Your reading, your choices.

Reading without an account

You may read the public Library without creating an account. Anonymous reading progress, saved works, and bookmarks can be stored in your browser on that device. Highlights and private notes require a verified reader account. Browser-local reading information is not sent to Voices of the Fathers merely because you are reading. If you complete an entire work, the site may record a privacy-minimized aggregate completion event for that work; this does not include your browser-local reading history or an account identity.

When you create an account

We store the information needed to provide your account and Personal Library: your email address, securely hashed password, email-verification and sign-in metadata, reading position and section-completion state, saved works, passage bookmarks, highlights, and private notes.

Essential cookies and email delivery

Signing in uses an essential session cookie so the site can keep you authenticated and protect account actions. Verification and password-reset messages are sent through the site's configured transactional email provider, which necessarily processes the destination email address for delivery. These functions are not used for advertising.

How personal reading data is used

Personal reading data supports features such as Continue Reading, saved works, bookmarks, highlights, private notes, and cross-device synchronization. We do not sell this information or use private reading activity for advertising. Your individual reading history is not made public. To help the editorial team discover quotations that readers find meaningful, administrators may review the text of highlighted public quotations in an anonymous curation screen. That screen does not show the reader's identity or email address, private notes, or reading history. A quotation may then be selected as an editorially featured quotation on the site.

Sharing and aggregate features

Bookmarks, private notes, and individual reading histories are not exposed through public social features. Highlighted quotation text may be reviewed by administrators only through the anonymous editorial process described above. Quote-card images are generated in your browser and are not uploaded to Voices of the Fathers. When you complete an explicit sharing or quote-card export action, the site may increment a daily aggregate counter associated with the public work, passage, edition, action type, and—when applicable—the selected public quotation. The site may also increment a daily aggregate count when a reader completes an entire work. Completion aggregates distinguish anonymous and signed-in reading at the category level but do not store a reader account ID, email address, private note, IP address, or individual reading history. These aggregate records may support editorial analytics and future discovery features without publishing an individual reader's activity.

Device-to-account import

If a browser already contains anonymous reading data when you sign in, the site may offer to add that guest data to your account. The import requires your choice. Reader data previously associated with another signed-in account is kept in a separate browser-storage namespace and is never offered as guest data.

Data access and deletion

Verified reader accounts support a machine-readable export of the Personal Library and underlying account-owned reading records, as well as account deletion. During public beta, those export and deletion controls are not shown on the routine Account page. Account deletion removes synchronized personal data from the active service; browser-local copies on other devices may remain until those browsers are cleared. Private operational backups may retain a copy until they expire under the site's normal backup-retention cycle.

Site analytics

Voices of the Fathers uses Google Analytics to understand general site usage, such as which public pages are visited and how readers move through the site. Google Analytics may use cookies or similar browser technologies and receives technical information associated with a visit. This analytics data is used to understand and improve the site, not to serve advertising through Voices of the Fathers. Private notes and the contents of your Personal Library are not intentionally sent to Google Analytics as analytics event content.

Operational data

Like most websites, the server may retain limited technical logs needed for security, reliability, abuse prevention, and troubleshooting. These are separate from the Personal Library feature.

Questions

This privacy explanation is intended to be plain language and will be updated if the account system or sharing features materially change.