Swoon Privacy Policy

Swoon is a reading companion and journal for romance readers. What you tell it is close to a diary, and we treat it that way. This page says what we keep, what we do with it, and what we will never do — in plain words, because you shouldn't need a lawyer to understand your own journal.

What we never do

• We never sell your data. To anyone, for anything.
• Your conversations, journal entries, and taste profile never train an AI model — not ours, not anyone else's. They exist to give you back a record of your reading life, and for nothing else.
• Nothing of yours leaves Swoon without an explicit yes. What Swoon knows about a book comes from public reference sources and named public reviews — never from another reader's journal. Authors and creators contribute only by opting in — nothing of theirs enters Swoon unless they put it there themselves. (Creator accounts aren't open yet; this is the standing commitment for when they are.)
• Nothing you write ever appears anywhere public unless you tap to share that specific line.

What we keep

• Your account: your email (to sign you in), a display handle, and whatever you add to your profile.
• Your reading life: your books, your conversations with the companion, the journal entries made from them, your reactions, and the taste profile built from all of it.
• Reviews you import: only what you upload yourself, after confirming it's your own writing. We never go and fetch your reviews from anywhere.
• How you found us: if you arrived through a tagged link (say, from a newsletter or a community), we record that tag once — a single word like booktok. It tells us which communities Swoon is reaching; it says nothing about you.

The AI behind the companion

The companion's replies are generated by Anthropic's AI, under API terms that prohibit training on your content. For each exchange we keep a small technical record — which model ran, how much text it processed, how long it took, what it cost us. That record is for billing and keeping the service healthy. It does not contain what you said.

When you share a take

Sometimes a line you say about a book is worth passing on to other readers. Swoon will show it back to you afterward and ask. Share it, and it appears on that book's page in your words, without your name, alongside other readers' takes. Keep it private, and only you will ever see it, on your own view of that book. Nothing joins a community page without your tap — one line at a time, never in bulk.

Books we don't have yet

When you look for a book that isn't in Swoon yet — or mention one to your companion that we don't recognize — we record that it happened, so we know which books readers actually want us to add next.

When you coin something

Sometimes you'll reach for a trope Swoon doesn't have a name for yet — your own phrase for a thing you love. When that happens, Swoon may show the phrase back to you and ask whether we can count it toward what gets added next. Nothing is counted without your yes, and if a new trope makes the list, its name is written fresh. Delete your account and those notes go with it — unless other readers have made your phrase part of their own vocabulary, in which case the phrase stays and every link between it and you is destroyed, permanently.

When you delete your account

You can delete your account any time from Settings. The moment you ask: your account deactivates and any subscription stops — no further charges, and it will not renew. Until the later of 14 days after your request or the end of any paid period you've already covered, you can sign back in and restore everything — including any remaining paid time. After that, we permanently erase everything private to you — conversations, journal, reactions, taste profile, imported reviews, account. Two exceptions, stated plainly. First: any line you chose to share on a book's page stays on that page. It was published anonymously and it stays that way — but we destroy the link between it and you, permanently, so it can never be traced back. Second: a trope phrase you coined that other readers have since adopted stays in the shared vocabulary— one reader leaving shouldn't take words away from everyone still using them — and, the same way, we destroy the link between the phrase and you, permanently. We don't offer a data export yet.

Payments

Stripe processes all payments. We store your subscription status — never your card number.

Where your data lives, and how it's protected

Swoon runs on infrastructure you've likely already trusted with other apps: your data is stored with Supabase and served by Vercel, encrypted in transit and at rest. Every record is scoped to your account at the database layer — row-level security means the system itself refuses to hand your journal to anyone who isn't you. Email (sign-in links, receipts) is delivered via Resend; payments run through Stripe, and your card number never touches our servers. No third party ever receives your data for advertising or marketing — the only companies that touch it are the ones that keep Swoon running, under terms that match this policy.

Affiliate links

Some outbound book links are affiliate links (Bookshop.org and Amazon Associates); swoon may earn a commission on qualifying purchases made through them. Subscribers are shown plain, non-affiliate links instead. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

Changes & contact

If this policy changes in a way that affects you, we'll say so plainly. Questions about your data: support@withswoon.com.

See also the Terms of Service.