Terms

What Pages and People is

A private place for a small group - a circle - to read a book together: choose one, agree a pace, talk about it without being spoiled, and meet. It is not a social network, a public review site or a shop. There is no feed, no follower count and nothing here designed to make you open the app more often.

Using the service means agreeing to what is on this page and to the privacy policy.

Your account

• You must be 13 or older. We ask when you set up an account and we record your answer. If you are younger, this is not for you yet.
• One account is one person. You are responsible for what happens under it, so keep your email account secure - anyone who can read your email can request a sign-in link.
• Give a name your circle will recognise. It does not have to be a legal name.
• You can leave whenever you like. Deleting your account is self-serve, immediate, and described in the privacy policy.

Your circles

A circle has an owner and may have organizers and moderators. Between them they set the circle’s code of conduct and norms, decide who comes in, choose books, publish reading plans and run meetings. A circle’s own rules apply inside it in addition to these terms, and where a circle asks more of you than we do, its rules are the ones that bind you there.

A circle always has at least one owner. Only an owner can hand the circle over or delete it, and you cannot delete your own account while you are the only owner of one - hand it on or close it first.

What you write

Your words stay yours. You keep every right you had in what you post, note, capture and rate. You give us only the permission we need to run the service: to store what you write and show it to the people in your circle who are entitled to see it. We do not use it for anything else, we do not train anything on it, and we do not license it onward.

If you delete your account, posts you wrote in a circle stay in that circle’s conversation with your name removed, because pulling them out would break the replies other people wrote. Everything that is only yours goes. That distinction is set out in full in the privacy policy.

Quoting a book

Quote a line and say where it came from. Do not paste chapters. This service holds discussion and short quotations with their source, never full book text, long excerpts or scans, and posts are length-limited so that the product cannot easily become a place to store one. If you hold rights in something you believe has been posted here in breach of them, write to contacts.pagesandpeople@gmail.com naming the work and where it appears, and we will take it down while we look.

How to behave

The short version is that these are small rooms of people who chose each other, and the standard is that of a book group in somebody’s front room. Do not:

• harass, threaten, demean or target anybody, in a circle or through it;
• post content that is unlawful, or that sexualises children, or that incites violence;
• spoil deliberately - the product has a spoiler gate and going around it on purpose is a way of being unkind, not a clever trick;
• post other people’s private information, or bring what was said in a private circle outside it;
• use the service to advertise, spam, or scrape;
• probe, attack or interfere with the service or with other people’s accounts.

Reporting and blocking

Every post carries Report, which sends your reason and a link to that circle’s moderators - and nothing else, so a report never copies the post into a second place. Moderators can hide content with a recorded reason, and moderation actions are written to the circle’s audit trail.

You can also block somebody, and you do not need anyone’s agreement to do it. A block stops you seeing their writing anywhere in the product and stops them seeing yours. They are not told. It does not remove them from a circle - that is an organizer’s decision - and it does not delete anything, so unblocking puts everything back. What a block covers, and what it deliberately does not, is written out in full in the privacy policy and in the product where you make one.

We may remove content or end an account for a serious or repeated breach of this page. Where we can, we will say why.

What we promise, and what we do not

We will run this carefully, keep what is private private, and tell you the truth about what the product does. What we cannot promise is that it will never be unavailable, never lose anything, or never have a bug. It is provided as it is, without a warranty of fitness for a particular purpose, and to the extent the law allows we are not liable for indirect or consequential loss. Nothing here limits liability that cannot lawfully be limited.

Ending it

You can ask us to delete your account at any time, and we will. We can suspend or end an account for a breach of these terms. If we ever discontinue the service, we will give you notice and time to take a copy of your data first.

Changes

When these terms change materially, the date at the top changes and we say so in the product before the change takes effect for you.

Getting in touch

contacts.pagesandpeople@gmail.com reaches a person. Use it for a complaint, a takedown, a question about your data, or to tell us something on this page is wrong.