Legal
Privacy Policy
The short version
- The website needs no account. You can search any book and read its content notes without signing in, giving an email, or being tracked.
- No ads, no analytics SDKs, no third-party trackers.We don’t use Google Analytics, ad pixels, or behavioural profiling — anywhere.
- Your notes and name live on your device. The list of content notes you care about is stored in your browser, not on our servers.
- Signing in the app keeps almost nothing. Sign in with Apple or Google gives us one opaque ID. We never receive or store your email, real name, or photo.
- We never sell your data. There is very little tied to you in the first place, and none of it is for sale.
Foreword tells you what’s in a book before you start reading it. This policy explains, in plain words, exactly what the Foreword website (foreword.info) and the Foreword iOS and Android apps collect, what we store, what we do with it, who else touches it, and whether any of it can be traced back to you. It is specific to Foreword — not a generic template.
1. Who we are
Foreword is built and operated by Onemoretab, LLC(“Foreword,” “we,” “us”). We are the data controller for the personal information described here. You can reach us any time at hello@onemoretab.software.
Foreword is a harm-reduction tool for readers, not a rating, censorship, or advertising service. Our incentives are aligned with collecting less data, not more.
2. What this covers
This policy applies to:
- The Foreword website at foreword.info;
- The Foreword app for iOS and iPadOS;
- The Foreword app for Android.
The website and the apps share one backend, but they collect different things — the website needs no account at all, while the apps offer an optional sign-in so you can contribute community notes. We call those out separately below.
3. Using the website
You can use the entire Foreword website — search for a book, pick the content notes you care about, and read what a title contains — without an account and without signing in. There is no sign-up, no login, and no profile on the website.
Search & lookup requests
When you search for a book or open a title, your browser sends the search text (and the content-note categories you’ve selected) to our own server so we can return results. Those requests are proxied through the website’s server so your browser never talks to third parties directly. We use these queries only to answer the lookup in that moment. We do not build a search history tied to you, and there is no account for one to attach to.
Server logs
Like essentially every website, our hosting and network providers (Vercel and Cloudflare — see §12) automatically process standard technical request data such as your IP address and browser user-agent to deliver pages, defend against abuse, and keep the service up. These are transient operational logs, not a profile of you, and they are not used for advertising or analytics.
Fonts
The website loads typefaces from Google Fonts. Serving those fonts means your browser makes a request to Google’s font servers, which exposes your IP address to Google for that request. We don’t send Google anything about what you searched, and we set no Google cookies. This is the only routine third-party request the site makes.
Cookies & tracking
Foreword sets no advertising or tracking cookies. We use your browser’s local storage for a few functional preferences only (your light/dark theme and your notes list — see §4). We do not use analytics SDKs, ad pixels, session replay, fingerprinting, or cross-site trackers.
4. Your notes list & name
On the website, the content notes you choose to track — and any display name you type in — are saved in your browser’s localStorage on your own device. This list stays on your device. We do not upload it, store it on our servers, or link it to you.
The only time your selections leave your device is at the moment of a lookup, where the selected note categories are sent as anonymous IDs so results can be tailored to what you asked about. Clearing your browser storage erases this list; there is no server-side copy to delete.
5. Signing in — Sign in with Apple & Google
In the app, signing in is optional and is used for one purpose: attributing the community notes you contribute so the crowd-voting system can work. Reading and searching never require an account.
What the provider sends us
When you choose Sign in with Apple or Sign in with Google, Apple or Google authenticates you on their side and hands the app a signed identity token. The app passes that token to our server, which cryptographically verifies it directly against Apple’s or Google’s public keys.
What we actually keep — and why it’s so little
From that verified token we extract and store one thing: the token’s subject identifier (the sub claim) — an opaque, provider-issued string that is unique to your Foreword account but is not your email, name, or Apple/Google account name. Alongside it we store which provider it came from (“apple” or “google”). That is the entirety of what sign-in creates. Concretely, your account record holds:
- A random internal account ID we generate;
- The provider name (Apple or Google);
- The opaque provider subject ID (sub);
- A count of how many notes you’ve contributed and a “last seen” timestamp;
- A flag for whether the account has been blocked for abuse.
We deliberately discard everything else the platform may offer. We do not store your email address (including Apple’s private relay address), your real name, your profile photo, or any contact details. Because we never keep your email, we literally cannot email you, and there is no name in our database to attach to your activity.
Your session
After sign-in, our server issues a signed session token that your device stores and presents when you contribute or vote. It expires after 90 days. It identifies your opaque account, not you as a person.
What Apple and Google know
Apple and Google run the sign-in on their own systems and therefore know that you used your Apple/Google account to sign in to Foreword. Their handling of that is governed by Apple’s Privacy Policy and Google’s Privacy Policy. We don’t control what they log on their side, but we don’t send them anything about your reading, searches, or notes.
6. Contributing a community note
If you’re signed in, you can add a community content note to a book. When you submit one, we store:
- The book it’s about and the content-note topic you tagged;
- Whether the note affirms or disputes that the content is present;
- A severity level (brief, some detail, or graphic);
- An optional free-text context note (up to 500 characters);
- A link to your opaque account ID (see §5) and a status.
Community notes go live and public immediately, and are shown to other readers attributed to “the Foreword community” — never to your name (we don’t have it). Please treat the free-text field as public and don’t put personal information in it. To keep notes clean and safe, submitted text is automatically screened and rejected if it contains links, email addresses, phone numbers, or slurs. We keep the internal link between a note and your account so we can show you your own contributions, count them, and remove abuse.
7. Voting on notes
Up/down voting on community notes is anonymous and needs no account. To stop one person or bot from stuffing the ballot, we need a way to tell votes apart without identifying voters. So:
- A vote is tagged with a voter key: either your app’s random device identifier, a random per-browser id the website stores locally (tied to no account, and regenerated if you clear browser storage), or — as a fallback — a one-way SHA-256 hash of your IP address, truncated. The hash cannot be reversed back into your IP; it only lets us detect duplicate votes.
- We record a coarse network bucket(roughly, your IP’s neighbourhood — a /24 IPv4 or /64 IPv6 range, never the full address) so that a coordinated brigade from one network can be auto-detected and a contested note hidden.
- Your raw IP is used transiently to enforce rate limits (short-lived counters that expire within a day) and is not stored alongside your vote in raw form.
None of this is tied to a name, email, or account. It exists purely to keep the vote tallies honest.
8. App-integrity checks
To keep automated bots from flooding contributions, the app proves it’s a genuine, untampered install using the platform’s built-in integrity services — Apple App Attest on iOS and Google Play Integrity on Android. These confirm the request came from the real Foreword app on a genuine device.
For this we store a per-device cryptographic public key and a counter (for App Attest), and we send integrity tokens to Apple/Google for verification. These checks attest the app and device, not you— they don’t reveal your identity, and we don’t use them to track you across apps or sessions.
9. What we never collect
To be explicit, Foreword does not collect, store, or use:
- Your email address or real name (even when you sign in);
- Advertising identifiers, ad pixels, or marketing profiles;
- Analytics-SDK behavioural data, session replays, or fingerprints;
- Your precise or background location;
- Your contacts, photos, microphone, or other device sensors;
- Payment or financial information (the apps and site are free);
- Your reading history or library from any other service;
- Any data brokered from or sold to third parties.
10. Can it be traced back to you?
This is the question that matters most, so here is a straight answer for each kind of data. We distinguish anonymous (not linkable to you even by us) from pseudonymous (linked to an opaque ID rather than your real-world identity).
| Data | Status | Can Foreword tie it to the real you? |
|---|---|---|
| Website searches & page views | Anonymous | No. There’s no account and we keep no per-user search history. |
| Your notes list & display name (web) | Local only | No. It never leaves your device; we don’t hold a copy. |
| Votes on community notes | Anonymous / pseudonymous | No. Tagged by a hashed IP or random device ID — no name or email attached. |
| Your account (after sign-in) | Pseudonymous | No. We hold only an opaque provider ID. We can link your own contributions together, but not to your real-world identity — we have no email or name. |
| Community notes you contribute | Public, pseudonymous | Shown to everyone as “the Foreword community,” never under your name. |
The honest nuance: your account is pseudonymous, not perfectly anonymous. The opaque sub ID we store is issued by Apple or Google, so theycould in principle connect it back to you — but Foreword cannot, because we never receive your email or name. And any activity you deliberately make public (a community note’s wording) is, by design, public. Everything else described here is either anonymous or stays on your own device.
11. Why we process each thing
We only process data for the specific reasons below. Where the GDPR applies, our legal basis is noted.
- Answering searches & showing content notes — to provide the service you asked for (contract / legitimate interest).
- Sign-in identity (opaque ID) — to let you contribute and to attribute and manage your contributions (contract).
- Contribution & vote records — to build and maintain the community content-note database that makes Foreword useful (legitimate interest).
- IP hashing, rate limits, integrity checks — to prevent spam, brigading, and bot abuse and keep the data trustworthy and the service secure (legitimate interest / legal obligation).
- Server logs — to operate, debug, and secure the service (legitimate interest).
13. Where it lives & how long
- Your notes list & theme (web): on your device until you clear your browser storage.
- Rate-limit counters & integrity challenges: transient — they auto-expire within minutes to a day.
- Account & contributions: kept while your account exists so your notes stay attributed and the database stays consistent. Delete your account (see §15) and we remove your account record; public community notes may be retained in de-identified form to keep the shared database intact.
- Server logs:kept only as long as our providers’ standard operational retention windows.
Foreword’s infrastructure runs on globally distributed services, so data may be processed on servers outside your country (see §17).
14. How we protect it
Traffic is encrypted in transit (HTTPS/TLS). Sign-in tokens are cryptographically verified against Apple’s and Google’s keys and never trusted blindly. Session tokens are signed and time-limited. IP addresses used for abuse-prevention are one-way hashed rather than stored raw against your votes, and app requests are integrity-checked. No system is perfectly secure, but collecting so little is itself our strongest protection: there is very little about you to lose.
15. Your choices & rights
Because the website holds nothing tied to you, most control is already in your hands — clear your browser storage and your local notes and preferences are gone. For an app account you can, subject to your local law (including the GDPR and California’s CCPA/CPRA):
- Access the limited data tied to your account;
- Delete your account and associated personal data;
- Correct or object to certain processing;
- Not be discriminated againstfor exercising these rights — and note we have no personal data to “sell” or “share” in the CCPA sense, and we don’t.
To make a request, email hello@onemoretab.software from the device you use to sign in, or from within the app, so we can locate the right opaque account. Because we hold no email or name, we may need you to verify control of the account to act on a request.
16. Children
Foreword is intended for a general audience and is not directed to children under 13 (or the equivalent minimum age in your country). We don’t knowingly collect personal information from children. If you believe a child has provided us information, contact us and we’ll remove it.
17. International users
Foreword is operated from the United States and uses globally distributed infrastructure. If you use Foreword from outside the U.S., your information may be processed in the U.S. or other countries whose data-protection laws differ from your own. Where required, we rely on appropriate safeguards for such transfers. Given how little we collect, these transfers involve minimal personal data.
18. Changes to this policy
If our data practices change, we’ll update this page and revise the effective date at the top. For material changes we’ll make a reasonable effort to highlight them. Continuing to use Foreword after an update means you accept the revised policy.
19. Contact us
Questions, requests, or concerns about privacy? Email hello@onemoretab.software. We’re a small team and we read everything.
Onemoretab, LLC · © 2026 · Content notes for readers, not a rating or censorship service.