Privacy policy

Obscura Classics is run by [company name], [registered address] (“we”). This page explains what we collect when you use the website, why, and what you can do about it. Questions: [privacy email].

What we collect

• Your account: your email address and password (stored only as a secure hash), or the account you sign in with, and your birth year, which we use only to check you are 16 or older.
• Your profile: username, display name, bio and picture. These are public.
• Your reading: where you are in each book, reading time, books finished, your shelves, highlights and notes. Notes are private to you; highlights are private unless you let them count towards popular highlights (you can turn this off in your settings).
• What you write: quote posts, essays, forum threads, replies and chat messages, and your likes, reposts and follows. Most of this is public to other readers.
• Points and ranks: the record of points you earned and why.
• Safety records: reports you send or that are made about your content, and any warnings, mutes, suspensions or bans, with the reasons.
• Technical data: the cookies that keep you signed in, and server logs (such as IP addresses and times) kept for security for up to [30] days.

Why we use it

• To run the book club you signed up for: your library, reading place, community and notifications (this is needed to provide the service).
• To keep the community safe: moderation, spam and abuse checks (our legitimate interest, and yours).
• To improve the service, using counts and totals rather than tracking individuals (our legitimate interest).

We don’t sell your data, show advertising, or use it to train AI.

Who else handles it

• Our hosting provider, [Namecheap], on whose servers the website and database run ([server location]).
• Our email provider, [provider], for sign-in and account emails.
• When subscriptions start, our payment provider, [Stripe], handles payments; we never see your full card number.

Each works under a data processing agreement. If data leaves [the UK/EU], it is protected by approved safeguards such as standard contractual clauses.

Cookies

We only use cookies that the site needs to work: the ones that keep you signed in. We don’t use advertising or tracking cookies, so there is nothing to accept or decline.

How long we keep it

Until you delete your account. When you do, your profile, reading data and everything you wrote are deleted straight away. Reports you made about others stay, without your name. One exception: if your account was banned when you deleted it, we keep a one-way scrambled copy (a hash) of your email address for 12 months, so it can’t be used to join again, and a note in our moderation records that the banned account was deleted.

Your rights

• See and download your data: in Settings → Account, choose “Download my data”.
• Correct it: edit your profile at any time.
• Delete it: in Settings → Account, choose “Delete my account”.
• You can also object to how we use your data, or ask us to limit it, by writing to [privacy email]. You can complain to your data protection authority ([for example, the ICO in the UK]).

Children

Obscura Classics is for people aged 16 and over. We don’t knowingly hold data about anyone younger.

Changes

If we change this policy in a way that matters, we’ll tell you on the site before it applies.