Privacy Policy

1. What Data We Collect

• Account info: email, login data via Clerk.
• Content you create: reviews, posts, comments, photos you upload to the feed, private notes, wishlist folders and the books you add to them (private to you), OCR text fragments you save.
• Functional contributions: corrections and additions to book metadata.
• Usage info: app interactions, device info, approximate location derived from IP.
• Cookies & tracking: see Cookie Policy.
• Referral clicks: when you open a referral link, the record described in section 7.
• Web subscription data (Premium subscribers on the website): when you purchase a Premium subscription on the Readlink website, the transaction is processed by Stripe Payments Europe, Limited or its affiliates ("Stripe") under Stripe's terms. Stripe collects your billing email, billing address, and tokenized card or alternative payment instrument details on our behalf. We do not store full card numbers on our servers. Stripe retains that data and shares with us only the limited information necessary to grant you Premium and manage your subscription, including a customer identifier, subscription identifier, plan, currency, payment status, and renewal timestamps. We use RevenueCat, Inc. as our cross-platform subscription management infrastructure, which receives the same limited transaction data plus a pseudonymous user identifier we generate. Lykan Sagl is the merchant of record for web subscriptions; Stripe is our payment processor (a data processor) under Swiss data protection law and the GDPR.
• In-app purchase and subscription data (paid features only): when you purchase a subscription or in-app feature on iOS or Android, the transaction is processed by Apple (App Store) or Google (Google Play) under their respective billing terms. We do not receive your full payment details (card number, billing address, etc.). Apple and Google retain that data and share with us only the limited transaction information necessary to grant you the features you purchased, including a transaction identifier, product identifier, purchase and renewal timestamps, and entitlement status. We use RevenueCat, Inc. as our subscription management infrastructure to validate purchases, manage entitlements across platforms, and track subscription lifecycle events. RevenueCat receives the same limited transaction data described above plus a pseudonymous user identifier we generate.

We do not retain photos used for OCR. The source image is discarded once text extraction is complete; only the text fragment you select is stored.

2. How We Use Your Data

• Provide, maintain, and improve Readlink.
• Display your public content to other users in line with your privacy settings.
• Operate features such as recommendations, search, and the social graph.
• Maintain the Readlink Dataset of book metadata.
• Communicate with you about your account, and (with your consent) send optional updates or marketing.
• Analyze app usage to improve the Service.
• Detect, prevent, and respond to fraud, abuse, scraping, and security incidents.
• Apply a referral discount at checkout and track the creator's commission, as described in section 7.

3. Legal Basis (GDPR / FADP)

• Performance of a contract: to provide the Service you signed up for.
• Legitimate interest: to operate, secure, and improve the Service, including dataset maintenance, abuse prevention, and analytics.
• Consent: for marketing communications and optional features.
• Legal obligation: to comply with applicable law.

4. Sharing & Transfers

• We share data with service providers strictly as needed to operate the Service: Clerk (authentication), Vercel (hosting), PlanetScale (database), Stripe (processing payments for web subscriptions), RevenueCat (subscription management and entitlement validation across the website and in-app purchases), KookiOk (cookie consent management), and analytics providers (planned).
• We do not sell your personal data.
• Web subscription processing via Stripe:When you purchase a Premium subscription on the Readlink website, Stripe processes the payment as our processor under Swiss data protection law and the GDPR. Stripe receives the billing email, billing address, and tokenized payment instrument details necessary to complete and renew the transaction; we receive only the limited subscription metadata described in Section 1. Stripe may further share transaction data with card networks, issuing banks, and fraud-prevention partners as necessary to authorize and settle the payment. Stripe operates from the European Union (Stripe Payments Europe, Limited) and, for cross-border processing flows internal to Stripe, relies on its own legal transfer mechanisms (standard contractual clauses, the EU-US Data Privacy Framework). For further information about how Stripe handles your data, see Stripe's Privacy Policy.
• In-app purchases via Apple and Google:When you purchase a subscription or paid feature through the iOS or Android app, your purchase is processed directly by Apple Inc. through the App Store or Google LLC through Google Play, under those companies' own terms and privacy policies. Apple and Google act as independent controllers of your full payment data, which we do not receive. Limited transaction metadata (product, timestamp, entitlement status, anonymized transaction identifier) is shared with us and with RevenueCat, Inc., which we use to manage subscription lifecycle and entitlements across platforms. For information about how Apple and Google handle your payment data, see Apple's Privacy Policy and Google's Privacy Policy directly.
• International transfers are safeguarded via standard contractual clauses, the EU-US Data Privacy Framework where applicable, and Switzerland's adequacy framework.
• We may disclose data where required by valid legal process, to enforce our Terms, or to protect the rights and safety of users.

5. Your Rights

You have the right to:

• Access the personal data we hold about you.
• Request correction of inaccurate data.
• Request deletion of your data, subject to limits described in our Terms (functional metadata contributions remain in the Readlink Dataset).
• Object to or restrict certain processing.
• Withdraw consent at any time where processing is based on consent.
• Lodge a complaint with the Swiss Federal Data Protection and Information Commissioner (FDPIC) or your local data protection authority.
• Data portability where applicable.

To exercise any of these rights, contact legal@readlink.app.

6. Retention

We retain personal data only as long as necessary to operate the Service and comply with legal obligations. Specifically:

• Account data: retained while your account is active, deleted on termination.
• Public creative content: removed from public display upon deletion. Residual copies in encrypted backups are retained for up to 90 days, after which they are overwritten in the normal backup rotation.
• Private notes and OCR fragments: deleted on account termination.
• Functional metadata contributions: retained as part of the Readlink Dataset per the Terms of Service.
• Logs and security data: retained for limited periods consistent with security and legal needs.
• Referral clicks: kept for the attribution window in section 7, then deleted. A subscription attribution record, if you subscribe, is kept as that section describes.

7. Referral links

When you open a referral link (a Readlink URL under readlink.app/r/), we record a referral click. That record contains the creator the link belongs to, the referral code when the link names one, a random visitor ID, and your Readlink account ID if you are already signed in. We do not store your IP address or browser details with the click.

We use that record to apply the referral discount at checkout and to track the creator's commission. Two strictly necessary cookies carry the same referral through checkout: readlink_vid, the random referral visitor ID, and readlink_ref_code, the referral/discount code. Both are set only from a referral link, last 30 days, and are not used for advertising or shared with ad networks. The Cookie Policy describes them in full.

We keep the click for that 30-day attribution window and then delete it. If you subscribe within the window, we keep a separate attribution record that links your subscription to the creator, including the payment-provider customer and subscription identifiers needed to calculate commission. That attribution stays with the subscription after the click and the cookies expire, and a later referral link does not reassign a subscription that is already attributed.

9. Security

We use reasonable technical and organizational measures to protect your data, including encryption in transit, access controls, and provider-level security from our subprocessors. No system is perfectly secure; we will notify you of significant breaches as required by applicable law.

10. Children

The Service is not intended for anyone under 16. We do not knowingly collect personal data from anyone under 16. If we become aware that we have collected data from a person under 16 without verified parental consent in jurisdictions where that is permissible, we will delete it. If you believe a person under 16 has provided us data, please contact legal@readlink.app.

11. Changes to This Policy

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. For material changes (including changes to the categories of data we collect, the purposes of processing, the legal basis, retention periods, or the list of subprocessors), we will notify you via in-app notice or email at least 30 days before the change takes effect. The "Last updated" date above reflects the most recent revision.