Privacy Policy

What Siftivo collects, why, who it is shared with, and what happens when you delete your account. We do not sell your personal information, we show no third-party advertising, and we do not share your reading activity with advertisers.

2. What we collect

Account information. Your email address, and a password if you set one. If you sign in with Google or Apple, we receive your email address and, where you allow it, your name. We do not receive or store your Google or Apple password.

Profile information. Your handle, your display name if you set one, and your profile picture if you add one. We keep a record of handles you have used before so that old links to your profile keep working.

What you do with books. This is the substance of the service, so it is most of what we hold: the books you shelve and their reading status, your ratings, your reviews, your reading journal entries, the lists you build, and the authors, lists and readers you follow.

What you tell us you like. Your answers during onboarding, your favorite genres, the moods you pick, the content you ask us to avoid, and your discovery settings.

What we work out from that. We build a taste profile from your activity, including a numerical representation of your reading taste, and we use it to generate recommendations. It is derived from the items above rather than collected separately.

Technical and usage information. Your IP address, your browser or device type, the page that referred you, and a record of significant actions in the product such as starting a session or being served a recommendation. We use this to keep the service working, to understand which parts of it people actually use, and to detect abuse.

Payment information. If and when we charge for the service, payments are handled by our payment processor. We store only the identifiers that let us match your account to your subscription. We never see or store your card number.

3. What is public

Some of what you create is meant to be seen. Please treat the following as public, visible to anyone with a link and to search engines:

Your handle, display name and profile picture.
Reviews and ratings you publish.
Public lists you create, and the readers and authors you follow.
Any reading card you choose to share, including the quote and the name shown on it at the time you shared it.

Your reading journal, your private lists, your preferences and your email address are not public.

4. Why we use it

To run your account and sign you in.
To provide the service itself: your shelves, your journal, your lists and your reviews.
To generate recommendations, which is the main reason we hold taste data at all.
To send you email you have asked for, such as the weekly reading index, and to let you turn any of it off.
To keep the service secure, diagnose faults and prevent abuse.
To understand in aggregate how the product is used so we can improve it.

We do not sell your personal information. We do not show third-party advertising, and we do not share your reading activity with advertisers.

5. Who we share it with

We share personal information only with service providers who process it on our behalf, under contract, for the purposes above. As of the date on this page those are:

Our authentication provider, which manages sign-in and stores your credentials.
Our cloud hosting provider, which runs our servers, database, search index and file storage.
Our email provider, which delivers account and subscription email.
Our payment processor, if and when paid plans are active.
A third-party AI provider, which processes book metadata and search queries to power search and recommendations.

AI assistants you connect. You can connect your account to an AI assistant. Doing it takes a sign-in step you complete yourself, and we share nothing with an assistant you have not connected. Once connected, it can read the books on your shelves along with your reading status, ratings, progress and private notes on each one, and it can shelve, rate, annotate and remove books for you. What that assistant's operator does with what it reads falls under their privacy policy, not this one.

We may also disclose information where the law requires it, or where it is necessary to protect our rights or someone else's safety.

Some links to booksellers are affiliate links, which means we may earn a commission if you buy. Following one takes you to a third party whose own privacy policy applies. We do not pass them your personal information.

6. Keeping it, and deleting it

We keep your information for as long as your account exists. You can delete your account at any time from Settings, in the app or on the web.

When you delete your account, here is exactly what happens:

Your account, profile, shelves, ratings, reviews, journal, lists, follows and taste profile are deleted.
Your email address is removed from our email provider, so our email stops.
Any reading cards you shared are deleted, and links to them stop working.
Records we keep for aggregate reporting, such as counts of how often a feature was used, are stripped of anything identifying you. That includes your IP address, your device information and anything you typed. What is left cannot be traced back to you.

Deletion is immediate in our live systems. Encrypted backups roll off on their own schedule and are never used to restore a deleted account.

7. Your rights

Wherever you live, you can ask us to show you what we hold about you, correct it, or delete it. Most of this you can do yourself from Settings. For anything you cannot, write to hello@siftivo.com and we will respond within the time your local law allows.

If you are in the European Economic Area or the United Kingdom, you also have the right to object to processing, to restrict it, to receive your data in a portable form, and to complain to your data protection authority. If you are in California, you have the right to know, delete and correct, and the right not to be discriminated against for exercising them. We do not sell or share personal information as those terms are defined by California law.

9. Security and location

We protect your information with encryption in transit and at rest, access controls, and a hosting provider that maintains recognised security standards. No service can promise perfect security, and we do not.

We operate from the United States, and your information is processed there. If you use the service from outside the United States, you are sending your information to a country whose data protection law may differ from your own.

1. Who we are