Privacy

What we collect

An anonymous session identifier (technical cookie, 400 days), your email if you give it (and only after link confirmation), your display language, the shelf photos you send, the comment — written or spoken — you attach to a favourite, and your position at upload time if you allow it — refusing never blocks anything.

What we do not store

No IP address is kept in our application data, in any durable form. Abuse protection relies on anonymous counters built from salted network-prefix fingerprints, whose salt changes daily and which are destroyed within 24 hours. Scan telemetry counts visits, never people: it contains no account identifier. Page traffic is measured on the same principle: an ephemeral salted fingerprint of the network prefix — never the IP address — associated with the page viewed (without parameters or tokens), destroyed within two hours.

Photos

Photo metadata (including the GPS position embedded by the phone) is stripped on re-encoding, systematically. A photo refused in moderation is deleted from disk. Photograph the shelves, not people: faces are not blurred automatically — a photo where someone is recognisable will be refused in moderation.

Photos of books taken or dropped off serve identification only and are deleted right afterwards. One exception: the cover photo of a favourite is kept, because it illustrates the book's entry when no official cover is found.

The links in our alert emails

The links in the emails announcing new books carry a single-use token: it tells us a link was opened, and credits you a few points. Nothing else is measured — not the email being opened, not your IP address. You can forbid it in your settings: the links will then carry no token at all, and no points will be earned by opening them.

Favourite comments

The note — or the voice message — you attach to a favourite is public: it appears next to the book, without your name or nickname. It is moderated afterwards and can be taken down, in which case it is deleted. It stays visible as long as the book does, and disappears with it. If you delete your account, your comments and recordings are deleted.

Your town's questions

From your second visit to a box's page onwards, the town hall may ask you a few questions: age group, country of residence, where you live, how often you walk past, how you heard about the box. These questions are picked from a fixed list that we write, with closed answers: none of them can identify you. Age is never asked to the day, only as a bracket.

The town hall may add one question of its own, which you answer freely. It is the only one whose wording we do not control; asking for a name, address, phone number or email address is forbidden, and we can remove it. Do not put anything that identifies you there.

Answering is optional, earns no points and gates nothing: “Later” puts the question off, “No thanks” turns it off for good for that town. You may also answer only some of the questions. The town hall sees only totals — never who answered what — except for its own question, whose answers it reads as written. Your answers are deleted if you delete your account.

Retention

Inactive anonymous sessions: 12 months, then anonymisation (your contributions remain, detached from any account). Scan telemetry: 13 months. Emails: until you unsubscribe — one click from every message, no login, no reason asked.

Processor

The site is hosted by OVH SAS (Roubaix, France). Like any host, OVH keeps its own technical logs, which contain IP addresses and fall under its own privacy policy.

The nearby-boxes map shows an OpenStreetMap background: those tiles are loaded by your browser directly from OpenStreetMap's servers, which then see your IP address, under their own policy. Without JavaScript, no tile is loaded and the list is enough.

Your rights

Unsubscribe in one click from every email. Access, rectification or account deletion on request: contact@ma-boite-a-livres.fr.