Privacy

To run your book club we store the essentials: your email address (for sign-in), the display name you choose, the clubs you belong to, and the content you create — book suggestions, votes, availability, meeting notes, and messages.

If you sign in with Google or Apple, we receive your email address and name from that provider — nothing more. If you subscribe to a paid plan, we keep a payment reference and your plan status (see “Payments” below).

We do not ask for more than we need to make the product work.

We don’t sell your data, we don’t run ads against it, and we don’t build advertising profiles or feed your reading life to ad trackers.

Your club’s discussions belong to your club, not to us.

To understand how the app is used and make it better, we use a privacy-respecting product-analytics service (PostHog). It records things like which pages are visited and a few key actions — such as creating a club or starting a subscription — associated with your account.

It’s configured for privacy: no advertising, no session recording, and we never sell or share this data. It exists only to improve Scholarly Oxen.

Scholarly Oxen is built on Postgres with row-level security, so members can only read and write the club data they’re actually part of — the access rules are enforced in the database itself, not just in the app.

You can sign in by magic link, by email and password, or with Google or Apple. If you set a password, it’s hashed by our authentication provider — we never see it in plain text.

If you subscribe to a paid plan, your payment is handled by our payment provider, Stripe. Stripe receives the billing details needed to process it; we store only a customer reference and your current plan status — never your full card number.

You can update your display name and leave any club at any time. You can also ask us to delete your account and the content tied to it.

Depending on where you live — for example under the GDPR or CCPA — you have the right to access, correct, export, or delete your personal data, and to object to certain uses. We don’t sell your data, so there’s nothing to opt out of on that front. To exercise any of these rights, email support@blackautomations.com and we’ll respond within a reasonable time.

Scholarly Oxen is a service operated by Black Automations LLC, which is the data controller responsible for the personal data described here.

Questions about privacy, or want to exercise a data right? Email support@blackautomations.com and a human will get back to you.