Legal
Privacy
Draft for review by the owner’s adviser before launch. The organisation responsible is named below (owner decision, 2026-09-21); data flows are recorded in docs/SECURITY_AND_PRIVACY.md as they are built.
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.
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, no analytics scripts 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.