book points at Bookshop.org; and the first time you read a scanned page, the text-recognition engine downloads itself from the jsDelivr CDN. Nothing about you or your book travels with any of those requests — only which cover, or which language.

How long we keep it

Your account and everything in it stays until you delete it — a shelf you come back to after two years should still be there. Delete the account and it goes at once, except for two things. Payment records stay, because tax law requires it. And a bug report or a piece of feedback you sent stays too — but it stops being yours: your account is unlinked from it, so what is left is the description of the problem with nobody attached to it.

Your rights over it

You can ask for a copy of what we hold, ask us to correct it, or ask us to delete it. Most of that you can simply do yourself from your Account page, which is faster than asking. If you are in the UK or the EU you also have the right to object to what we do, to take your data elsewhere, and to complain to your country’s data protection authority if you think we have got this wrong. We would rather you told us first.

Children

Marginalia is not built for children and accounts are for 13s and over — 16 and over in the European Union. If a younger child has made one, write to us and we will delete it.

Your control

You can edit your profile and remove books, highlights and notes at any time. You can also permanently delete your entire account and everything in it from your Account page — this can’t be undone.

Contact

Questions, or a request about your data: support@marginaliareader.com

Marginalia is run by Mahmoud Ayman El Sherif, Egypt, postal code 11841 — full street address on request. support@marginaliareader.com There is no separate data protection officer — that is the person who reads it.