Privacy
This site knows what people read. That is a category of information worth being careful with, so the defaults here are private and this page is short enough to actually read.
Mini-Library Network, part of One Library Per Village. Last updated 11 September 2026. Contact: hello@mini-library.in
What we keep
| Your account | Name, email address, and phone number if you gave one. Shared with my-tree.in, which runs on the same platform and the same account. |
|---|---|
| What you did | Which books you took, left and donated, and where. This is what makes a book's page work. |
| Notes you write | Ratings and short notes on books. |
| Your Mini-Library | If you are a Captain: its name, landmark, postal code, opening hours and the photograph you uploaded. |
| Sign-in attempts | Counted for fifteen minutes to stop password guessing. Your network address is stored as a one-way hash, never in readable form, and discarded after a day. |
Signing in with Google
If you choose Continue with Google, Google tells us four things and nothing else:
- your Google account identifier — a number, stored so we recognise you next time;
- your email address, and whether Google has verified it;
- your name, used the same way a name you typed would be;
- your profile picture address, if your Google account has one.
That is the whole of it. We request only the openid, email and profile permissions. We do not ask for, and cannot see, your Gmail, contacts, calendar, files, photos or anything else in your Google account.
Google user data is used only to create and sign in to your Mini-Library account. It is not sold, not shared with anyone, not used for advertising, not used to train any model, and not passed to any other application. It is stored in the same database as the rest of your account and is subject to everything else on this page.
You can disconnect Mini-Library from your Google account at any time at myaccount.google.com → Security → Your connections to third-party apps. Doing that stops the Google sign-in working; it does not by itself delete your Mini-Library account, which you can ask us to close at any time (see below).
If an account already exists under the same email address and Google has verified that address, signing in with Google joins the two rather than making a second account. If Google has not verified the address, we do not join them — that check is the thing standing between an account and somebody who put your address on a Google profile.
What other people see
Nothing, by default. A new account is set to private: your name does not appear beside a donation or a note until you change that in your settings. You can change it back, and nothing becomes public retroactively because you once ticked a box.
Minors are never named. Where an account is marked as belonging to a person under 18, the name is withheld from every public page regardless of any other setting. That is enforced in the database queries themselves, not in the page templates, so it cannot be undone by a change to how a page looks.
Where a Mini-Library is
A Mini-Library is often at somebody's house or shop. Its page shows a landmark and a rounded distance — never exact coordinates. Photographs uploaded by Captains have their embedded location data stripped out before publication, because phone cameras write GPS coordinates into photographs and most people do not know it.
What we do not do
- No advertising, and no selling or sharing of anything here.
- No analytics scripts, no tracking pixels, no third-party JavaScript. This site runs no JavaScript at all.
- No cookies except the one that keeps you signed in.
- Nothing here trains a machine-learning model, ours or anybody else's.
Children
Children read from these libraries, and that is the point of them. An account for somebody under 18 is registered by a Captain or a guardian, who records the guardian's name, and that account is never named publicly. We ask a minor for nothing beyond a name and, where a guardian gives one, a contact number.
Where it is kept, and for how long
On a server in India, in one database shared with my-tree.in. Account details are kept until you ask us to close the account. Sign-in attempt records are deleted after a day. A book's events are kept for the life of the book, because that record is the thing the project exists to make.
Getting your data, or getting rid of it
Write to hello@mini-library.in and we will send you everything we hold about you, or close the account. No reason needed, and we will answer within thirty days.
One thing we cannot do is erase a book's history. A book's page is made of events contributed by many people, and removing one person's link in the chain breaks the record for everybody else. What we do instead is unname you: the event stays, your name comes off it permanently and irreversibly. If that is not acceptable to you, please do not use the site.
If this page changes
The date at the top changes with it. If a change affects what we do with information we already hold, we will say so on the site before it takes effect rather than quietly editing this page.