What RE.ORDER stores, and where

What is kept

Your email address, a hash of your password (the password itself is never stored and cannot be recovered), and whatever you put in: the names of your bookcases and rows, the books on them, their prices and conditions, and the photographs you take of your own shelves and rooms.

Alongside that, the things a service needs to work: which browsers and phones are signed in, a count of shelf scans so limits can be applied, and the machine's own readings of your spines — kept so that correcting one means something.

And a small picture of each book's spine, cut from your shelf photographs — the first one and the two most recent — so the book can be recognised the next time its row is photographed.

Where it is

On servers run by Infomaniak, in Switzerland. The database, the photographs and the website are all there.

A nightly copy is pulled to the operator's own machine in Switzerland, so that a mistake or a failure can be undone.

Who else sees it

• Plunk, an email service, receives your address so that a confirmation or password-reset letter can be sent. It receives nothing else — no books, no pictures.
• If you ask the catalogue for a book it does not hold, the title you typed may be sent to a national library catalogue (the German DNB, the Italian SBN) to look it up. Only the words you typed go, and only when you press the button.
• Nobody else. The data is not sold, not shared with advertisers, and never used to train anyone else's software.

Your photographs are read in Switzerland

When you scan a shelf, that row's photographs are sent to a computer in the operator's home, where the spines are read automatically. A copy is kept there, as the next section says.

If that computer is unavailable, the spines are read on Infomaniak's servers in Switzerland instead, which keep no copy. Your photographs are not sent to any other company, and they do not leave Switzerland.

Your photographs help improve RE.ORDER

The photographs taken in RE.ORDER — of shelves and bookcases, and the spine pictures — are kept on the operator's own computers in Switzerland, together with the outlines of the books found in them (the ones drawn automatically and the ones you corrected) and each book's title and author. They are used to improve RE.ORDER's automatic spine reading and the way it finds shelves, bays and spines.

They are kept after an account or a workspace is deleted. Write to the address below and the ones from your account are found and removed.

They are never given to anybody else, and never used to train anyone else's software.

How long

Your books and shelves stay until you delete them. On the RE.ORDER server, the photographs a scan uploads are deleted a day after it is read; the row's picture stays with the shelf. The copies kept to improve the spine reading stay on the operator's computers until you ask for them to be removed. The counters behind the scan limit are deleted after two days. A workspace whose email address is never confirmed is deleted after seven days.

A book's spine pictures stay until the workspace is deleted: deleting a single book keeps them, because a deleted book can be brought back.

Deleting everything

Settings → Delete this workspace. It takes the books, the shelves, every photograph and the account itself off the RE.ORDER server, immediately and for good, with no grace period.

The nightly backups are the exception, and they cover the pictures too: a copy already taken — of the records or of a photograph — can survive for up to seven days before it is rotated out.

The photographs, and the book outlines and titles from them, already kept on the operator's computers to improve the automatic spine reading are the other exception: deleting the account or the workspace does not remove them. They stay there until you ask for them to be removed, at the address below.

RE.ORDER is run by a small team

Keep your own record of anything that matters to you: backups go back seven days.

Questions, or a request to see or remove your data: write to info@dotted.space.