The Bookship App is developed by The Hawaii Project, LLC. Bookship is a social reading experience designed to help you read books together with other people. This document describes the privacy policy for the Bookship Services, comprised of the Bookship app and the companion website (www.bookshipapp.com).

We are also the makers of a personalized Book Recommendation Engine called The Hawaii Project. The Bookship app is distinct from The Hawaii Project. You can find the privacy policy for The Hawaii Project here. This document does not apply to the use of The Hawaii Project.

This privacy policy covers our treatment of personally identifiable information and other data we may gather as you access our Services. We also describe ways you can control how certain of this information is used and shared.

This privacy policy is incorporated into, and subject to, the Terms of Service.

What Personal Information Does Bookship Collect?

• Personal Information you provide us about yourself: In order to use our Services, an account / registration is required. In order to register, you provide us with your email address and a username, as well as optionally your name and a profile photo (which may optionally be derived from one of your social media accounts such as Facebook). We will request permission to collect your mobile device type and device identifier in order to provide you with alerts from our Services, which you may decline. By signing up and providing us with your email address, you explicitly grant us permission to send you emails related to the Services. You can alter the permissions granted in the Accounts section of the Bookship mobile application.
• Personal Information you provide us about others: Bookship allows you to participate in a group messaging environment, where a group of people reading the same book(s) as yourself can communicate (we call this a “Reading”). You provide us with other people’s email addresses or phone numbers so we may send them an invitation to join a Reading or the Services. With your permission we will access your phone's address book to find your friends' email addresses or phone numbers. When you "Start a Reading" in Bookship, you agree it’s ok for us to upload the contact information for those selected users to our servers, so we may send them an invitation, which will state that you invited them to join. When you receive an invitation, it may be delivered through a Branch link (see below), which may provide us with your Device ID if you are on a mobile device. This allows us to understand what Reading you were invited to.
• Information Collected Automatically: Like most standard Web and mobile apps, Bookship stores and uses web server log files. These files include anonymous information about web browsers, such as internet protocol (IP) addresses, browser type, internet service provider (ISP), referring/exit pages, platform type, date/time stamp, and number of clicks to analyze trends, administer the site, track users' movement in the aggregate, and gather broad demographic information for aggregate use. Such log files are not linked to or treated as Personal Information by the Bookship Services. We may provide aggregate or anonymous information to our partners about how our users, collectively, use our Services, so that our partners may also understand how often people use our Services.

The Services are not permitted or intended for individuals under the age of 13.

How is My Information Shared?

As a guiding principle, our intent is that while Bookship is a social application, only those users with whom you explicitly intend to share information can view your information (unless your account profile privacy setting is set to Public). We share your personally-identifiable information only when it is reasonably necessary to offer the Services, legally required, or permitted by you.

We use your information in order to provide you with the Services. Communicating with other users is an essential element of the Services. When you invite other users to participate in the Services (especially via a Reading), your profile will be visible to them. The profile information shared will include your photo, name, and username, and potentially a book you wish to read with them. Your email is NOT shared with other users. Your profile will not be visible to other Bookship users unless you have invited them to participate in a Reading, or your profile visibility is set to Public. While we do not make visible your email, we may provide a User Search feature that allows your profile to be found by someone already possessing your email address.

When you post information in Bookship (“User Content”) — including comments, photos and other media — your posts are visible to those Bookship users with whom you share a Reading, unless your Reading is a Public reading, and therefore visible to anyone with an account. Any such “User Content” must be in compliance with our Terms of Service.

We do not perform any Advertising in our application or website. We therefore do not make use of any of your personal information for Advertising purposes. We may in future accept promotional sponsorships, but we will not engage in Advertising that relies upon any of your personal information. We do participate in the Amazon affiliate program and may receive a commission in the event you buy a book from Amazon that you discovered on our site.

From time to time we may employ other companies and people, such as independent vendors, service providers and/or contractors, to perform tasks on our behalf and may need to share your information with them in order for them to provide services to us. Any such vendors or people will be required to exercise the same or greater care with your personal information as we do.

We use certain third party systems to provide our Services, as described below. All such services have outstanding security and privacy protections, and more robust security technologies than we could likely build on our own. All communications with Bookship and other systems involving personally identifiable information are conducted through secure, encrypted https connections.

The Third Party Services we use:

• Firebase — we use Firebase, a Google product, to manage user authentication data including your email address and password. We also use Firebase Crashlytics to capture and collect crash logs for customer support and debugging purposes. The relevant Google Privacy Policy can be found here.
• Facebook SDK — the Facebook SDK provides us with the ability to interact with the Facebook Platform for integration with Facebook if and when you choose to connect your Facebook account. The Facebook Platform Privacy Policy can be found here and the Facebook Privacy Policy can be found here.
• Mailgun — we use Mailgun for the delivery of email alerts and notices regarding the Services, including notifications when other users post on Bookship as well as service-related support notifications. You can opt out of these emails from the Accounts section of the Bookship app. The relevant privacy policy can be found here.
• Mixpanel & Google Analytics — we use Mixpanel and Google Analytics to analyse aggregate, anonymous user behavior in the Bookship app and on Bookshipapp.com.
• Branch — we use Branch, a deep linking platform, for link attribution. For example, if someone sends you a Reading Invite, it may contain a Branch link that will assist you in downloading the app, and assist us in understanding what link you clicked on, what reading you were invited to, and other information, including your Device ID if you are on a mobile device. That information will be associated with your account so that we may provide the Bookship Services. We do not use that information to serve 3rd party advertisements. The Branch privacy policy is here.
• Twilio — we use Twilio to send text messages to either yourself, or persons whom you invite to a Reading by providing us with their phone number. This involves transmitting those phone numbers to Twilio's server(s) so they may send the text messages. The data you provide us, and which we send to Twilio, is not shared with any other party for their business purposes, and is used solely for the purpose of delivering messages. The Twilio privacy policy is here.

All communication with 3rd party services is done through secure, encrypted HTTPS channels.

Is my personal information secure?

We make every effort to secure your information, but we can’t promise to eliminate all risks. Please do your part by selecting unique, secure passwords and do not share that information with anyone else. When you provide information to us, you do so at your own risk.

The Services may contain links to other sites. We are not responsible for the privacy policies and/or practices on other sites, nor the content posted on those sites. This Privacy Policy only governs information collected on our Services.

We reserve the right to change this policy in the future.

If you have any questions or concerns regarding privacy using the Services, or would like your account/data deleted, please send a detailed message to: info@thehawaiiproject.com.

Last updated January 6, 2021.

Account Deletion

You may delete your account at any time, using one of two methods:

• via the App — In the Bookship app, go to Settings, and scroll to the bottom of the page. Tap the button entitled DELETE ACCOUNT, then follow the steps. This is essentially instantaneous.
• via Email — Send mail to info@thehawaiiproject.com, and provide us with the email address you used to open the account. We will delete your account and inform you via that email address.

In either case, none of your data is retained and cannot be recovered. Please be sure this is what you wish. We try to address account deletion features in a timely fashion (less than 24 hours), but if you wish this done urgently, the app DELETE ACCOUNT feature is essentially instant.