Privacy Policy

Effective date: September 8, 2026

Updated September 8, 2026: the app was renamed from SamePage to PlotLock, and our contact address changed. No change to what we collect, how we use it, or your rights.

PlotLock ("we", "us", or "our") is a collaborative reading tracker. This policy explains what information we collect, how we use it, and your rights regarding it.

What We Collect

When you create an account and use PlotLock, we store:

Email address and password — used to identify your account and to sign you in. Your email address is not shown to other users; the people in your reading groups see your username. Your password is handled by Firebase Authentication and stored only in hashed form; we never see it.
Username and display name — your @username, your display name if you set one, and an avatar colour. These form a public profile so that other users can find you and recognise you in a reading group. See Data Sharing for who can see them.
Referral source — if you signed up from another user's invite or referral link, we record which account referred you.
Reading data — book titles, authors, reading mode (chapters or pages), total length, and your current progress.
Comments — the text of margin notes you write, along with the location (page or chapter) at which they were written.
Group codes — the codes used to link reading group members together.
Reactions — the emoji reactions you leave on comments.
Friends and invitations — who you are friends with, pending friend requests you have sent or received, and journey invitations between you and other users.
Notification tokens — if you allow notifications, a push token for each device you use, so we can tell your device that someone left a note in your group. See Notifications.
AI Chat data — your prompts and the assistant's responses, scoped to each book, along with optional spoiler feedback reports if you choose to flag a response.
Timestamps — when your account was created and when content was added.

We do not collect payment information, precise location data, or advertising identifiers, and we do not collect any account data beyond what is listed above. The only device-level identifier we store is the notification token described above, which exists solely to deliver your notifications and is deleted when you delete your account. Aggregate usage measurement is described under Analytics.

How We Use It

Your data is used solely to operate PlotLock:

Authenticating you when you sign in.
Displaying your library and progress to you.
Sharing your progress and comments with members of your reading group (people who have joined the same group code).
Providing the AI reading assistant features (answering questions about books based on your reading progress).
Sending you notifications about activity in your reading groups, if you have allowed them.

We do not sell your data or use it for advertising. Beyond the infrastructure providers listed below, the only data that leaves PlotLock goes to the three services described under Other Services We Send Data To.

Infrastructure Providers

PlotLock is built on services provided by Google (Firebase Authentication, Firestore, and Vertex AI) and Cloudflare (hosting and privacy-focused web analytics). Your data is stored on Google's servers in accordance with Firebase's privacy terms. For the AI reading assistant features, your messages and reading progress are processed via Google Vertex AI; we use enterprise settings to ensure that your prompts and responses are private and are never used by Google to train their AI models.

Other Services We Send Data To

Three services outside our own infrastructure receive data directly from the app:

Web3Forms — when you send feedback from Settings, your message and your email address are sent to Web3Forms, which delivers it to us as an email. This happens only when you choose to send feedback, and the app tells you so at the point you send it.
Google Books — when you search for a book to add, the words you type are sent to the Google Books API to fetch matching titles, authors and covers. Your account is not identified in that request.
DiceBear — when a book has no cover image, we request a generated placeholder from DiceBear using the book's title. No information about you is sent.

As with any request your device makes over the internet, these services can see your IP address. None of them receive your reading progress, your comments, or your AI chats.

Analytics

We use Cloudflare Web Analytics to understand how many people use PlotLock and which screens they reach. It is privacy-focused by design: it sets no cookies, does not fingerprint your device, and does not track you across other websites or apps.

For each page view it records the page address, the referring page if you arrived from a link, your browser, operating system and device type (such as phone, tablet or desktop), page load and performance timings, and a country derived from your IP address. Your IP address itself is used only to derive that country and is not stored by us or made available to us. This measurement is aggregate: it is not linked to your account, your email address, or anything you read or write in PlotLock, and we cannot use it to identify you.

This applies in the PlotLock mobile apps as well as on the website, since the apps display the same pages.

We do not use analytics for advertising. This data is processed by Cloudflare on our behalf, as described under Infrastructure Providers; we do not sell it or share it with anyone else.

Notifications

If you allow notifications, your device registers a push token which we store on your account, one per device you sign in on. It is used only to deliver notifications to that device — for example, telling you that someone left a note in a group you are reading with. Notifications are delivered through Firebase Cloud Messaging, and a notification tells you the username of the person who wrote the note and shows the first part of it.

The token is a device-level identifier. It is not used for advertising, not linked to the analytics described above, and not shared with anyone. Revoking notification permission on your device stops the notifications; if a token stops working — because you uninstalled the app, for example — we mark it inactive and stop using it. The stored token is deleted when you delete your account.

Within PlotLock, other people can see:

Your reading group — members of any group you join can see your username, your progress in that book, and the comments you leave in it.
Any signed-in user — your @username, display name and avatar colour are a public profile, so that people can find you by username and add you as a friend. Your email address, your library and your comments are not part of that profile.
Anyone with a share link — if you share a journey, the card at that link shows the book, your username and your progress in it, and can be opened by anyone who has the link without signing in. The link stays live until you delete the share.

Nothing else you store — books you have not shared into a group, or your AI chats — is visible to other users.

We do not sell your information. We do not share it with third parties other than the infrastructure providers listed above, who process it on our behalf so that PlotLock can operate, the services described under Other Services We Send Data To, or where we are required to by law.

Data Retention and Deletion

Your data is retained as long as your account exists. You can delete individual books (and their associated comments, group membership, and AI chat history) at any time from the Library screen. AI chat messages also have an automatic expiration of 90 days. You can delete your entire account and all data (including usage counters and spoiler reports) from Settings → Delete Account. For full instructions, see our Data Deletion page. If you need help, email us at the address below and we will remove your data within 30 days.

Your Rights

Depending on where you live — including in the UK, the European Economic Area, and parts of the United States — you have rights over your personal data. We honour these requests wherever you are, not only where the law requires it.

Access and a copy of your data — you can see everything you have stored from inside the app. If you would like a copy in a portable form, email us and we will send it to you.
Correction — you can edit your reading data, comments and progress at any time. Two things cannot be changed once set: your @username and your display name. This keeps your identity stable for the people reading alongside you and prevents impersonation. Email us if one of them is wrong and we will help.
Deletion — you can delete individual books, and you can delete your entire account and all of its data from Settings → Delete Account. See Data Deletion.
Objection and restriction — you can ask us to stop using your data in a particular way, or to restrict how we use it, by emailing us.
Withdrawing consent — you can turn notifications off at any time in your device settings.
Complaint — you can lodge a complaint with your local data protection authority. We would rather you contacted us first so we can put things right.

To exercise any of these, email us at the address at the foot of this page. We will respond within 30 days. We do not charge for this, and we will not treat you differently for asking.

Why We Are Allowed to Process Your Data

We process your account details, reading data and comments in order to provide the service you signed up for. We process aggregate analytics, and keep the service secure and working, on the basis of our legitimate interest in understanding and maintaining PlotLock — balanced against your privacy, which is why that measurement is not linked to your account. Notifications are sent only with your consent, which you can withdraw at any time.

Where Your Data Is Processed

PlotLock is operated from the United States, and our infrastructure providers process and store your data on servers in the United States. If you use PlotLock from outside the United States, your data is transferred there. Google and Cloudflare provide safeguards for these transfers, including the European Commission's standard contractual clauses.

Age Requirement

PlotLock is intended for people aged 16 and over. It is not directed at children, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 16.

We set a single minimum age of 16 everywhere rather than the lowest age each country allows, so that the rule is the same wherever you are. If you believe someone under 16 has created an account, contact us at the address below and we will delete it and its data promptly.

Changes to This Policy

If we make material changes to this policy, we will update the effective date above. Continued use of PlotLock after changes constitutes acceptance of the updated policy.

Questions? Contact us at [email protected]