Data usage

What Libling stores. Your email address (for signing in), the places you create (libraries, rooms, bookcases, shelves), the items catalogued there, and the photos you take. Photos live in a private storage bucket in the EU (Supabase); after a shelf photo is read, only a downscaled copy is kept. Nothing is public: only you, and people you explicitly share a library with by email, can see your catalogue.

Signing in with Google. If you choose Google rather than an emailed link, Google gives Libling three things: your name, your profile picture, and your email address. They are used to identify your account and for nothing else — no contacts, no calendar, no Drive, no other Google data is requested or received. You can withdraw that access at any time from your Google account's connections page, and nothing you have catalogued is affected if you do.

What leaves the service, and why. Three things only. A photo you scan is sent to Google's Gemini API to read the spines — that is the product's core function. And when Liblinglooks an item up, the title and author (never your photos, never your email) are sent to the open catalogues: Open Library, Libris, Google Books, MusicBrainz, Discogs, TMDB, BoardGameGeek, and — for records — Spotify, to find the exact album link. And when you start as a guest or ask for a sign-in link, Cloudflare Turnstile checks that the request comes from a person rather than a script: for that check Cloudflare sees your IP address and basic browser details (see Cloudflare's Turnstile privacy addendum), and Liblingreceives only a pass or a fail.

A library can remember where it is, but only if you press the button that asks your device — never on page load, and never from a photo (resizing strips the GPS tag before anything is uploaded). What is stored is rounded to about 110 metres, enough to tell one home from another and too coarse to point at a door. Anyone the library is shared with can see it, and “Forget this location” removes it for good.

What Libling does not do. No advertising, no analytics trackers, no selling or sharing of your data with anyone. There are no third-party cookies; the only cookies are the ones that keep you signed in.

Deleting. Deleting an item or a library removes it and its files permanently. Deleting a photo deletes the picture itself for good, and offers to delete the items it catalogued along with it — but if you keep those items, the reading taken from that photo is kept too: which titles were found, in what order, and which of them were visible in one frame. That last fact is what stops two volumes of one work being mistaken for each other later, and it is text rather than an image. Delete the items and it goes with them.

Getting in touch, and getting out. Deleting everything you have created removes all of your content. If you also want the account itself gone, or have any question about what is held about you, write to hello@libling.app.

Last updated: 9 October 2026.