Privacy notice
Last updated 24 August 2026
The short version
We hold your email address, your delivery address, what you like to read, any bookshelf photographs you upload, and the list of books read from them. We use it to choose and post books to you. We do not sell it, we do not profile you for advertising, and there is no tracking on this site.
Who is responsible
Elliot Reed, trading as NinthYard, is the data controller for the information described here.
- Address
- 253 Beckhampton Road, Nottingham, Nottinghamshire, NG5 5NE
- [email protected]
We are not required to appoint a Data Protection Officer and have not appointed one. Email the address above with any data protection question and it reaches the person responsible.
What we hold, why, and on what basis
| Information | Why | Lawful basis |
|---|---|---|
| Email address | To sign you in, and to tell you when a book is posted | Performance of our contract |
| Name and delivery address | To post books to you | Performance of our contract |
| Reading preferences, genres, lengths, things to avoid | To choose books you will want | Performance of our contract |
| Bookshelf photographs | To learn your taste and avoid sending duplicates | Consent — you choose whether to upload any |
| The list of books you own | To never send a book you already have | Performance of our contract |
| Delivery history | So the same book is never sent twice, and you can see what you had | Performance of our contract |
| Payment and subscription status | To take payment and know what you are owed | Performance of our contract; legal obligation for tax records |
| Server logs | To keep the service running and secure | Legitimate interests — running a service that works |
Providing an email address and a delivery address is necessary to have a subscription; without them we cannot post you a book. Everything else is optional.
Bookshelf photographs
These are pictures of the inside of your home, and we treat them that way. They are stored privately, never at a public or guessable address, and are only ever visible to you and to NinthYard.
Each photograph is sent once to Anthropic's Claude API, which reads the book spines and returns a list of titles. Anthropic processes it on our instructions to provide that result and does not use it to train models. We keep the resulting list of titles against your account.
Uploading photographs is entirely optional and based on your consent. You may withdraw that consent at any time by deleting the photographs from your account, which removes the image files from our storage. Withdrawing consent does not affect the lawfulness of what we did before. Deleting a photograph does not by itself delete the titles read from it — those are your shelf list, and you can remove them separately.
We ask you not to photograph anything you would not want us to see. If a photograph happens to include a person, we do not attempt to identify anyone; we read book spines only.
Automated processing
Reading titles from your photographs is automated, and so is the check that a book we have picked out is not one you already own. Neither makes a decision about you on its own: a person chooses the book that is actually sent, and anything the model was unsure about is flagged for you or us to correct.
There is no automated decision-making producing legal or similarly significant effects, and no profiling for advertising.
Who else sees your information
We use these processors, and no others:
| Processor | What for | Where |
|---|---|---|
| Stripe | Payments and billing | USA |
| Resend | Sending sign-in links and delivery emails | USA, sending from the EU |
| Anthropic | Reading book spines from photographs | USA |
| DigitalOcean | Hosting the site and database | United Kingdom |
We do not sell your information, share it for anyone else's marketing, or disclose it to anyone other than the processors above — unless we are legally required to.
Stripe holds your card details directly; we never receive them. We hold only a Stripe customer reference and your subscription status.
Information leaving the UK
Stripe, Resend and Anthropic are based in the United States, so some of your information is transferred outside the UK. Those transfers are covered by the UK's International Data Transfer Addendum to the European Commission's standard contractual clauses, which is the safeguard required by Article 46 of the UK GDPR.
You can ask us for a copy of the relevant safeguards by emailing [email protected].
How long we keep it
| Information | Kept for |
|---|---|
| Your account, preferences and shelf list | While your account exists |
| Bookshelf photographs | Until you delete them, or your account closes |
| Delivery history | While your account exists |
| Payment and order records | 6 years after the tax year they relate to, as HMRC requires |
| Server logs | Rotated automatically; only the most recent 30 MB per service is kept |
| Backups | 14 days, after which they are overwritten |
Ask us to close your account and we delete your personal information, including the photographs, keeping only the payment records the law requires. Deleted information persists in backups for up to 14 days before being overwritten.
Your rights
Under the UK GDPR you have the right to:
- be told what we hold about you, and get a copy of it;
- have inaccurate information corrected;
- have your information deleted;
- restrict how we use it, or object to us using it;
- receive it in a portable, machine-readable form;
- withdraw consent for the bookshelf photographs at any time.
Email [email protected] to exercise any of these. There is no fee, and we will respond within one month. If a request is especially complex we may extend that by up to two further months, and we will tell you if so and why.
Complaining about how we use your information
You have the right to complain directly to us, and we would rather you did that first. Email [email protected] with "data protection complaint" in the subject, or write to the address above.
We will acknowledge your complaint within 30 days of receiving it, investigate it, and respond without undue delay. If it is taking longer than expected we will tell you how far along we are and when you can expect an answer.
You can also complain to the Information Commissioner's Office at any time, whether or not you have complained to us first: ico.org.uk/make-a-complaint, or 0303 123 1113.
Cookies
One cookie, which keeps you signed in. It is strictly necessary to provide the service you asked for, so under the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations it does not require your consent — which is why there is no cookie banner.
There is no analytics, no advertising, and no third-party tracking on this site. If that ever changes we will ask for your consent first and update this notice.
Keeping it safe
The site is served over HTTPS. Photographs are stored outside the web root and are only released after checking that the account requesting them owns them. There are no passwords to steal, because we do not use any. Access to the live system is limited to the person running NinthYard.
If a breach happens that is likely to put your rights at risk, we will tell the ICO within 72 hours and tell you without undue delay.
Changes to this notice
If we change how we use your information we will update this page and change the date at the top. Where the change is significant we will email you.