Privacy

OpenBook is run by Sajal Jahan. If anything here worries you, write to hello@openbook.cool and you will get a real answer.

• Your account. Your email address, and a password that is stored scrambled — nobody at OpenBook can read it or tell you what it is.
• Your profile. The name you choose, the few lines you write about yourself, and your portrait if you upload one.
• What you write. The pages of your Book, and anything you tape or stick onto them.
• The ordinary marks any website leaves. Our hosting keeps a short record of requests — the time, the address asked for, and the internet address it came from. It is used to keep the site running and to stop abuse.

A new Book starts public. That means the days you write in it can be read by anyone at all — no account needed — and your name and photo are shown beside them. Search engines are allowed to find those days, so they can turn up in a Google result.

You can change that at any time on the Settings page. There are three choices, and every one of them takes effect straight away:

• Public. Anyone at all can read every day in the Book, with no account and no sign-in, including days you wrote before you chose this. Search engines may index them.
• Followers only. Only people who follow you can read the days. Your name, photo and bio stay visible to everyone, because nobody can follow a person they cannot find — but not one day can be read by anybody else.
• Private. Only you can read it. If every Book you keep is private, nobody can find you on OpenBook at all.

Changing from public to anything narrower takes back the days that were already readable, at once. Changing the other way opens every day already in the Book, not only the ones you write afterwards.

Nobody at OpenBook reads your Book, and we do not use what you write to train anything.

Google tells us your email address, your name and the address of your Google profile picture. That is all we ask for and all we receive. We never see your Google password.

A small site is built out of other people's services. These are all of ours, and none of them is given your Book to do anything with except hold it for us:

• Supabase — the database and the sign-in system. Your data is stored on servers in Ireland, inside the EU.
• Vercel — the hosting that serves the pages.
• Resend — sends the letters, such as confirming your email or resetting your password.
• Google — only if you choose to sign in with Google.

We do not sell your data, and we never will.

OpenBook runs no advertising, no advertising cookies and, today, no analytics or tracking of any kind. Two things are kept in your browser and that is all: what is needed to remember you are signed in, and the look you chose — the lamp, the background, and whether your writing is in a hand or a plain face. Nothing there is sent anywhere. If we ever add measurement, it will never record what you write, and this page will say so before it starts.

Your Book is kept for as long as your account exists. A page you tear out is destroyed immediately — the writing, the pictures, the notes and the seals all go, and there is no copy in a bin somewhere to restore.

You can delete your account yourself, at the bottom of the Settings page. You type the name on your Book to confirm, and then it all goes at once: your profile and portrait, every Book, every day in them, every photograph, and every margin note and seal you left anywhere on OpenBook.

There is no waiting period and nothing is kept back. Once it is done, nobody at OpenBook can undo it or get any of it back for you — the same promise a torn-out page makes, at the size of a whole account.

You can also ask for a copy of everything we hold about you, or ask us to correct something. Write to hello@openbook.cool and it will be done within 30 days.

There is no button that downloads your Book yet. Until there is, writing in is the way, and it works.

OpenBook is not for children under 13. If we learn that an account belongs to a child under 13, we will delete it.

The date at the top is the last time anything here changed. If we change something that matters, we will tell you by email before it takes effect.

The other half of the agreement is on the Terms page.