Privacy policy

The short version: Rex reads shelves on your phone and never uploads your photos; we hold what you give us to run your account and nothing for advertising; you can delete all of it from inside the app.

Who we are

Rex and this website are made by The Sage Group ("we"). We are the data controller for the personal data described here. Write to us at hello@rex.re about anything in this policy.

This website

rex.re is a set of static pages. It sets no cookies, runs no analytics and has no accounts. The pages are delivered by Amazon CloudFront, which processes your IP address for the moment it takes to send you the page; we keep no access logs of the website.

What the app collects, and why

Your account

You sign in with your Apple or Google account. We receive the identifier that service gives us for you, your name if you share it, and an email address, which with Sign in with Apple may be a relay address rather than your own. We use these to create and secure your account and to answer you when you write to us. We never see your password.

Your profile

You choose a username and may add a display name, a short bio and a picture. Profiles are visible to other signed-in users of Rex; that is what makes following possible.

Your reading

Your shelves, ratings, reviews, lists and the people you follow are the substance of the service. They are shown to other signed-in users as the app's sharing settings describe, so that the people who follow you can use them. We use them to show you what the people you follow think.

Your camera

When you point the camera at a shelf, the text on the spines is recognised on your phone using Apple's on-device text recognition. Only the recognised words are sent to our servers, over an encrypted connection, to be matched against our catalogue of books and authors. No photo or video is uploaded, and none is stored by us. We keep a record of which books were recognised so the catalogue can grow; that record is not used to build a profile of you.

Ask Rex

When you ask the app for a book in words, your question is sent to our servers and answered with the help of two providers who process the text of the question on our behalf: Anthropic, whose Claude models write the answer, and DeepInfra, whose models rank the candidates. They receive the question, not your name or account.

Technical data

Our servers keep short-lived technical logs of requests, including IP addresses, so the service stays running and secure. If you write to us for help we may ask for your phone model and iOS version to reproduce a problem.

What we do not do

• No advertising, and no advertising identifiers.
• No third-party analytics or tracking software in the app or on the website.
• No selling of personal data, and no sharing of it for anyone else's marketing.
• No use of your content to train artificial-intelligence models.

Where it is kept

Our servers run on Amazon Web Services in the United States, and the database that holds accounts and profiles is provided by Supabase. Sign-in is provided by Apple and Google. Data is encrypted in transit and at rest. If you are outside the United States, your data is transferred there to provide the service, under the safeguards those providers offer.

How long we keep it

For as long as your account exists. When you delete your account, your profile, shelves, ratings, reviews, lists and follows are deleted, your Apple or Google sign-in is revoked, and the data leaves our backups within 30 days. Technical logs are kept for a short, fixed period and then discarded.

Deleting your account

In the app, open your profile, then Settings, then Delete account. It takes effect at once and cannot be undone. You can also write to us and we will do it for you, after confirming that the request comes from the email on the account.

Your rights

Wherever you live, you can ask us what we hold about you, ask us to correct it, ask for a copy of it, and ask us to delete it. If you are in the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom or Switzerland you also have the rights to restrict or object to processing and to complain to your data-protection authority; our legal bases are the contract we have with you when you use the service, and our legitimate interest in keeping it running and secure. If you live in California, the rights above are the rights that state's law gives you, and we do not sell or share personal information as that law defines those terms. To exercise any of these, write to hello@rex.re.

Children

Rex is not for children under 13, and we do not knowingly hold their data. If you believe a child has an account, tell us and we will delete it.

Changes

If this policy changes in a way that matters, we will say so in the app before the change takes effect. The date at the top is the date of the current version.