Last updated: 2026-09-17
read to me is a private, invite-only read-aloud application built by an individual for personal and household use. This page describes what information the application processes, why it exists, who can access it, and how long it is kept. The wording is deliberately plain because the audience is the small circle of family and friends who have been added to the allowlist — not a mass-market user base.
When you sign in with Google we receive your verified email address and the fact that you completed a successful Google OAuth consent. We do not receive your Google password. We store the email address inside a signed cookie on your browser so we know it is you on subsequent requests; the cookie expires thirty days after the last successful sign-in.
When you upload a photograph of a book page we store that photograph on disk on the server hosting this application. When you type a book title, correct extracted text, or add a voice name we store those strings in a Postgres database on the same server. When the play view synthesises narration audio we cache the resulting MP3 file on disk so that repeated playback does not repeatedly bill our OpenAI account.
We do not use tracking pixels. We do not integrate an ads network. We do not embed third-party analytics on any page inside the authenticated area. We do not share your data with anyone outside the operators of this specific application.
Photographs of book pages are sent to OpenAI for optical character recognition (via the GPT-4o vision endpoint) so that the extracted text can be shown to you for review. Extracted or corrected text is sent to OpenAI when the play view synthesises narration audio (via the TTS endpoint). Both endpoints operate under OpenAI’s standard API terms; per those terms, API traffic is not used to train their general models.
Photographs, extracted text, and cached narration audio persist for as long as the corresponding book exists in your library. Deleting the book from the library removes the database rows; the associated media files on disk are removed by a background cleanup, and can be removed by the operator on request. Your session cookie disappears from your browser once it expires or when you sign out.
You can delete a book from your library at any time. You can sign out from any page. If you would like every trace of your usage removed from the server, contact the operator (the person who invited you) and we will delete your rows and files by hand.
We do our best. The application runs behind HTTPS with a certificate issued by Let’s Encrypt, the session cookie is signed with a server-side secret and marked HttpOnly and Secure, and access is gated behind a hand-curated allowlist. We do not disclose the specific tools or techniques we use to keep the application safe. If you spot something that concerns you, contact the operator directly.