Ajar is a reading tracker where you choose who sees each review. This policy explains what Ajar collects, why, who else handles it, and what you can do about it. Ajar is made by Brandon Lobenberg ("we"). Questions are welcome at [email protected].
The short version
- We keep what you put into Ajar and what it needs to run: your account, your books, ratings and reviews, and your friends.
- You choose who sees each review, shelf and your reading: everyone, your friends, or only you. Private notes are only ever yours.
- We don't sell your data, show ads, or track you across other apps and websites.
- You can delete your account at any time, and your content goes with it.
What we collect
Your account
If you sign in with Apple, Apple gives us an identifier for you and, if you choose to share it, your email address, which may be a private relay address. If you sign in with email, we keep your email address and send codes to it. Ajar has no passwords.
Your profile
Your handle, display name, bio and profile photo. Photos are redrawn on our servers, which removes their location and camera details. Your name, handle, photo and bio are public, as profiles are on any reading site.
Your reading
The books you add and their status, your reading dates and progress, ratings, reviews and who can see each one, shelves, private notes and yearly goals.
Goodreads imports
An export you import is read once and not kept. Each book's details stay with the import only until the book is added to your library or you skip it. Books that need you to pick the right match keep their details until you do.
Friends and safety
Friend requests and friendships, invite links you create, readers you block, and reports you send.
Your age range
When you sign up, Apple tells Ajar your age range, such as 13 to 15 or 18 and over. We keep only the range, never your birth date.
Ajar Plus
If you subscribe, Apple handles the payment and tells us, through RevenueCat, whether your subscription is active. We never see your card details.
Technical details
The name of the device you sign in from, such as "iPhone", so you can see where you are signed in, and the IP addresses and request details that servers record, which we use to keep Ajar running and to stop abuse.
Messages to us
Emails you send to support, and our replies.
How we use it
- To run Ajar: show your library, keep it the same on every device, and share what you choose with the people you choose.
- To find books, their covers and matches for imported ones. Ajar sends book titles, authors, ISBNs and the words you search for to Open Library, and ISBNs to ISBNdb, never who you are.
- To keep Ajar safe: limit sign-in attempts and repeated requests, check public reviews and public shelf names for abuse, and act on reports.
- To send sign-in codes and answer your emails.
We don't use your data for advertising, sell it, or use it to train AI models. We also ask the crawlers AI companies use for training to stay away from public reviews, shelves and profiles at ajarreads.com, though not every crawler honours that request.
Who can see what
- Reviews and ratings each have their own audience: Public, Friends or Only me. Public reviews appear on the book's page in the app and at ajarreads.com, and search engines can find a book's page with its public reviews.
- Shelves each have their own audience too.
- Your reading, meaning what you're reading and how many books you've read, has an audience of its own.
- Private notes are visible only to you.
- Your friends list is never shown to anyone else.
- Profiles are public, but pages for a profile, a shelf or a single review are kept out of search engines, so your name isn't a search result of its own. Share images and links show only what is public.
Services that handle data for us
These companies handle data only to provide their service to Ajar:
- DigitalOcean hosts Ajar's servers, database and files, in New York.
- Cloudflare carries traffic to ajarreads.com and the app, and forwards email sent to our support address.
- Apple provides Sign in with Apple, App Store purchases and your age range.
- An email delivery service sends sign-in codes.
- OpenAI checks the text of public reviews and public shelf names for harmful content, but only after you agree to it in the app. It receives the text alone, not who wrote it.
- RevenueCat tells us whether your Ajar Plus subscription is active.
Open Library supplies book details and covers, and ISBNdb supplies covers; Ajar asks them about books, never about you. Some covers load straight from Open Library or the Internet Archive, in the app and on ajarreads.com, and those sites see your device's IP address as any website would. ISBNdb's covers come from Ajar's own copies, so ISBNdb never sees your device.
When we share data
We don't sell or rent personal data or share it for advertising. We may disclose it when the law requires, to protect someone's safety, or if Ajar moves to a new owner, who would have to keep to this policy.
How long we keep it
- Your data stays until you delete it or your account.
- Deleting your account removes your profile, photo, library, reviews, shelves, notes and friendships at once. Database backups are kept for seven days, then replaced.
- Server records are kept only for a short time. Sign-in codes expire after 10 minutes.
- Records of moderation decisions may be kept to stop repeated abuse.
Your choices and rights
- Change who sees each review, shelf and your reading at any time.
- Edit or delete any review, shelf or book.
- Download your data as a file from the app's settings.
- Delete your account whenever you like.
- Ask us to see, correct or delete your data at [email protected]. We answer within 30 days, and some states, such as California, give you these rights by law.
Children
Ajar is for people 13 and older. If we learn that someone under 13 has an account, we delete it. Parents can reach us at [email protected].
Security
Every connection is encrypted, sign-in tokens are stored only as hashes, and the app keeps you signed in through the iPhone's Keychain. No system is perfect; if you find a problem, please tell us at [email protected].
Where your data lives
Ajar is offered in the United States, and your data is stored there.
Do Not Track
Ajar doesn't track you across other sites, so it treats every visitor the same whether or not their browser sends a Do Not Track signal.
Changes
If this policy changes, we'll post the new version here with its date, and tell you in the app when a change matters to how your data is used.
Contact
Brandon Lobenberg, [email protected]