Privacy Policy

The short version

The Reading Challenge is a small tool built by Timberdoodle to help homeschool families keep track of what their kids are reading. To do that, we store some information about your family—your email, the names and grades of the readers you add, books you log, and any optional avatar photos you upload. We don’t sell that data, we don’t share it with advertisers, and we don’t use it to target ads anywhere. Children don’t sign in themselves; parents manage the family account on their behalf.

This page explains exactly what we keep, who can see it, and how to ask us to delete it. The Reading Challenge is part of Timberdoodle, so the broader Timberdoodle Privacy Policy also applies to the extent it isn’t inconsistent with this one.

What we collect

When you create a parent account and use the app, we store the following:

• Account information. Your email address.
• Reader profiles. The names, grades, and optional avatar photos you add for the children in your family. Avatar photos are stored privately, scoped to your family, and have their EXIF metadata stripped before storage.
• Reading activity. The books you and your readers log, with timestamps, optional ratings, and optional notes.
• Lists and favorites. Want-to-read, currently reading, completed lists, library lists, family bookmarks, and any book flags you submit.
• Settings. Your timezone (auto-detected from your browser, editable in Settings), weekly reading goals, and reader counts.
• Access codes. If you redeem a Reading Challenge access code, we record the code and the resulting access window so we can show you the right content.

We don’t collect anything directly from children under 13. Parents create and manage the account; readers don’t sign in themselves and don’t have access to the app independently.

How we use it

We use your information to run the Reading Challenge for you: showing your family’s progress, matching readers to appropriate challenges, fulfilling rewards, and keeping the catalog improving over time. We may also use it to contact you about your account or about Timberdoodle’s products and curriculum—you can opt out of marketing emails at any time while keeping account emails on.

We do not use family data for advertising, do not sell it, and do not share it with third parties for their own marketing purposes.

Bookshelf photos

If you use the spine-scan feature to add books by photo, here’s exactly what happens with the picture you upload:

• We process it once, then we drop it.The photo goes to Anthropic’s vision model, which reads the spines and returns a list of titles and authors. We do not save the image to our database, our file storage, or anywhere else on our servers.
• We keep the books you confirm, not the photo. After you review the matches, only the resulting list of books (linked to your family bookshelf) is stored. Books we couldn’t match get submitted as private “logged-only” entries scoped to your family.
• Anthropic’s handling. The image is transmitted to Anthropic to perform the spine extraction. Anthropic processes your request under their privacy policy; they do not train on data submitted through the Claude API.
• Take care framing the shot. Bookshelf photos can incidentally capture more than spines (family items, return-address labels on packages, kids in the background). We recommend a tight shot of just the shelf.

Who we share it with

The Reading Challenge runs on a small set of trusted infrastructure providers. Your data passes through them only as needed to deliver the service:

• Supabase—database, authentication, and file storage for avatars
• Vercel—application hosting
• Google—the Google Books API for looking up book covers and ISBNs from public catalog data (your family’s data is not sent to Google for this)
• Open Library—public cover and metadata lookups for the book catalog (your family’s data is not sent)
• Anthropic—vision processing for the optional spine-scan feature. Photos you upload for spine scanning are sent to Anthropic and not retained by us (see “Bookshelf photos” above).

We share data with these providers only as necessary to operate the app and only under their standard terms. We don’t share family data with anyone else except where required by law.

Cookies and sessions

We use first-party cookies that are strictly necessary to keep you signed in. We don’t use third-party advertising cookies and we don’t run analytics that follow you across other sites.

How long we keep it

We keep your account data for as long as your account is active. You can request deletion at any time (see below). Backups are retained for up to 90 days on a rolling basis and are then overwritten.

Your choices and rights

You can:

• View and edit your readers, logs, and settings any time inside the app.
• Delete a reader from Settings. This removes their profile and avatar from active use. Backups are overwritten on the schedule above.
• Request a copy of your data or request full deletion of your account by emailing us (see Contact below). We’ll respond within a reasonable timeframe, typically within 30 days.
• Unsubscribe from marketing email at any time using the link at the bottom of any marketing message.

Children’s information

The Reading Challenge is designed for parents to use on behalf of their family. Children don’t create their own accounts and don’t interact with the app directly. The information stored about children—name, grade, optional avatar, and reading activity—is provided by the parent, viewable only by the parent’s family account, and removable by the parent at any time.

We don’t use children’s information for advertising or analytics, and we don’t share it with third parties for their marketing.

Security

Data is encrypted in transit and at rest by our infrastructure providers. Family data tables are protected by row-level security policies so each family can only read its own data. Reader avatar files are stored privately with access controlled per family. We’re a small team and we follow standard practices, but no system is perfect—please use a strong password and let us know if you see anything suspicious.

Changes to this policy

We may update this policy from time to time. If we make material changes, we’ll let account holders know by email or via a notice in the app. The “Last updated” date at the top will reflect the most recent revision.