Privacy
Last updated 19 Oct 2026
Our Shelf is an app for keeping track of the books your household owns. This page explains what it does with your information, and what this website does. We have tried to keep it short, because there is not much to say: the app has no account, no server of ours, and no tracking.
The data controller is Cy-Sec Awareness and Consultancy Ltd, registered in England and Wales, company number 13176798, registered office Office 1 Izabella House, 24–26 Regent Place, Birmingham, B1 3NJ. ICO registration number ZC127066. Write to us at privacy@cy-sec.co.uk and put "Privacy" in the subject line.
The short version
- There is no account and no sign-in. We never see your books, your family's names or your reading.
- Your library lives on your devices and in your own iCloud. Sharing it with your household uses Apple's iCloud sharing, between your Apple accounts.
- Photographs of shelves are read on your phone and discarded. They are never uploaded.
- To fetch a cover and a description, the app sends a book's title or ISBN, and nothing else, to a book database.
- Children in a household are a first name or nickname and an age band, never a date of birth.
- The website sets no cookies and uses no trackers. It has no forms; the only way to give us anything is to email us.
The app
What the app stores, and where
Everything you put into Our Shelf — books, shelves, household members, who has read what, ratings, notes, wishlists — is stored on your device and, if iCloud is on, in your own iCloud account, using Apple's CloudKit. We do not run a server and cannot read it. Apple's handling of iCloud data is covered by Apple's privacy policy.
If you share your household with other people, the app creates a shared iCloud zone that those people can read and write. The invitation is a link you send yourself; it works only for the people who accept it, and you can remove anyone at any time from Settings. The link's preview shows the words "Our Shelf" and nothing about your books or family.
Household members are a first name or nickname you choose, a colour, and for children an age band (7–9, 9–12 or YA). The app never asks for a date of birth or a surname. Nothing the app puts on the share sheet or in a share preview names a member or their age band.
Shelf photographs
When you photograph a shelf, the picture is read on your phone by Apple's Vision framework to find the text on the spines. The photograph is held in memory while that happens and then dropped. It is never saved by the app, never uploaded, and never leaves your phone. The same is true of a photo you choose from your library or from Files.
Looking up a book
To turn a scanned spine, a barcode or a typed title into a real book with a cover and a description, the app sends the book's title or ISBN to one or both of:
- Google Books (Google LLC) — the request also carries an API key that identifies our app, so that Google can meter its use
- Open Library (the Internet Archive, a US non-profit) — for the book record, and for the cover image, which Open Library serves from archive.org
Those services see the title or ISBN you looked up and your device's IP address, as any website you visit does. They do not receive your name, your household, your other books or anything else from the app. We do not have an agreement with either that lets us control what they do with request logs; their own privacy policies apply. If you prefer, you can add books without looking them up, in which case nothing is sent.
What comes back (title, authors, cover, description, series, publisher's age range, categories) is saved on the book record in your library so it is not fetched again.
Buying a book
The Wishlist's Buy sheet shows links to bookshops (Bookshop.org, Waterstones, Amazon, Apple Books, World of Books, AbeBooks) and to BookFinder for comparing prices. Nothing happens until you tap one. A tap opens the shop's website in Safari, which is then the shop's business and covered by their privacy policy. The app never fetches a shop's pages itself and never tells a shop which books you own.
Some of those links may carry an affiliate tag, which means the shop may pay us a small commission if you buy. The tag does not identify you to us; we see a count of purchases, never who made them. The order of shops is fixed and the same for everyone; nothing is promoted or hidden for commission.
Paying for the app
Subscriptions and the lifetime purchase are made through Apple's App Store with your Apple account. We never see your payment details. To know which features to unlock, the app uses RevenueCat (RevenueCat, Inc.), which receives an anonymous identifier for the app installation and the purchase receipt from Apple. RevenueCat does not receive your name, your email or any of your books.
Locking the app
The optional lock uses Face ID, Touch ID or your passcode through Apple's own authentication. The app only learns whether you passed; it never sees or stores the biometric itself.
Analytics and crash reports
The app contains no analytics. If you have opted in with Apple to share diagnostics, Apple may send us anonymised crash reports through App Store Connect; we cannot identify anyone from them.
Deleting your data
Settings > Privacy > Your data > Delete everything removes all your books, members and shelves from your device and from your iCloud account. It cannot be undone. Because we do not hold a copy, there is nothing further to ask us to delete. If you have joined someone else's household, leaving it removes their shared data from your device.
Deleting the app removes the local copy; the iCloud copy stays in your account until you use Delete everything or remove it from iCloud settings.
Children
Our Shelf is made for families, so a household may include a child's books and reading. The app is used and set up by an adult; children are recorded only as a first name or nickname and an age band. We do not knowingly collect any personal data from a child under 13 directly, and the app has no way to.
This website
What we collect
The website sets no cookies and loads nothing from third parties except the pages themselves. We use Vercel Web Analytics, which counts page views without cookies, without storing IP addresses and without a way to tell one visitor from another over time.
Our host, Vercel Inc., keeps standard server logs (IP address, page requested, time, browser) for a short period to run and secure the service. Vercel is a US company; its processing for us is covered by its data processing agreement, which includes the UK addendum to the standard contractual clauses.
If you write to us, we keep the email for as long as we need to answer and for a reasonable period afterwards, then delete it.
Your rights
Under UK data protection law you can ask us what we hold about you, ask for it to be corrected or deleted, object to our using it, or ask for a copy. For the app the answer is almost always that we hold nothing, because it is all in your own iCloud; for the website it will be nothing unless you have emailed us. Write to privacy@cy-sec.co.uk and we will answer within a month.
If you are unhappy with how we have handled your data, you can complain to the Information Commissioner's Office at ico.org.uk.
Changes
If we change what the app or the website does with your information, we will update this page and change the date at the top. A change that matters will also be in the app's release notes.