Privacy

Who is responsible for your data

1544650 Alberta Ltd., operating as HummingRead, an Alberta corporation, decides what personal information HummingRead collects and why, and is the organisation to hold to account for it. Write to hello@hummingread.com with any question about your data, or to ask for a copy or its deletion.

What we collect

An adult’s email address and billing details (held by our payment partner, not by us). For each reader profile: a display name or initials, a reading band, and interests chosen from a fixed list. Nothing else about a child — there is no field for a legal name, a birth date, a school, a photograph, a diagnosis or an address, so none of it can be stored.

If you ask to be told when memberships open, we keep your email address and the date you asked, and use it only to send that notice. You can unsubscribe from any message, and we delete the address on request.

We count page visits with Vercel Web Analytics, which uses no cookies and does not identify you.

It receives the page's address and, if you arrived from a link, the name of the channel it came from (for example, facebook). Your browser keeps that channel name in its local storage until you create an account; we then keep it with your household, and nothing else about where you came from.

If you add your children to give them gardens: each child’s first name, an optional starting band, and the readers they finish with their Quick Check results — no surname, age, photograph or email address. Removing a child deletes all of it.

Files you download carry your household’s bookplate name and a download code, so a copy that turns up elsewhere can be traced to the account it came from.

Signing in

There is no password. You give an email address and we send a link that signs you in once and expires in twenty minutes. We keep a one-way digest of that link and of your session, never the link or the session itself, so a copy of our database would not let anyone sign in as you.

Signing in sets one cookie. It holds a session identifier and nothing else, it is not readable by scripts in the page, and it is not used to follow you anywhere. The public pages — the library, the Free Shelf, the reading profile — set no cookie at all.

Where your data is held

HummingRead is operated from Grande Prairie, Alberta. Account data — your email address, your household and your reader profiles — is stored with our database provider on servers in the United States, and is therefore subject to the laws of that country. We tell you this because Alberta’s PIPA requires it. The provider and the storage region are named in our records and change only with notice on this page.

What we don’t do

No advertising, no selling or sharing of data, no behavioural profiling and no third-party trackers. The reading profile is the reader’s: visible and editable from the account, and removable at any time.

Children

Accounts are created and controlled by an adult. There is no child login, no messaging and no public profile. Children’s data is held under Canadian privacy law (PIPEDA and Alberta’s PIPA); the adult-controlled, minimised model is reviewed before sale in other countries.

Seeing and deleting your data

A reader profile can be reset or removed from the account at any time; removing it removes what we hold about that reader.

Ask for a copy of your household’s data, or for the household to be deleted, from the account page. Both are recorded as a request with a state you can see. Support prepares the copy and confirms a deletion by email before anything is removed; billing records are kept only as the law requires.