Last updated: 2026-10-13

This policy explains what Margins may collect about you and why. It says who may receive it and what choices you have. It covers the Margins app on iPhone and Android and the website at margins.app.

1. Who We Are

Margins is run by Paratext Inc., d/b/a Margins (“Margins,” “we,” “us”). We decide how your personal data is used. That makes us its controller.

Paratext Inc., d/b/a Margins
548 Market St PMB 65688
San Francisco, CA 94104-5401
United States

Email us about anything in this policy at hello@margins.app.

2. What We Collect

What we collect depends on what you use. We may collect the following.

Your account

• The email address or phone number you sign in with. We send a code to it to confirm it is yours.
• Your display name, profile picture and privacy setting.
• An account ID that we create for you.

Your reading

• The books in your library, your lists, your Want to Read and your reading progress.
• Your reading sessions, reading time, goals and streaks.
• Your ratings, reviews, notes and favorites.
• What you share with other readers. This includes stories, recommendations, the people you follow, and book club meetups, polls and votes.
• The searches you make with Search by Vibes.
• Reports you send us about missing or wrong book details.

Things you choose to add

• Your contacts, if you allow access. We may upload the names, phone numbers and email addresses in your address book. We may use them to show you people you know who are already on Margins, and people you could invite. Your contacts are never posted to your profile. An invitation is sent from your own phone's messages or email app.
• Photos you pick. A photo can become your portrait, or you can search for books with a photo of a cover. Images you post in stories may be stored too.
• Your library from Goodreads, StoryGraph or Fable, if you import it. You sign in to that service on its own page inside the app. We may copy your books, shelves, ratings, reviews and reading dates. From Goodreads and Fable we may also copy the names and profile pictures of your friends there. We may use them to show you which of them are on Margins.

Purchases

• Membership. You pay through your phone's app store. We may receive your membership status and purchase history. We do not receive your card details.
• Book orders. When you order a book, we may collect your name, email address, shipping address and phone number, and what you bought. You can order without a Margins account. You pay on our payment processor's checkout page, so we never receive your full card number.

Your device and how you use Margins

• What you do in the app, such as the screens you open and the buttons you tap.
• Your device model, operating system, app version, language and region, and the country of your app store account.
• Your IP address. Our analytics service may use it to estimate your country.
• A push notification token, if you allow notifications.
• Diagnostic logs and crash reports. These may carry your account ID so we can fix problems you run into. When you use Search by Vibes, what you typed and the suggestions you received may be kept in our logs too.
• On margins.app, our analytics service may record the pages you open and what you click, and may store an identifier in your browser. Signing in stores a cookie that keeps you signed in.

Advertising measurement

From the first time the app opens, it may send a small amount of data to an attribution measurement service so we can tell which of our ads lead to installs. Section 5 explains exactly what.

What stays on your device

Reading-time app blocking runs on your device. On iPhone it uses the phone's own screen-time controls. On Android it uses an accessibility service to notice which app is open during a reading session. We do not receive the apps you use. The camera scans book barcodes and book club invite codes on your device. We do not keep the camera image.

3. How We Use It

If you are in the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom or Switzerland, the law requires a legal basis for each use. Where we have settled one, we name it below. We may use what we collect for the following.

• To run your account and the features you use. This covers your library, syncing between your devices, profiles and following, book clubs, imports, portraits, Search by Vibes and notifications. Legal basis: our contract with you.
• To sell you a membership and to sell, ship and support your book orders. Legal basis: our contract with you.
• To understand how people use Margins so we can improve it, and to find and fix problems. Legal basis: our legitimate interest in running and improving the app.
• To keep Margins secure and prevent abuse. For example, we limit how many sign-in codes can be sent to a phone number. Legal basis: our legitimate interest in protecting Margins and its readers.
• To measure which of our ads lead to installs.
• To find people you know on Margins from your contacts and your Goodreads or Fable friends.
• To send our newsletter, In the Margins, and a welcome series of seven emails, one a day, after you confirm your email address.
• To decide whether to show you offers to buy books. We ship only to the United States. To guess whether you are there, we may use whether we have shipped you a book, your app store country, your device region, the country of your phone number, the domain of your email address and the country estimated from your IP address.
• To let our team understand a reader's taste when they look into an account. This may send the titles you read, your ratings and the reviews you wrote to an AI provider.

4. Who Receives It

We do not sell your personal data. We may share it with the kinds of service below so they can do work for us.

Running Margins

• A hosted database service stores our database and handles sign-in.
• A hosting service runs our website and servers.
• A sync service keeps your data in sync between your devices.
• A content delivery service stores and delivers images, and stores our logs.
• A search service powers search. This includes finding readers by display name.
• A server hosting provider runs the servers that process our logs.
• An app update service delivers updates to the app.

Sign-in codes, email and notifications

• A text message service sends sign-in codes by text message.
• An email delivery service sends our emails. These include sign-in codes, receipts and the welcome series.
• A newsletter service sends our newsletter. It may also receive whether we show you book offers.
• The maker of your phone's operating system delivers push notifications to your device.

Analytics

• An analytics service may receive what you do in the app, your device details and your IP address. It may link them to your account ID, your email address and your phone number.

Membership and book orders

• Your phone's app store handles membership payments.
• A subscription billing service manages memberships. It may receive your account ID, email address, phone number, display name and purchase history. It may also receive the identifier our attribution measurement service gives your device. It uses that identifier to report your payments to that service. Section 5 explains what it may report.
• A payment processor takes payment for book orders and calculates tax.
• Our team's internal chat tool may receive the name, email address and city of each book order.
• A book distributor ships book orders. It may receive your name, shipping address and phone number. Its delivery carriers may use your phone number if there is a problem with the delivery.

Portraits and Search by Vibes

• An image generation service turns the photo you pick into your portrait. It receives the photo.
• An AI provider suggests books for Search by Vibes. It may receive what you type or the cover photo you pick. It may also receive a short summary of your reading: favorites, books you rated highly, recent and current reads, your Want to Read and your top genres. When our team looks into an account, it may also receive the titles that reader read, their ratings and the reviews they wrote, to summarise their taste.

Advertising measurement

• An attribution measurement service. Through it, we may share data with the advertising platforms we buy ads on. Our subscription billing service may report your payments to it. Section 5 explains what each of them may receive.
• One advertising platform, directly, on Android only. The Android app contains that platform's own software. It may ask the platform once, the first time the app opens, whether you installed Margins from an ad there that pointed at a particular book. Section 5 says what that request may carry.

Other readers

Other readers see your profile and activity according to your privacy setting: Public, Friends Only or Only Me. Readers can find you by your display name unless your profile is set to Only Me.

5. Advertising Measurement

We pay for ads in other apps and on other websites to find new readers. We may use an attribution measurement service to learn which of those ads lead to people installing Margins. That tells us which ads are worth paying for. Margins shows no ads inside the app, and we do not sell your personal data.

The measurement service may receive:

• Your device's advertising identifier, where one is available. On Android this is the Android advertising ID. On iPhone, Margins never asks for permission to track, so the service does not receive the phone's advertising identifier. It may receive an identifier that the phone gives only to apps from the same developer.
• How you arrived at the app, such as the ad or link that led to the install.
• Your IP address and basic details about your device, such as its model and operating system.
• Two milestones from the app: that you started onboarding and that you finished it. They carry nothing about your books or what you wrote.
• Your payments, reported by our subscription billing service rather than by the app: the first payment for a membership, each renewal, and any one-time purchase you make inside the app once we offer them. Each comes with the amount you paid and its currency. The billing service may also report when you start or cancel a trial and when you cancel a membership. Those carry no amount.
• Book orders you pay for on our website, reported by our server once the order is linked to your Margins account. Each comes with the amount you paid and its currency, and nothing about which books you ordered or where they were sent. An order placed as a guest is reported once you claim it in the app.

On iPhone, the measurement service may also receive a copy of the phone maker's own install reports for our ads. The phone maker designs these reports so they do not identify you.

The measurement service may share three things with each advertising platform we buy ads on: installs, that you finished onboarding, and payments with the amounts. We do this so the platforms can look for readers who are likely to stay and support Margins, not only readers who are likely to install it. That you started onboarding, trial changes and cancellations are not passed on to the advertising platforms.

The measurement service may send every one of these platforms every install it measures, with the events above. Some platforms use that to tell the service which installs came from their ads. For the others, the service does the matching itself. Either way, the platforms may receive this about readers who never saw one of our ads.

On Android, the app also contains a small piece of one advertising platform's own software. It is used for one thing. The first time the app opens, it may ask that platform whether you installed Margins from one of its ads for a particular book, so the app can open that book for you. That one request may carry your Android advertising ID, your IP address and basic details about your device and the app. It happens once, for every Android reader, whether or not you saw an ad. The software does not report anything else about what you do in the app. On iPhone, the app does not contain it.

Measurement is on from the start, everywhere, and the app has no switch for it. The app does not ask you about it, on any platform. On Android, you can reset or delete your advertising ID in your phone's settings. That limits the identifier the measurement service may receive. It does not stop measurement.

One advertising platform asks us to say whether a reader is in the European Economic Area. We answer from your device's region setting and time zone. If either places you in the European Economic Area, we may also tell that platform that you have not agreed to it using your data for advertising or to personalised ads, because we never asked you.

6. Your Choices

In the app, Settings opens from the Stats tab.

• Advertising measurement. There is no switch in the app. Android lets you reset or delete your advertising ID in your phone's settings, as described in section 5.
• Who sees your profile. In the app, open Settings, then Community, and choose Public, Friends Only or Only Me.
• Contacts. You can turn off contacts access in your phone's settings. Contacts we already have stay until you use Clear My Data or delete your account.
• Notifications. In the app, open Settings, then Notifications. You can also turn notifications off in your phone's settings.
• Email. Every marketing email and every newsletter issue has an unsubscribe link. You can also manage email in your notification settings on margins.app. Emails about your account and orders, such as sign-in codes and receipts, are always sent.
• Clear My Data. In the app, open Settings, then Account, then Clear My Data. This erases everything you added: your books, reviews, notes, reading sessions, lists, goals, imports, contacts, stories and notification settings. Your profile, your portrait, the people you follow, your membership and your book clubs stay.
• Delete your account. In the app, open Settings, then Account, then Delete Account. On margins.app, go to Settings, then Account. Deletion is permanent. If a book order is still on its way, you can delete your account once it arrives.

7. Where Your Data Is Processed

Margins is based in the United States. Our website and servers, our logs and our analytics data are in the United States. If you use Margins from another country, your data is transferred to the United States.

8. How Long We Keep It

• We keep your account data until you delete your account. When you do, we remove your account and the data linked to it from our database. We do not keep a backup copy.
• If you ask us to delete your account for you, we keep a backup copy for 30 days. It is then deleted automatically.
• When you delete your account, we delete your book orders from our database. Our payment processor keeps its own record of each payment, including your email address and shipping address.
• When you delete your account, we remove your email address from our newsletter.
• Images you uploaded are removed when you delete your account on margins.app. Deleting your account in the app does not yet remove them.
• Deleting your account does not yet remove the records held by our analytics service, our subscription billing service, our payment processor, our email delivery service or our attribution measurement service, or our logs. Email us if you want any of these removed.

9. Your Rights

Depending on where you live, you can ask us to do the following:

• Show you the data we hold about you and give you a copy.
• Correct data that is wrong.
• Delete your data.
• Give you your data in a format you can take to another service.
• Stop using your data where we rely on our legitimate interests.
• Limit how we use your data.

Where we rely on your consent, you can withdraw it at any time. That does not change what happened before you withdrew it.

You can correct your profile, clear your data and delete your account yourself in the app. For anything else, email hello@margins.app. If you are in Europe or the United Kingdom, you can also complain to your local data protection authority.

10. Children

Our Terms of Use require you to be at least 13, or the minimum age in your country. We do not ask your age when you sign up. If you believe a child has given us personal data, email us.

11. Changes to This Policy

When we change this policy, we update it on this page and change the date at the top.

12. Contact Us

Questions about this policy go to hello@margins.app.