Privacy policy
Draft under legal review — not the final text.
This page explains what data the Maktabty site and app keep, and why. The party responsible for the service: Maktabty.
This site
- It uses no cookies and no third-party fonts. Visits are counted with Umami: it records the page, the page you came from, the browser, device type and country, with no cookies and without storing your internet address (IP) or anything that identifies you, and it does not run if your browser asks not to be tracked.
- Your choice of light or dark mode is kept in your own browser only and is not sent to us.
The contact form
When you send the form we keep what you wrote in it: your name, your email address, your phone number if you gave one, the type of request, the library's name and the plan, the message, and the time it was sent. We use them to reply to you and to create your library if you asked for one; we don't use them for marketing and we don't give them to anyone.
We keep a request for twelve months after it is closed and then delete it. You can ask for it to be deleted earlier from the contact page.
The app
For people who have an account, the app keeps:
- The account: email address, name, the password as a one-way hash, and the appearance preference.
- The library's data: books, copies and their places, loans and borrowers' names, the reading log and notes, and the cover photos you upload. Every library is isolated from the others, and only its members see it.
- Security: failed sign-in attempts with the internet address (IP) to prevent guessing, and a log of permission changes.
- One cookie to keep you signed in. It is not used for any tracking.
If you choose to sign in with an external account (Google, Facebook, LinkedIn or GitHub), that provider sends us only your email address, your name and your photo. When you look a book up by ISBN, the number alone is sent to public book catalogues (Google Books and Open Library).
The shared catalog
So people can find a book and add it quickly, the app has one catalog shared by every library. It comes from open data (Open Library and Wikidata) and from the libraries' own books: title, author, publisher, year, page count and ISBN only. Nothing about copies, loans, reading or members is taken, nor the library's name, nor uploaded covers, and a book shows in the catalog only once at least two libraries have it. Sharing is on by default, and a library's owner can turn it off at any time in the system settings, which takes the library's books out of the catalog.
Public book pages
Every book in the shared catalog has a public page on this site that anyone, including search engines, can read: the book's details and editions, and how many members read it. Members' ratings, reviews and short quotes are shown on it by default, with the member's first name only and never the library's name; this includes what was written before this page changed. A member can hide any one of them from under it in the app, or all of them from the account settings; a library's owner who switches off catalog sharing takes all of the library's members' words off the pages. Anyone can report what they see there, and we remove what breaks the rules.
Where is the data kept?
On Amazon Web Services servers, and emails (invitations and password links) are sent through the same provider's mail service.
Your rights
A library's owner can export its data from the app. You can ask to see your data, to correct it, or to delete your account from the contact page.
Last updated: 2026.