Privacy policy

1. Identity of the data controller

The data controller is Alexis Le Pin, publisher of the Lexu application, who can be reached at alexis@lexu.fr. For any question relating to the protection of your data, write to us at alexis@lexu.fr with the subject "RGPD".

2. Data collected

We collect only the data necessary for the service to work:

• Account: email address, password (hashed, never stored in clear text), authentication method (email, Apple, Google).
• Profile: display name, username (@), avatar, bio, preferences (favourite genres, reading goals).
• Library: books added, progress (pages read), status (reading, finished, to read, abandoned), notes, quotes, impressions, as well as the information you enter yourself about your copy (price paid, place where it is kept, condition, format, publisher, personal labels, recommendation). A note can contain a voice recording that you start yourself, and a photo: the microphone is never activated unless you press to record.
• Reading activities: sessions (duration, pages read, date), history of shared activities.
• Social network: follows (followers / following), likes, comments, shares.
• Published works (authors area): if you publish a work on Lexu: pen name, title, summary, genre, cover and the text of the chapters. This content is public by nature once the work has been validated. In the reader, your reading position and your highlights are saved and are visible to you only.
• Messaging: content and metadata of the conversations between users (encryption in transit, storage on the server side).
• Premium subscription: subscription status (active / expired), product identifier, renewal date. No banking data is stored by Lexu: payments are handled by Apple (App Store), Google (Play Store) and, on the web, by Stripe.
• Technical data: device identifier (anonymised), OS version, app version, language, time zone, IP address (collected temporarily for security and for the prevention of abuse).
• Push notifications: device token (Apple Push / Firebase) if you enable notifications.

We collect no sensitive data (health, political, religious or trade union opinions, sexual orientation, etc.).

Advertising: the application displays sponsored placements to all of its users. Each placement carries the mention "Sponsored", and the name of the advertiser is displayed in the placement. We do not sell, rent or pass on any personal data to advertisers: they receive only aggregated statistics about their campaign.

3. Legal bases and purposes

In accordance with article 6 of the GDPR, each processing operation rests on a clear legal basis:

• Performance of the contract (art. 6.1.b): account creation, operation of the library, reading statistics, messaging, Premium subscription, user support.
• Legitimate interest (art. 6.1.f): security of the service, prevention of fraud, improvement of the app through aggregated and anonymised analyses.
• Consent (art. 6.1.a): push notifications, analytics, public sharing. You can withdraw your consent at any time through the settings of the app or of your device.
• Legal obligation (art. 6.1.c): retention of the connection logs (loi n° 2004-575 du 21 juin 2004, the French Act of 21 June 2004) and billing.

4. Processors and recipients

Your data may be processed by the following processors, under contracts that comply with the GDPR:

• Supabase (European Union, Sweden): hosting of the database and of the file storage (avatars, custom covers).
• Apple Inc. (United States): App Store, in-app payments, iOS push notifications, Sign in with Apple.
• Google LLC (United States): Play Store and payments for Android, Sign in with Google.
• RevenueCat (United States): technical management of the subscriptions and of the billing webhooks.
• Stripe Payments Europe (Ireland): payments made on the web (lifetime access, Pro offers and advertising).
• OneSignal (United States): delivery of the push notifications.
• OpenAI and Anthropic (United States): processing of the artificial intelligence features. The content you send to the reading assistant, as well as the book extracts needed to generate the quizzes and the summaries, are transmitted to them to produce the answer. They do not use this content to train their models.
• Resend (United States): sending of the service emails (password reset, address change, support replies). Your email address is transmitted to them for that sending.
• Netlify (United States): hosting of the lexu.fr website.
• Boxtal (France): creation of shipping labels for the Troc, Lexu's book swap. When a label is generated for a swap, the name, e-mail address, phone number and pick-up point of each of the two members are passed to them, and to the carrier delivering the parcel.
• Spotify AB (Sweden): if you connect your Spotify account, Lexu exchanges connection tokens with Spotify and retrieves the tracks played during your reading sessions to attach them to the session. Nothing is transmitted if you do not connect it.
• Discord Inc. (United States): if you link your Lexu account to the Lexu Discord server, your username, your Premium or author status, your number of books, your reading streak and your sign-up date are passed to it to display your roles. If your account is private, only the roles and the sign-up date are transmitted. You can remove the link at any time.
• Boxtal (France): creation of the shipping labels of the Book swap. When a label is generated for an exchange, the name, email address, phone number and pickup point of each of the two members are transmitted to them, as well as to the carrier that delivers the parcel.
• Spotify AB (Sweden): if you connect your Spotify account, Lexu exchanges the connection tokens with Spotify and retrieves the tracks you listen to during your reading sessions to attach them to the session. Nothing is transmitted if you do not connect it.
• Discord Inc. (United States): if you link your Lexu account to the Lexu Discord server, your username, your Premium or author status, your number of books, your reading streak and your sign-up date are transmitted to it to display your roles. If your account is private, only the roles and the sign-up date are transmitted. You can remove the link at any time.

We never sell your data. We share it with third parties only in order to provide the service or if the law requires us to.

5. Transfers outside the European Union

Some of our processors (Apple, Google, RevenueCat, OneSignal, OpenAI, Anthropic, Resend, Netlify) are based in the United States. These transfers are governed by:

• the standard contractual clauses of the European Commission;
• the certification of the American providers under the EU-US Data Privacy Framework (DPF) where applicable;
• additional measures (encryption in transit and at rest, strict access control).

6. Retention period

• Account data: kept for as long as your account is active. Deleted within 30 days of your account deletion request.
• Activities and messages: kept for as long as your account is active, deleted when the account is closed.
• Connection logs: kept for 12 months (legal obligation).
• Billing data: kept for 6 years (tax obligation, art. L. 102 B of the French Book of Tax Procedures).
• Inactive accounts: after 3 years of complete inactivity, we send you a warning email before automatic deletion.

7. Your rights

In accordance with the GDPR, you have the following rights over your data:

• Right of access (art. 15): obtain a copy of your data.
• Right to rectification (art. 16): correct inaccurate data.
• Right to erasure (art. 17): delete your data.
• Right to restriction (art. 18): temporarily freeze a processing operation.
• Right to portability (art. 20): retrieve your data in a structured format.
• Right to object (art. 21): object to a processing operation based on legitimate interest.
• Right to withdraw your consent at any time (art. 7).
• Post-mortem directives: decide what happens to your data after your death.

To exercise these rights, write to us at alexis@lexu.fr. We reply within 30 days at the most (extendable by 60 days in the event of a complex request). Proof of identity may be requested from you.

If you consider that your rights are not respected, you can lodge a complaint with the CNIL, the French data protection authority (3 Place de Fontenoy, 75007 Paris).

8. Account deletion

You can delete your account directly from the app (Profile → Settings → Help & support → Delete my account) or by contacting us. Deletion is irreversible and entails the loss of all your data (library, activities, impressions, messages). The data needed for the legal obligations (billing, logs) is kept for the legal period and then deleted.

9. Cookies and technical identifiers

The mobile application and the lexu.fr website use:

• Strictly necessary cookies (session, authentication, preferences): these do not require your consent.
• Anonymised device identifiers: for security and for limiting abuse (anti-spam, anti-fraud).

Lexu uses no third-party tracking pixel, no external advertising network and never follows your activity outside the application. On the showcase website, strictly aggregated and anonymised analytics tools may be used.

Purchase links. The "Where to find this book?" sheet of the application offers Amazon.fr and Fnac.com. Amazon places its own cookies according to its privacy policy. The link to Fnac.com first goes through the redirector of the affiliate platform Awin, which places a tracking identifier used to attribute the purchase to Lexu. That link contains nothing concerning you: only the public identifier of Lexu and a marker indicating which screen you clicked from. Neither your account, nor your email address, nor your library are transmitted, and we receive only aggregated reports of clicks and commissions, never the identity of the buyers.

9 bis. Sponsored placements and measurement

Sponsored placements are sold directly by Lexu to authors and publishing houses, and validated one by one: only books are promoted there. No advertising agency and no third-party advertising network is involved.

Authors and publishers you follow. The authors and publishers you follow will be able to e-mail you only if you accept it, once this setting is available in Settings; until then, no author or publisher can write to you, and without that consent they never receive your address. You will be able to withdraw your consent at any time in the same place, and every message contains an unsubscribe link. The advertiser behind a sponsored placement never receives your address or your identity.

Relevance of the campaigns. In order to avoid showing you a book unrelated to your tastes, the display order takes account of the themes of the books in your library (for example "Romance" or "Fantasy"). Two guarantees:

• The themes liable to reveal sensitive data (religion, health, political opinions, sexual orientation) are excluded by design from this calculation.
• This ranking only reorders the campaigns. It discards no one and has no consequence for your account, your content or your features.

Measurement. For each campaign, we record the placement actually seen, the opening of the book page and the addition to the to-read pile, at most once per day and per person. These events serve to produce the report given to the advertiser, which contains only totals and numbers of unique readers, never your identity or your profile.

Legal basis: legitimate interest (art. 6.1.f) in funding a free service and in measuring its effectiveness, balanced against your rights.

Your right to object. You can turn this ranking off at any time, without justification and without losing anything of the service, from Settings then Privacy, or by writing to alexis@lexu.fr. The campaigns are then presented to you in no particular order. Accounts declared as minors are excluded from it automatically: none of their reading enters the calculation.

10. Security

We implement appropriate technical and organisational measures: TLS 1.2+ encryption in transit, AES-256 encryption at rest for the sensitive files, hashing of the passwords (bcrypt/argon2), strict access policies (Supabase Row Level Security), regular audits, access logs. In the event of a breach liable to create a risk to your rights, we will notify the CNIL within 72 h and you yourself as soon as possible.

11. Minors

Lexu is intended for an audience aged 15 and over. We do not knowingly collect data concerning people under the age of 15. If you think that a child has sent us data, contact us: we will proceed with immediate deletion.

12. Professional customers (Lexu Pro)

This section applies to you if you use the Lexu Pro space (lexu.fr/pro) for a publishing house or as an author, or if you buy an advertising placement. The data controller is the one named in section 1.

Data processed.

• Contact: your name and e-mail address, the name of your publishing house or your pen name, and the e-mail addresses of the collaborators you invite into your space.
• Payment and billing: payment is handled by Stripe, which collects the information needed for the payment. Lexu neither receives nor stores any banking data: we receive from Stripe your name, your e-mail address and the status of your subscription or order, together with the billing details you give us (for example the name to print on the invoice).
• Content of your space: the records and texts of your books, quiz questions, campaign briefs and visuals, editorial calendar, newsletters, and the contacts you record.

Legal bases. Performance of the contract or pre-contractual steps taken at your request (art. 6.1.b): creation and operation of your space, payment, service e-mails (access, decision on your application, reports, campaign follow-up). Legal obligation (art. 6.1.c): retention of accounting and billing records.

Retention periods.

• Contact data and content of your space: kept as long as your space is open, then deleted within 30 days of your closure request, except what the law requires us to keep. Book records are an exception: they join Lexu's public catalogue, on which readers' libraries rely, and remain there after closure; only their link to your space is removed.
• Accounting and billing records: 6 years (art. L. 102 B of the French Book of Tax Procedures).
• Connection logs: 12 months, as stated in section 6.

Contacts you record. For the people you record in your space (press, booksellers, reviewers and other contacts), you are the data controller: Lexu acts as a processor, on your instructions, under article 11 of the Pro Terms of Sale ("Data entrusted by the customer"). When your space is closed, this data is deleted or returned to you, as you choose. If one of these people writes to us to exercise their rights, we forward the request to you.

Processors. For Lexu Pro, your data is processed by:

• Supabase: hosting of your space's database and files, in the European Union (Sweden).
• Stripe Payments Europe (Ireland): payment, subscriptions and invoices.
• Resend (United States): sending Lexu Pro e-mails and the newsletters you send to your contacts.
• Netlify (United States): hosting of lexu.fr and of the Lexu Pro space.
• Anthropic (United States): automatic review of the quiz questions you submit.

Transfers outside the European Union are governed as described in section 5. You have the rights described in section 7, exercised in the same way, at alexis@lexu.fr.

12 bis. Professional prospecting

This section applies to you if Lexu has written to you to present Lexu Pro, the Authors' Space or its advertising formats: publishing house, author, agency or platform serving the book trade. The data controller is the one named in section 1.

Source of the data. Only the contact details you publish yourself for professional enquiries: contact, press or partnership address, your website's contact form, professional page on a social network. We note the address of the page where we read them. No file is bought, rented or exchanged, and no address is inferred.

Data processed. The name of the publishing house or your pen name, the published contact detail and its source, our exchanges, and the aggregated reading figures for your titles on Lexu quoted in our messages (never below five readers, never data about an identifiable reader).

Purpose and legal basis. To present you with an offer related to your professional activity, on the basis of our legitimate interest (art. 6.1.f GDPR), within the framework of article L. 34-5 of the French Postal and Electronic Communications Code.

Number of messages. A first message then, without a reply, at most two follow-ups for a publishing house or company, a single one for an author. Nothing after that.

Objection. Reply STOP to one of our messages, or write to alexis@lexu.fr: we will not write to you again. Your address then joins an opt-out list, used for that purpose only and kept for at least three years.

Retention period. Three years from collection or from your last message, then deletion.

Recipients and tools. Only Alexis Le Pin reads and processes this data. Messages go through lexu.fr's professional mailbox (Google Workspace, Google LLC, United States); their preparation and follow-up rely on Anthropic (United States), an assistance tool, which does not use this content to train its models. Transfers outside the European Union are governed as described in section 5.

You have the rights described in section 7 (access, rectification, erasure, objection), to be exercised at alexis@lexu.fr. We reply within one month.

13. Changes

We may update this policy. The date of the last update appears at the top of the page. In the event of a substantial change, we will inform you by email or through a notification in the app at least 15 days before the new provisions come into force.

14. Contact

For any question relating to this policy or to your data:

alexis@lexu.fr · Contact form (in French)