Privacy Policy

Last updated: October 25, 2026

The short version

• We collect what we need to run your account, your family's book lists and your membership. We do not sell it.
• We don't show ads based on you. We don't use advertising cookies.
• Our visitor counts come from Fathom Analytics, which does not use cookies. It sees the page you visited, not what you searched for.
• Payments go through Stripe. We never see or store your full card number.
• You can ask us to delete your account and your family's data.

Who we are

Big Sky Life Books helps parents check children's books before they read them.

Questions about privacy? Contact us.

What we collect, and why

Your account

• Your email address. You sign in with a one-time code we email you. We use your email to sign you in, to find your account, and for billing.
• Your first name, if you give it at sign-up or in Account. We use it to greet you in the app.
• Sign-in records. When you sign in, we record the session so we can sign you out everywhere if needed. Each session lasts up to 7 days. You can be signed in on up to 3 devices; a fourth sign-in signs out the oldest. We keep the date you last signed in.
• How you heard about us (optional), and where your first visit came from: the name of the website that sent you, and two campaign tags (utm_source, utm_campaign) if the link had them. We save these once, when you create your account, to learn which outreach works.

Your family and your books

• Family questionnaire. Your answers about what your family is looking for: ages, book types, topics, character traits, curricula or book lists you use, how you get books, reading habits, and family events you choose to share (such as a new baby, a move, travel, or a hospital or doctor visit). You can also write a short note. We use these answers to suggest books. We keep earlier versions of your answers so we can show why a suggestion was made.
• Child profiles (see “Information about your children” below).
• Your lists and choices. Favorites, Library List, Purchase List, Have Read, Home Library, lists you name yourself, books a child loved, and books you said were “not for us” (with the reason you picked). Your setting to hide some lists' books while browsing.
• Book requests. If you tell us a book is missing, we keep the title you typed so our team can look for it.
• Suggestions we showed you. When the app suggests books, we record what it suggested and what you did with them (saved, turned down, asked for more like it). We use this to check that suggestions are working.
• Short surveys. If you answer our in-app question (“How would you feel if you could no longer use Big Sky Life Books?”), we keep your answer. We show it to you at most once every six months.

Your membership

• Stripe handles payments. When you start a free trial or pick a plan, you enter your card on Stripe's page, not ours. We never see or store your full card number.
• We keep: your Stripe customer and subscription IDs, your plan, its status and renewal dates, and whether you came through the Founding Member link.
• When you start a free trial, we keep a record that you had one: a scrambled (hashed) form of your email address, your Stripe customer ID, and a card “fingerprint” from Stripe. A fingerprint lets us tell if the same card was used before; it is not your card number. We use this record so each person and each card gets one free trial.
• If you ask for a renewal refund, we keep the request and the decision.
• We keep a copy of your billing history from Stripe (subscriptions, invoices, refunds, and the reason a plan ended) to understand how our membership is doing. This copy uses Stripe IDs, not your name or email.

Gifts

• If you buy a gift membership, we keep your name and email address, the recipient's name and email address, your optional message, the date you chose for it to be sent, the plan and price, and the payment references from Stripe. We use them to deliver the gift, to send you and the recipient the emails that go with it (a receipt, the gift itself and reminders to claim it), to handle refunds and to keep the form safe from abuse. You do not need an account to give a gift, and the recipient does not need one to be given it.
• The recipient's name and email address and your message go to Stripe with your payment, and the emails go out through Postmark (see “Who else handles your data”). If a gift ends without being claimed, we erase the recipient's name, email address and your message from our records 30 days later. The record of your payment, with your name and email address, is kept for our accounts.
• To have your details, or a gift recipient's, removed, Contact us. We confirm it is you and do it within 30 days.

Using the app

• Visitor counts (Fathom Analytics). Fathom counts page visits and a fixed list of actions, such as “Search”, “Favorite added”, or “Trial started”. It receives the page address without anything after the “?”, so it never sees what you searched for. It receives the previous page the same way. It does not get your name, email, or what you typed. Fathom does not use cookies. We don't count visits to our admin pages or from automated browsers.
• Our own counts. For each book, we count how many times a day it was opened, scanned, saved, or had its buy link clicked. For searches, we count how many there were and how many found nothing. These counts are not tied to you. When you scan or type an ISBN we don't have, we keep that ISBN (not who looked it up) so we know which books to add. We delete it once nobody has looked it up for 90 days.
• Barcode scans. When you scan a book's barcode, your device reads it and sends us only the ISBN. We never receive or keep a picture from your camera. (The scanner our own team uses to add books to the catalog keeps small pictures of barcodes it couldn't read, for 60 days, to improve it.)
• Books you opened. For each member, we record which books were opened with their reviews each day. We use this only to stop anyone from copying our reviews in bulk. We delete these records after 30 days.

Our newsletter and messages to us

• Newsletter (Kit). The email box on our site is separate from your account. If you type your address there, we send it to Kit, our email-list service, which emails you a confirmation link; you are on the list only once you click it. We use the list to send you our newsletter. Every newsletter has an unsubscribe link, and you can also ask us to take you off (Contact us). Kit receives your email address, a label for which sign-up box you used, and, if you picked them, which of the “I am a…” choices you ticked (for example grandparent or teacher), and records when you signed up. To stop automated sign-ups we also keep a keyed hash of the address and of your internet address for two days (see “Keeping the app safe”).
• Contact Us. When you write to us through the Contact Us form, we receive your name, your email address and your message in our info@ inbox, and we reply to the address you gave. The form does not save the message anywhere in the app. We use Postmark, an email-delivery service, to send it to us; Postmark keeps its own record of the message for 45 days by default. We keep the message in our inbox until we delete it. To stop spam we also keep a keyed hash of the address and of your internet address for two days (see “Keeping the app safe”).

Keeping the app safe

• Bot check. Sign-in, sign-up, changing your email, the newsletter box, Contact Us and buying a gift use Cloudflare Turnstile, an invisible check that you're a person. Your internet (IP) address is sent to Cloudflare for this check.
• Limits on sign-in codes. To stop floods of code emails and guessing of codes, we keep the email address, IP address and email domain behind each code request and each wrong code as keyed hashes: one-way codes made with a secret key, which can't be turned back into the address without that key. We delete them after two days.
• Security log. We record security events, such as refused sign-ins, too many requests, or a failed bot check. Each record holds your account ID if you were signed in, and keyed hashes (as above) of the email and IP address involved, never the plain address. We delete these after 90 days.
• Error reports (Sentry). When something breaks on our server, we send an error report to Sentry. Before it leaves, we remove cookies, headers, what was sent, query strings and IP addresses, and we hide anything that looks like an email address.
• Browser security reports. Browsers may tell us when a page tried to load something it shouldn't. We keep the page address without anything after the “?”.

Information about your children

Accounts are for parents. Children do not sign in or create accounts.

If you add a child profile, you give us:

• the child's first name,
• birth month and year (we use them to work out an age band, such as “6 to 8”),
• boy or girl,
• and, if you fill in the child's questionnaire: reading ages, grade, reading level, interests, favorite book types, books the child loved and why, and stricter content settings.

We use this only to suggest and filter books for that child. We don't show it to anyone outside your account. We don't send it to Fathom or Sentry.

When you delete a child, the profile is hidden from your account at once, and you can undo that for 14 days. After that we may delete the hidden profile for good, with that child's lists, answers and the suggestions made for that child. At the latest, we delete them when you ask us to delete your account.

Cookies and browser storage

We use only the cookies the app needs:

We don't use advertising or tracking cookies. Fathom Analytics does not use cookies.

The app also saves a few things in your own browser, which never leave it unless noted: your Home page filters, list view and sort choices, scroll position, and, for one browser tab, where your first visit came from (sent to us only if you create an account in that tab).

Stripe and Cloudflare may set their own cookies on their pages and checks.

Buy links

Buy links go to the retailers we link to, such as Amazon and ThriftBooks. They are affiliate links: if you buy, we may earn a small fee at no cost to you. The link names the book and our affiliate tag. Our site tells your browser not to pass along the page you came from. Each retailer's own privacy notice covers what happens on its site.

Who else handles your data

We share data only with companies that help us run the app:

We look up book facts (titles, authors, covers) from book data services (ISBNdb, Google Books, Open Library) and the Library of Congress. Those lookups use ISBNs, not anything about you.

We don't sell your information. We don't share it for advertising.

We may share information if the law requires it, or to protect our members or the app.

How long we keep things

Deleting your account

Contact us and ask us to delete your account. We will delete your account, your children's profiles, your lists, your answers and your sign-in records. We also delete your sign-in accounts at Firebase and Descope. If you have an active membership, cancel it first.

Your newsletter subscription is separate from your account. Unsubscribe from any newsletter, or tell us, and we will remove you from the list.

What we keep, and why:

• the hashed free-trial record, so a new account can't get a second trial;
• refund requests and the billing history copy, for our accounts;
• your customer record at Stripe, which holds your billing records;
• records of gifts you bought, for our accounts. The recipient's details in them are erased 30 days after an unclaimed gift ends.

Your choices

• You can change your name and email in Account.
• You can edit your family and child answers, and delete a child profile, at any time.
• You can sign out of every device from Account.
• You can cancel your membership any time (see our Terms).

Security

We protect your data with signed, short-lived sessions, limits on requests, a bot check at sign-in, and keyed hashes, never plain addresses, in our security records. No system is perfect. If something goes wrong that affects you, we will tell you.

Changes to this policy

If we change this policy, we'll update the date at the top. If the change is important, we'll tell you in the app or by email.

Contact

Contact us