Privacy
BookSense has no accounts and asks for nothing but the book titles you type. Here is what happens with them and with the little else we keep.
What we keep
- Your search and its picks, for up to 7 days, so the same search loads instantly next time. They aren't linked to you.
- A count of your searches, for about 2 hours, to stop abuse. It is keyed to a scrambled (hashed) form of your IP address; the address itself is never stored.
- Clicks on “Buy on Amazon”: which book link was clicked and when, for about 13 months, so we know which picks are useful. Nothing identifies who clicked.
- If you sign in with Google: your reading list and the books you marked “Not for me”, until you remove them. They are stored under a scrambled (hashed) form of your Google account ID. We don't keep your name, email address or photo. When you search, your “Not for me” books are sent along so they're left out of your picks. Searching doesn't need an account.
Who else is involved
- Your book titles are sent to an AI model on Amazon Bedrock (Amazon Web Services) to find recommendations. When you ask for Picks for me, the titles and authors of up to 13 books from My books (your favorites and any you scored low, never your reviews) are sent the same way. Bedrock doesn't use them to train models.
- Book details and covers come from Open Library, which your browser loads cover images from. As you type, we look the text up on Open Library and keep the matches for a week so the next person typing the same thing gets them faster; nothing links them to you.
- BookSense is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. When you follow a “Buy on Amazon” link, Amazon may set cookies to credit us for purchases, and its own privacy notice applies on its site.
Visit counts and cookies
We count visits, searches and buy clicks with PostHog in its cookieless mode: it sets no cookies and stores nothing in your browser, and counts unique visitors with a one-way hash that can't be traced back to you. We never send it the books you type. BookSense shows no ads, and sets cookies only to keep you signed in once you choose to sign in.