Privacy Policy
The short version. Shelvanize has no accounts and no sign-in. It does not collect, transmit, or sell your information. Your book collection is stored on your device and nowhere else. There are no ads, no analytics, and no tracking of any kind.
You can export everything you have entered at any time, for free, and deleting the app deletes your data with it.
Who we are
Shelvanize is made by Laughter Consulting LLC. You can reach us at nic@laughterconsulting.com about anything in this policy.
What the app stores, and where
Shelvanize is a catalog of the physical books you own. Everything you put into it is written to a database on your own device. That includes the books you add, the shelves you create, the physical locations you name, any notes, ratings or measurements you enter, your lending records, and the arrangement passes you run.
None of it is uploaded. There is no Shelvanize account, so there is nothing for us to hold. We cannot see your collection, and we have no way to recover it for you if you lose your device, which is why the app makes exporting free and always available.
What we collect about you
Nothing. To be specific about the things apps usually collect and this one does not, Shelvanize has no analytics or telemetry, no crash reporting that includes your content, no advertising identifiers, no third-party advertising or marketing software development kits, no location tracking, and no contact list access. We do not build a profile of you, and we do not sell or share personal information with anyone, because we do not have any.
Your reading and lending records
What a person reads, and who they lend books to, is sensitive. We treat it that way. Your reading history, your lending records, and the names of anyone you have lent a book to stay on your device, are never transmitted to us or to anyone else, and are deliberately excluded from the app's diagnostic logs.
The app never generates commentary about your taste, your habits, or what your collection says about you. That is a deliberate product decision, not an oversight.
Permissions the app asks for
- Notifications, only if you set a return date on a book you have lent out. The reminder is scheduled by your device and fires locally, with no server involved. If you decline the permission, lending still works in full and the app simply tells you it cannot remind you.
- Files, only when you choose to export or import. The app writes to the location you pick and reads the file you pick, and nothing else.
Each permission is asked for at the moment the feature needs it, and declining any of them never blocks the rest of the app.
Children
Shelvanize is not directed at children under 13, and since the app collects no personal information from anyone, it collects none from children.
Your data, and your control over it
Because everything lives on your device, you already have complete control. Export your entire collection to CSV or JSON at any time, at no cost and with no subscription required, including while offline. Delete everything from inside the app with the delete-all option in Settings. Uninstalling the app removes its database from your device.
None of these are paid features and none of them will ever become paid features. If you subscribe and then cancel, everything you entered stays readable, editable and exportable.
Payments
If Shelvanize offers a paid feature, the purchase is handled entirely by Apple or Google. We never see or store your payment details. We receive only whether your purchase is active.
Where the book information comes from
Book records shown in Shelvanize come from Open Library, a project of the Internet Archive, which publishes its catalog into the public domain. Looking up a book does not tell Open Library, or us, anything about you.
This version describes an app with no network features
We are naming this plainly rather than writing a policy for features that do not exist yet. The version of Shelvanize this policy covers makes no network requests, so there is no server-side data, no retention period, and no deletion request to process. When barcode lookup and cover images ship, the app will send an ISBN to our lookup service and request cover images directly from Open Library. Those are the first things that will ever leave your device, and this policy will be updated to describe them, with a new version number and date, before that version is released. We will not quietly widen this document under the same date.
Changes to this policy
If we change this policy, we will change the version number and effective date at the top. If a change affects what leaves your device, we will say so in the app rather than only here.
The website
shelvanize.com is a static site with no analytics, no advertising, and no tracking cookies. Our host keeps standard server request logs, which include IP addresses, for security and reliability. We do not use them to identify you.
Contact
Questions about privacy go to nic@laughterconsulting.com.