Bookdive privacy policy
Last updated: 19 September 2026
1. The short version
Bookdive is a reading app. You add books; an AI that has read them answers questions about them while you read.
- Your highlights, notes, bookmarks and reading position are yours. We do not read them, mine them, or share them.
- We do not train any AI on your books, your notes, or your questions, and we do not let anyone else use them to do so — see section 4 for what the AI provider's own terms say.
- To answer a question, the text of the book you are reading and your question are sent to an AI provider. This is the one thing in the app that sends your reading somewhere else, and section 4 is about it in detail.
- You can download everything we hold, and delete your account and everything in it, from inside the app. Settings → Download my data and Delete account.
2. Who we are
Bookdive is operated by Ilyass Anida, an individual based in Morocco.
Questions, requests, or complaints: support@bookdive.app.
3. What we hold, and why
Your account. Your email address, and — if you signed in with Apple or Google — the stable identifier that provider gives us. If you use a password, we store only a bcrypt hash of it, never the password. If you sign in with Apple and choose Hide My Email, we never see your real address and store Apple's relay address instead.
Your books. The EPUB file you add, its cover, and the text parsed out of it so the AI can search it. We hold these so you can read on more than one device and so questions can be answered. We do not make them available to anyone else, and there is no way in the app for one account to see another's.
What you do while reading. Your highlights and their text, your notes, your bookmarks, and where you got to in each book. These exist so the app can show them back to you, and for nothing else.
Your conversations. The questions you ask and the answers you get, so a conversation continues where it left off.
A log of questions asked. The text of each question, when it was asked, which book it was about, and what it cost us in AI tokens. We keep this to understand what the service costs and whether it works. When you delete your account, the text of your questions is deleted and the remaining rows stop being linked to you — the token counts and costs are kept, and identify nobody.
Errors. When the app or the server fails, a report goes to Sentry so we can fix it. These are configured to carry no personal information: no email, no book titles, no question text. Just what broke and where.
We do not collect advertising identifiers, location, contacts, or your activity in other apps. There is no advertising in Bookdive and no analytics SDK that follows you.
4. The AI, and where your reading goes
To answer a question about a book, we send that book's text and your question to an AI provider. Not an extract — the book. This is what makes the answers worth having: the model has actually read the thing rather than guessing from a few nearby paragraphs.
You are entitled to know this before you use the feature, because people read novels, and also medical books, religious books, and political ones.
Who that provider is. We use DeepSeek (DeepSeek AI), through its API. DeepSeek is a Chinese company and its servers are in China. If you are in the UK or the EEA, this means the text of the books you read and the questions you ask are transferred outside that area.
We are telling you this plainly rather than burying it, because for some people it will be a reason not to use Bookdive, and that is a decision you are entitled to make before you add a book rather than after.
The basis for that transfer. Answering your question is the service you asked us for, and it cannot be done without sending the text — so the transfer is necessary for the performance of our contract with you (UK/EU GDPR Article 49(1)(b)). You can avoid it entirely by not adding a book, and by not asking questions about one.
What we do not send them. The book text and the question, and nothing else. Not your name, not your email, not your account id — the request carries no identifier of any kind, so what reaches DeepSeek cannot be tied back to a person by them.
Training. We checked DeepSeek's published privacy policy directly rather than assume: as things stand, it does not clearly state that content sent through its API is excluded from training its models, and does not draw the distinction other providers do between their API and their consumer chat product on this point. We use the API rather than the consumer app, but we are not able to tell you here that your book's text is never used for training, because DeepSeek's own terms do not say so. If that matters to you, that is a reasonable basis to hold off on this feature, or on Bookdive, until it is resolved - we would rather you decide with the true picture than a reassuring guess.
If we move to a provider elsewhere, this section will say so and we will tell you in the app before it happens.
Adding a book also sends its text to the same provider once, to work out who the characters are and where the moments that matter happen. If you never ask a question about a book, that first pass is still made.
If you do not want a book's text sent anywhere, do not add it to Bookdive. There is no mode in which the AI works without this, and we would rather say so than imply otherwise.
5. Who else we send things to
| Who | What they get | Why |
|---|---|---|
| The AI provider (section 4) | Book text, your questions | To answer them |
| Sentry | Crash and error reports, with no personal data | To fix failures |
| Apple / Google | Nothing from us; they tell us who you are when you sign in | Sign-in |
| Apple / Google, as stores | Your subscription status | Billing |
| Our hosting provider | Everything, because the server runs there | Hosting |
We do not sell your data. There is nobody else.
6. Where it is kept
On servers in Germany, plus whatever section 4 says about the AI provider.
Much of it is also on your own phone: since the app works offline, your books, highlights, notes and reading positions are stored on the device. Signing out or deleting your account removes them from the device as well as from the server.
7. How long
- While you have an account: as long as you keep it.
- When you delete your account: your books, files, highlights, notes, bookmarks and conversations are deleted immediately, and the text of your questions with them. Backups are kept for up to 60 days - the longest any deleted data can persist, in a form nobody but us can read, before the backup itself expires.
- Error reports: kept by Sentry for 90 days, and carry nothing that identifies you.
8. What you can do
You can, from inside the app, at any time:
- Get a copy of everything — Settings → Download my data. A JSON file with your account, books, highlights, notes, bookmarks, conversations and questions. It does not include the book files themselves: you have those already, and their contents belong to their publishers.
- Delete everything — Settings → Delete account.
- End every session — Settings → Sign out everywhere, for a phone you no longer have.
If you are in the UK or EEA you also have the right to correct what we hold, to object to or restrict what we do with it, and to complain to your data protection authority. Write to support@bookdive.app and a person will answer.
9. Children
Bookdive is not for children under 13, and we do not knowingly hold anything about one. If you believe we do, write to us and it will be deleted.
10. Changes
If this policy changes in a way that affects what happens to your reading, we will say so in the app before the change takes effect — not by quietly updating a date at the top of a page.
Everything factual in this document was written from the code it describes. If you find a claim here that the app does not honour, that is a bug and we want to know: support@bookdive.app.