What Shelved keeps, and who sees it

Your reading record is private. The only thing anyone else sees is a recommendation link you choose to send. Shelved has no ads, sells nothing about you, and sends nothing about you to advertisers or analytics companies. It keeps its own log of how the app is used, described below, to find what to fix. You can export everything or delete your account from Settings at any time.

Shelved is a small independent app. Questions go through Settings › Feedback.

• Your account: first name, email and password. The password is stored hashed by Supabase, never in plain text.
• Your reading record: the books on your shelf, dates, ratings, reviews, notes, and why you saved a book.
• Files you import: your Goodreads export, kept so an import can finish or be undone.
• Recommendation links you make: the line you wrote and how many times the link has been opened.
• Feedback you send, with the page you were on and any screenshot you attach.
• An email left on someone’s link before its owner could join, so the book is on their shelf when they do.
• A log of how the app is used: which screens were opened and for how long, which buttons were tapped, what kind of device it was, whether it was the installed app, the site that sent you here, and errors (a sign-up that failed, a file that couldn’t be read, a search that found no book, with the words searched for). Never what you wrote: no reviews, notes or ratings, and no IP address. It is kept for 13 months.

One cookie keeps you signed in. There are no others. The log tells one browser from another with a random id kept in that browser’s storage, so a visit can be counted once; it is tied to your account only after you sign in, and clearing your browser’s site data removes it.

Only a recommendation link you send, to whoever has it: the book, your first name, your latest rating and dates for it, the line you wrote, and a chart of how you rate. Never your reviews, notes or the rest of your shelf. Story cards are made on request and go only where you share them.

• Supabase stores the database and files and handles sign-in, in the United States.
• Vercel hosts the app, in the United States.
• Anthropic (Claude) reads your shelf, ratings and reviews to write your taste profile and find picks; reads cover photos you take to identify a book; and helps match hard-to-identify books when you import. It handles this under Anthropic’s commercial terms, which don’t use it to train models.
• Open Library and Google Books are searched with book titles, authors and ISBNs. Nothing about you is sent.

Your record stays until you delete it. Deleting your account (Settings) removes your shelf, reads, reviews, notes, imports and links. Books you added stay in the shared catalog as title, author and cover, with nothing linking them to you. Feedback you sent stays, without your name, and so does the usage log, with nothing saying it was yours. Database backups expire on their own schedule.

See also the terms.