Privacy

BranchOut is a small, invite-only app for keeping a library, a reading log, and lending books to friends. This page says plainly what we store and why. There are no ads, no analytics trackers, and we never sell or share your data with anyone.

What we store

• Your account — email address, username, an optional display name, and an avatar chosen from our built-in set. Your password is stored only as a salted hash.
• Your content — the books you catalog, your reading log (statuses, ratings, reviews, read dates), your friendships, and your loans. Who sees what is governed by your visibility settings; nothing is public to signed-out visitors.
• A session cookie — strictly to keep you signed in. No third-party or advertising cookies.
• A device push token — only if you install the mobile app and allow notifications; used solely to deliver them, deleted when you sign out or delete your account.
• Error reports — when something breaks, technical details of the failure go to Sentry (our error tracker) so we can fix it. These never include your password or the contents of what you typed.

What we don’t do

• No location data of any kind — we never ask for or store it.
• No advertising, no ad SDKs, no behavioral tracking.
• No selling, renting, or sharing your data with third parties.

Who processes data for us

BranchOut runs on Vercel (hosting), Neon (database), Resend (transactional email — password resets and invitations), and Sentry (error reports). Book metadata comes from Open Library and Google Books; your ISBN searches are sent to those services to look up titles, never tied to your identity by us.

Deleting your account

You can delete your account any time from the account page. Deletion removes your email, name, credentials, library, and reading log immediately. Records of finished loans remain with the friends they were shared with, with your identity removed.

Contact

Questions: post@branchout.diy.