Haute Lumière · The Reader

The Shelf · by Haute Lumière

Privacy

What is held, what is not, and what we could not hand over even if we were asked.

What we cannot read

Your messages. The room is encrypted end to end. The keys are made on your device and stay there. We do not hold them, so there is nothing for us to read, sell, or be compelled to produce.

Your files. The five gigabytes are sealed on your device before they leave it. We hold ciphertext and a size.

What we do hold

A username and, if you gave one, an email. A password is never stored — only a value derived from it that cannot be turned back.

Which books you opened and where you stopped, because that is what makes the place the same place on your phone.

Who wrote to whom and when. A message cannot be delivered without it. We say so here rather than letting you find out.

What you marked, and what you wrote beside it, because a commonplace book is the point.

Your membership state and when it renews. The card itself is Stripe's or Apple's and never ours.

What we do not do

No advertising. No advertising identifiers. No third-party analytics. No selling, renting or sharing of anything, to anybody, for any price. There is no data broker in this. The membership is the business model, which is the whole reason it can be this one.

Your reading is never training data. Not ours, not anybody's.

Who else touches it

Cloudflare hosts the house and stores what it stores. Stripe takes the card on the web; Apple takes it in the app. When you bridge a room to Telegram, WhatsApp, Slack or a number, that network sees that message in the clear, because it has no other way to receive it — and the app says so, in those words, beside every bridged room.

Taking it with you, and being forgotten

One button gives you everything: books read, passages marked, places kept, files stored, in formats that open elsewhere.

One button deletes all of it, permanently, inside thirty days — except the warden's log, which keeps that a decision was made and nothing about who you were.

You have these whether or not the law where you live requires them.

Age

Sixteen and over. The room has strangers in it, and we are not equipped to make that safe for a child. The books are for anybody; the first chapter of every one needs no account at all.

A person

hello@hautelumiere.life. A person answers, inside a day.

The shelfThe Covenant