At Epiloca ("we", "our", or "us"), your privacy is a foundational priority. We believe community book sharing should be safe, transparent, and respectful of personal boundaries. This Privacy Policy explains how we collect, use, and protect your information when you access our website and Progressive Web Application (the "Service").

1. Anonymous Community Sharing

Epiloca is designed from the ground up to preserve your personal privacy during book exchanges:

• No Public Identifiers: Other community members can only see the books that have been scanned and their distance relative to the book's preferred drop site. Your name, email address, and personal location are never visible or shared with other users.
• Anonymous Fulfillment: When you request a book or drop one off at a community box, all routing, notifications, and status updates are handled by the application. You do not need to exchange personal contact details or meet requestors in person.

2. Information We Collect

We only collect the minimal information necessary to deliver and maintain the Service:

• Account Data: When you register an account, we collect your email address. Authentication is handled using secure third-party authentication services. We do not store your account passwords on our servers.
• Book Cataloging & Barcode Data: When you scan books to add to your bookshelf, barcode images (ISBN or UPC) are decoded locally on your device via your web browser's camera. We do not store camera feeds or photos. We only store bibliographic book details (e.g., title, authors, categories, ISBN, cover art) to show available titles to the community.
• Location Information: With your permission, we process location data to show nearby books, calculate distance relative to a book's preferred drop site, help you choose a community drop site, and verify physical proximity (~75 meters) when confirming a book drop-off. We do not track continuous background location or store historical location trails. You can revoke location permissions at any time through your device or browser settings.
• Device & Notification Tokens: If you choose to enable push notifications, we securely store a device notification token to route alerts to your device when books are requested, dropped, or when waitlist updates occur.
• Payment Data: If you purchase pay-as-you-go tokens or subscribe to a Supporter plan, payment information is collected directly by our payment processor, Stripe. Epiloca never collects, handles, or stores credit card numbers or sensitive payment details on our servers.

3. How We Use Your Information

We use the information collected via the Service to:

• Create and manage your user profile and bookshelves.
• Coordinate anonymous book requests, drop-offs, pickups, and waitlists.
• Process optional supporter subscriptions and token purchases through Stripe.
• Synchronize your bookshelf between offline and online states.
• Send transactional emails and push notifications regarding book activity, drops, and security alerts.
• Prevent fraudulent drop confirmations, spam, and abuse within the community exchange.

4. Third-Party Service Providers

We work with trusted third-party service providers to help operate, host, and maintain our application. These include vendors for cloud infrastructure, database hosting, user authentication, payment processing (Stripe), email delivery, and bibliographic book metadata lookups. These providers are only permitted to process data as necessary to perform their respective services on our behalf.

We do not sell, rent, or trade your personal information or email address to data brokers, advertisers, or any other third parties.

5. Offline Functionality & Local Storage

Epiloca uses local browser storage so you can scan books on your home bookshelf even when you do not have an active internet connection. When your device reconnects to the network, queued book updates are automatically synchronized with our servers.

6. Managing Notification Preferences

You have full control over your communications. You can toggle email notifications and device push notifications on or off at any time directly in your account Profile settings.

7. Data Retention & Account Deletion

You may edit or remove any book listing from your inventory at any time. If you wish to delete your account entirely, you can do so immediately from the dashboard Profile page under "Danger Zone". Deleting your account permanently purges your user profile, active book listings, drop history, and token balance from our active database.

8. Changes to This Privacy Policy

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time to reflect operational or legal adjustments. We will notify you of any material changes by updating the "Last updated" date of this policy. We encourage you to review this policy periodically.

9. Contact Us

If you have any questions, concerns, or requests regarding your personal data and privacy on Epiloca, please contact us at support@epiloca.com.