Privacy Policy
Effective: May 29, 2026
Vellicor ("we", "us", "our") is an app that lets you rank, review, and share the books you read. We take your privacy seriously and only collect what we need to make the app work. This policy explains what data we collect, why, and what control you have over it.
What we collect
Information you give us
- Account information: email address, display name, username, optional bio, optional profile photo
- Reading data: book rankings, sentiments, notes, reviews, shelves, recommendations, reading progress, custom labels
- Social activity: who you follow, who follows you, your follow requests, your blocks
- Messages: direct messages you send to other users, posts in book clubs you join
- Lending activity: books you mark as lendable, borrow requests, returns
- Subscription state: whether you have an active Vellicor Premium subscription (verified via Apple's App Store Server API)
Information collected automatically
- Device tokens for Apple Push Notifications (so we can notify you of activity)
- Diagnostic data: crash reports and performance metrics via Sentry to help us fix bugs
- Product usage analytics: actions you take in the app (sign in, rank a book, follow a user, etc.) via PostHog, associated only with your account once signed in
- Standard server logs: timestamps and request metadata from your interactions with our servers
We do not collect: precise location, contact list, photo library (beyond images you choose to upload), microphone, advertising identifiers, or any data for cross-app or cross-site tracking.
How we use your data
- To run the core app: show your rankings, deliver messages, render your social graph
- To send notifications you've consented to (follows, likes, comments, club discussions, direct messages, borrow requests)
- To enforce Vellicor Premium entitlements
- To improve the app via aggregated, anonymized usage patterns
- To debug crashes and errors
- To comply with legal obligations
We do not use your data for advertising, sell it to third parties, or share it with data brokers.
Third-party services
We rely on a small set of carefully chosen vendors. Each has access only to what it needs:
- Supabase (database + authentication + push relay): stores all your account data
- Apple (sign-in, push notifications, in-app purchases): handled by Apple's iOS APIs; subject to Apple's Privacy Policy
- Google Books, Open Library, Hardcover: queried for book metadata and cover images; we send your search queries but not your account identity
- PostHog: receives anonymized product analytics events
- Sentry: receives crash reports and performance traces, with IP and user-agent scrubbing enabled
We do not authorize any of these vendors to use your data for their own advertising or to share it with their customers.
Your rights and controls
Export your data
In the app: Settings → Data → Export Data. Generates a text file with your profile, all rankings, notes, and reading data. You can save or share it.
Delete your account
In the app: Settings → Delete Account → Delete Everything. This permanently and immediately removes:
- Your account and authentication record
- Your profile, rankings, shelves, reviews, notes, and labels
- Your follow graph, blocks, and messages you sent
- Your subscription record (note: this does not cancel an active Apple subscription — manage that in Settings → [your Apple ID] → Subscriptions)
- Your device push tokens
- All other data tied to your account
Deletion is final. We do not retain a recoverable copy.
Block users
Settings → Blocked Users. Blocking is bidirectional — blocked users cannot see your content, you cannot see theirs, anywhere in the app.
Adjust privacy settings
Settings → Privacy. Toggle profile visibility, reading activity sharing, and whether friends can see your rankings.
Adjust notifications
Settings → Notifications, or iOS Settings → Notifications → Vellicor.
Data retention
- Active accounts: data is kept as long as your account exists.
- Deleted accounts: data is removed immediately upon deletion. Aggregated analytics events may persist in a non-identifiable form.
- Diagnostic data: Sentry crash reports are retained for 90 days. PostHog product analytics are retained per their default policy.
- Server logs: rolled and purged on a 30-day basis.
Security
We use industry-standard practices to protect your data:
- All traffic between the app and our servers is encrypted in transit (TLS 1.2+)
- Sensitive credentials (API keys, signing keys) are stored only in server-side secrets, never in the app binary
- Database access is gated by row-level security policies that enforce per-user data isolation
- Subscription verification is performed server-side against Apple's cryptographically signed StoreKit JWS payloads
No system is perfectly secure, but we treat your data the way we'd want ours treated.
Children
Vellicor is intended for users 13 years of age or older. We do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 13. If you believe we have inadvertently collected such data, please contact us and we will delete it.
Changes to this policy
We may update this policy from time to time. Material changes will be announced in-app or via email. Continued use of Vellicor after a change means you accept the updated policy.