What we keep

House of a Reader (“the House”, “we”) runs this service. If you want anything below explained, corrected, or undone, write to us — the last clause says how.

Only what the House needs to work:

• ✦Your email address, and a passphrase we never store — only a scrypt hash of it, with a salt unique to you.
• ✦Your character: the name you chose, your house, your vow, your timezone, and your interface settings.
• ✦Your reading: books you add to your shelf, pages logged, dates and times, ratings, tags, moods, and any thought you write alongside a session.
• ✦Your company: friendships, blocks, direct messages, circle and hall messages, and the circles you belong to.
• ✦Your wishlist, if you save anything at the counter.
• ✦Any letter you send us from your own page.

We do not ask for your legal name, your address, your phone number, or your date of birth, and there is nowhere in the House to give them to us.

The House sets two cookies, and neither of them advertises to you:

• ✦hoar_session — proves you are signed in. Set when you sign in, lasts thirty days, and is HTTP-only so no script on the page can read it.
• ✦hoar_rite — holds the answers you give during the rite of entry before your account exists, so a refresh does not lose them. It expires after twelve hours and is deleted the moment your character is sealed.

We use Vercel Analytics to count page views. It is cookieless and reports in aggregate; it does not build a profile of you and we cannot use it to identify you.

Our servers keep ordinary request logs for a short period, as any web server does, which may include your IP address.

We use it to run the House and nothing else: to show you your shelf, count your pages, tally your quests, rank the houses, carry your whispers, and write to you when something needs your attention or when you have asked us to.

We do not sell your data, rent it, or hand it to advertisers. We do not train models on your reading or your messages. There is no advertising in the House.

Some of what you do is public inside the House by design. Before you write anything down, know which is which.

• ✦Seen by anyone with the link: your character name, house, sigil, level, XP, streak, honours, and the stats on your shared profile page.
• ✦Seen by readers in the House: your place in the standings and your house's roster, and anything you say in a hall or a circle.
• ✦Seen only by the reader you sent it to: your whispers. We do not read them for advertising, but they are stored unencrypted on our database and an administrator could technically read them — so treat them as private correspondence, not as secrets.
• ✦Seen only by you: your email address, your moods, and the thoughts you attach to a reading session.

Three third parties touch this service, and none of them are given your data to use for their own ends:

• ✦Open Library, run by the Internet Archive, answers our book searches and serves cover images. When you search for a title, that search text is sent to them. Your identity is not.
• ✦Neon hosts the database this all sits in.
• ✦Vercel hosts the application and provides the analytics described above.

We will also disclose what we hold if the law genuinely requires it of us.

For as long as your account exists. Reading logs are the point of the service, so they are kept until you remove the book or the account.

Hall messages are deliberately temporary and clear themselves after a quiet spell. Expired sessions are removed. Letters you send us are kept after an account is deleted, with the account detached from them, so that a bug report does not vanish before it is fixed.

You can change your name, vow, house, email, and settings at any time from Settings. You can remove any book, and with it every page logged against it.

Deleting your account is at the foot of your own page. It is immediate and it is total: your shelf, your logs, your XP, your honours, your whispers on both sides, and any circle you founded all go with it. There is no grace period and we cannot restore it afterwards.

Depending on where you live you may also have the right to ask for a copy of what we hold, or to object to our holding it. Ask and we will do it.

Passphrases are hashed with scrypt and a per-user salt, and compared in constant time — we could not tell you your passphrase if you asked. Traffic is served over HTTPS. Session cookies are HTTP-only.

No service can promise perfect security, and we will not pretend otherwise. If a breach ever affects your data we will tell you plainly and quickly.

The House is not intended for anyone under 13, and we do not knowingly keep anything about a child under 13. If you believe a child has made an account, write to us and we will remove it.

If this policy changes in a way that matters, we will say so in the House rather than quietly editing the date at the top.

To ask anything about your data, use Send word to the keepers at the top of your own page, or write to keepers@houseofareader.com.

The rules for using the House itself are in the Terms of Service.