What we know about you

The short version

• You can read every page here without telling us anything. Signing in is optional, and the reason to do it is to save books to a list of your own.
• Nothing you do on the site is counted or measured. No analytics, no advertising tag, no tracking pixel. The only cookie we ever set is the one that keeps you signed in, and it arrives when you sign in and not a moment before.
• If you do sign in, what we keep is three lines (your email address, a display name, and the date you joined) and the books you save, with the time you saved each. Nothing about you is ever a model input.
• The four things the site remembers (day or night, playback speed, reading pace, and how the two crowds are compared) are kept by your own browser and never sent to us.
• Delivering a page to you means our web host handles a request from your device, and that request carries your internet address, as every request on the web does. We do not read those records, and nothing is built from them.
• Everything else on this page is that, explained, including exactly what an account holds and what it is still being built towards.

The four things your browser remembers

Four things on Earmark are yours to set: whether the site is in day or night, what playback speed your runtimes are quoted at, how fast you read, and whether ratings are shown as the shops print them or measured against each crowd.

All four are stored in your own browser, under names beginning earmark-, using the browser’s own storage rather than cookies. The distinction matters and it is the reason we chose it: a cookie travels with every request you make, so we would receive it whether we wanted it or not. Browser storage does not travel. Your reading pace has never left your device and there is nowhere on our side for it to land. (The one cookie we do set is the sign-in one, described below. It travels, because it has to: that is the only way our server can know it is you.)

Clear your browsing data and the four settings are gone, with no harm done, and the page falls back to the house answer. And whatever they are set to, they change only what a page shows you: the opinion is the same opinion we give everybody.

What our server sees when you open a page

Earmark is a website, so something has to hand you a page. Ours runs on Vercel, a hosting company. When you open an address here, your device asks their servers for it, and that request unavoidably carries your internet address, which browser you are using, and which page you asked for. Vercel keeps short-lived operational records of requests like that, in order to run the service and to fend off attacks on it. That is the smallest arrangement we could find that is still a website.

We do not read those records, we have not connected them to anything, and there is no second system on our side receiving a copy. Vercel handles them under their own terms as our supplier.

What we can be exact about is our own database, because we wrote that part. The book pages are read once when the site is built, not when you visit: they were written out in advance, so the page you are reading now involved no database lookup about you or about anything else. The search box on the shelf is the same story: it filters a list that is already inside the page you downloaded, so what you type into it never leaves your browser. Two things are different, and only for a signed-in reader: your own account page looks your profile and your saved books up when you open it, and a book page asks our database whether that one book is on your list, so its Save button can say so. Signed out, neither happens.

We have not put analytics on this site

There is no analytics on this site. Not a light-touch, privacy-friendly one either. None at all. No script from anybody else runs on these pages, there is no advertising network, no tracking pixel, no session recorder, and no share buttons phoning home.

Even the two typefaces are ours to serve. They started life as Google fonts, but they are downloaded when the site is built and served from our own address, so opening an Earmark page does not quietly tell Google that you did.

We will be honest about the pull here: knowing how many people read a page is a genuinely useful thing for a small site to have, and one day we may want it. If that day comes, this page changes first, naming the tool and saying what it stores and how long for, and only then does anything get switched on. We would rather tell you before than apologise after.

There is one request that does leave your browser for somebody else’s server, and it is not analytics: the sample player on a book page with an audiobook on it. The next section says exactly what it asks for and when.

The one thing on a page that is not ours: the sample player

A book page with an audiobook on it carries a sample you can play without leaving the page. The clip is Audible’s, not ours (we hold no audio at all), so it is served from their file host rather than from us, and that makes it the one thing on an Earmark page that comes from somewhere else.

Because the player shows you how long the clip runs before you decide whether to play it, your browser asks Audible’s file host for the clip’s header when the page opens: its length and its format, a few hundred bytes, not the audio. That request carries the same things any request carries: your internet address and which browser you are using. The audio itself is fetched only when you press play. Pages with no recording on them, and every other page on this site, ask Audible for nothing at all.

We chose the honest trade rather than the quiet one: a play button that cannot tell you how long the thing it offers you runs is a worse deal than a page that says out loud what it fetched. If you would rather it did not, your browser’s own controls for blocking media from other sites stop it, and nothing else on the page depends on it.

What we hold is about books, not about people

Almost everything Earmark holds is about books, not about people. Titles, authors, page counts, how the crowds rated a book and how those ratings were spread, what prizes it won, how long each recording runs, who narrated it, and the scores we work out on top of all that. The figures come from Goodreads, Hardcover and Audible; the opinions are ours.

Two things we deliberately never keep. We hold no audio: not a file, not a clip, not a sample. And we hold no review text: reviews are read to derive a summary figure and then discarded, so there is no store of anybody’s writing here to leak, sell or be asked for.

Narrators, authors and publishers are named on these pages because you cannot describe a recording without naming the person who made it. If you are one of them and something we print about your work is wrong, write to milobedini64@gmail.com and we will correct it.

Your account, if you make one

You can sign in to Earmark, either with Google or with an email address and a password. There is no need to: every page on the site is readable signed out, and an account changes nothing about what a verdict says. It exists so that you can save books to a list and find them again.

What we hold is three things: your email address, a display name (Google sends one; an email sign-up takes the part of your address before the @ until you change it), and the date you first signed up. That is the entire profile. There is not a fourth column waiting quietly behind it.

And the books you save. Press Save on a book page and we keep which book and when: nothing else, not a rating, not a reason. Only you can see the list, and the part of Earmark that works out verdicts is locked out of it by the database itself, not by a promise. Delete the account and the list goes with it.

The one cookie. Signing in sets a cookie so that our server knows it is you on the next page. It holds the token that proves it and nothing else: it is not an identifier we follow you around with, it is not shared, and it is not read by anybody but us. Sign out and it is gone. Until you sign in, no cookie is set at all.

If you sign in with Google, Google knows you signed in to Earmark, in the same way it would know you signed in anywhere else. Google tells us your email address and your name; we never see your Google password. Signing in with an email and a password involves Google not at all.

One line will not move whatever else does: nothing about your account becomes a model input. The verdict you see is the verdict everybody sees. That is not a privacy promise bolted on afterwards, it is how the thing is built.

What you can ask us for

If you have never signed in, the honest answer is that there is nothing to ask for: we hold nothing that identifies you, so there is no copy to send you, nothing to correct and nothing to delete. The four settings are already yours: they are on your device, and clearing your browsing data removes them without involving us at all.

If you do have an account, the usual rights under United Kingdom data-protection law apply and we intend to honour them without making it a chore. Deleting the account is yours to do: the foot of your account page has the button, it names everything that goes before you press it, and it takes the profile and every saved book with the account at once. The site keeps nothing of it afterwards. Two copies outlast the button for a while: the sign-in service’s own log of sign-ins and changes, and the routine backups our database host takes. Either can hold your email address until it rolls off on the host’s schedule. For a copy of what we hold about you, or to fix something that is wrong, write to milobedini64@gmail.com and we will answer within a month. If we ever handle that badly, you can complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office, the UK regulator.

How to reach us, and how you will know this changed

Earmark is run by one person, Milo Bedini, in the United Kingdom. The address for anything on this page (a question, a correction, or a copy of what we hold about you) is milobedini64@gmail.com. There is no form and no ticketing system; it goes to a human.

The date at the top of this page says when these words were last looked at, and it moves only when they change, never when the site is rebuilt. If something here changes in a way that matters, we will say so on the site rather than edit quietly and hope.

The terms say what Earmark is and what we ask of you, and House Rules says where we stand on reading, listening and being willing to shrug.