Transform Reads is a UK-based reading recommendation and community platform operating at www.transformreads.com. We help readers discover books matched to their current season of life through our quizzes, articles, and the ReaderWrites community novel project.

For the purposes of data protection law, Transform Reads is the data controller responsible for your personal data. You can contact us at info@transformreads.com.

We collect different data depending on how you interact with the site:

• Account registration: your display name, email address, and password (stored encrypted)
• Quiz results: your answers to our reading DNA and life season quizzes, used to generate your recommendations
• ReaderWrites contributions: the text you submit, your IP address, the timestamp, and your legal consent record
• Story follows: your email address if you subscribe to story update notifications
• Contact forms: your name and email when you get in touch with us
• Usage data: standard server logs including IP address, browser type, and pages visited, collected automatically
• Cookies: see Section 5 for full details

We use your data only for the purposes for which it was collected:

• To operate and maintain your account on the site
• To generate and display your personalised book recommendations
• To process and moderate your ReaderWrites contributions
• To send you email notifications you have opted into — contribution approvals, rejections, story updates, and badge awards
• To respond to your enquiries
• To improve the site through anonymised usage analysis
• To maintain the ReaderWrites audit trail required for our Guinness World Record attempt

We will never sell your personal data. We will never use it for advertising. We will never share it with third parties except as described in Section 6.

Under UK GDPR, we process your personal data on the following legal bases:

• Contract: processing your account data and contributions is necessary to provide the services you have requested
• Consent: sending you email notifications, which you can withdraw at any time
• Legitimate interests: improving the site, preventing fraud, and maintaining security
• Legal obligation: retaining records we are required to keep by law

We use cookies to make the site work and to understand how it is used. The cookies we use fall into three categories:

• Essential cookies: required for the site to function — keeping you logged in, remembering your preferences, and security tokens. These cannot be disabled.
• Analytics cookies: anonymised data about how visitors use the site, used to improve it. No personally identifiable information is collected.
• Functional cookies: remembering your quiz results and reading preferences between visits.

You can manage your cookie preferences through our cookie consent tool, which appears when you first visit the site, or through your browser settings. Note that disabling essential cookies will affect how the site functions.

We work with a small number of trusted third-party services that may process your data on our behalf:

• Brevo (email delivery): used to send transactional emails such as contribution notifications. Your email address is passed to Brevo for delivery purposes only.
• Hostinger (web hosting): our website is hosted on Hostinger’s servers in the EU.
• Gumroad (payments): if you purchase any products from us, payment is processed by Gumroad under their own privacy policy.
• Anthropic (AI summaries): story text is sent to Anthropic’s API to generate the ReaderWrites “Story So Far” summaries. No personal data is included in these requests.

All third parties are required to handle your data in accordance with applicable data protection law. We do not sell or rent your data to any third party for marketing purposes.

• Account data: retained for as long as your account is active. You can request deletion at any time.
• Quiz results: stored in your account and retained until you delete your account.
• ReaderWrites contributions and consent records: retained indefinitely as part of the published work and the Guinness World Record audit trail. Approved contributions form part of the permanent record of the community novel.
• Email notification preferences: retained until you unsubscribe or delete your account.
• Server logs: retained for up to 90 days for security and diagnostic purposes, then deleted.

Under UK GDPR you have the following rights regarding your personal data:

• Right of access: you can request a copy of all personal data we hold about you
• Right to rectification: you can ask us to correct inaccurate data
• Right to erasure: you can ask us to delete your data, subject to our legal obligations (see Section 7)
• Right to restrict processing: you can ask us to limit how we use your data
• Right to data portability: you can ask for your data in a portable format
• Right to object: you can object to processing based on legitimate interests
• Right to withdraw consent: where processing is based on consent, you can withdraw it at any time

ReaderWrites is our community novel project. When you submit a contribution, we collect and store your display name, email address, the contribution text, your IP address, and the timestamp — along with a record of your legal consent.

If your contribution is approved, it becomes part of the published story on the website and, ultimately, part of a compiled book. Your display name will appear publicly alongside your published passage. This is part of the contributor credit you agreed to when submitting.

The audit trail — including timestamps, contributor identities, and consent records — is retained permanently as evidence for our Guinness World Record attempt. This means that even if you delete your account, your approved contribution and the associated audit record may be retained as part of the published work.

Please read our full ReaderWrites Contributor Terms before submitting.

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. When we do, we will update the effective date at the top of the page. Material changes will be communicated via the website. Your continued use of the site after any changes constitutes acceptance of the updated policy.

This policy was last updated in June 2025.