Privacy Policy

Roman Reads, of PWD Block D, Street 23, Islamabad 44018, Pakistan, decides why and how your personal data is used here. Write to info@romanreads.com about anything in this document.

• Account: your email address, and a password we never store in readable form.
• Orders: what you bought, the delivery name and address, and the status of the payment. If you subscribe, whether the subscription is active and when it renews. Not your card number.
• Reading: which titles are in your library, how far through you are in print or audio, and any marks you leave in a book.
• Questions to the AI: what you ask, and the word or line you hold in the reader to ask about. See “The built-in AI” below.
• Your voice: only if you make a Personal Voice. Two recordings you make, and the voice made from them. See “Your voice” below.
• Books you add yourself: only if you use Your files. The files you upload, photos of pages you take or choose, text you paste, web pages you link to, and the text and audio we make from them. See “Books you add yourself” below.
• Correspondence: what you write to us, and our replies.
• Technical: the usual server records, IP address, browser, pages fetched, timestamps. Your approximate country, so prices show in a sensible currency.

The app does not read your contacts, your location, or any file or photo you have not chosen. Neither the app nor the site carries advertising or analytics tools.

We do not ask for, and would rather not have, any special-category data such as health, beliefs or politics. Please don't put any in a support email.

• To perform our contract with you: taking an order, delivering it, keeping your library and your place in a book, answering the questions you ask the AI, and reading aloud the books you add.
• Because the law requires it: tax and accounting records, chiefly.
• Because we have a legitimate interest: keeping the site up, preventing fraud and abuse, and understanding in aggregate which parts of the site people use.
• Because you agreed: for your Personal Voice, which we make only after you record yourself agreeing to it, and for anything else optional, such as a newsletter. You can withdraw either at any time.

There are two ways to ask the AI a question, and each uses a different company.

• Ask AI, the AI tab in the app and the AI in your account on the website. Your question and the last few turns of the conversation are sent to Anthropic, which writes the answer. So that it can answer questions about your own books and orders, the question goes with the name on your account, the titles on your shelf and your wishlist, and a one-line status for each of your orders. The conversation is kept in your account until you close it.
• Ask Hermes, when you hold a word or a line in the app’s reader. The word, the line, up to 2,000 characters of the text before it, the book’s title and author, the language you chose for the answer, and anything you type are sent to Google, through its Gemini API, which writes the answer. Nothing that identifies you goes with it, and we do not keep the question or the answer.

Neither is sent your email address, delivery address or payment details. Please do not type personal information into either. It is a tool for reading books, and anything you put in a question travels with it.

Personal Voice lets a book be read to you in your own voice. It is optional, and nothing is recorded unless you start it.

To make one, you record two things in the app or on the website: a passage read aloud, between 10 seconds and 2 minutes long, and a short consent statement with your name in it, saying that you agree to Roman Reads making a copy of your voice. The statement also includes, word for word, the sentence Google asks for before it copies a voice.

• The passage is sent to Fish Audio, which builds a voice model from it. It is also sent to Google, through its Gemini API, which builds a second voice model from it, used to read books in Urdu, Arabic and the other languages Google reads. We do not keep this recording ourselves.
• The consent statement is sent to Fish Audio, to be turned into text so we can check you said it, and to Google, which checks that it is the same voice as the passage. We keep the recording, the statement, that text and the time you made it, as our record that you agreed.
• The voice models are held by Fish Audio and Google. When you ask to hear a book in your voice, the text of that book is sent to Fish Audio, or to Google for a book in one of Google’s languages, and the audio comes back. We keep that audio so a chapter is made only once.

Your voice is used only to read books to you. We do not use it for anything else, and we do not give it to anyone but Fish Audio and Google.

To delete it: in the app, Profile, then Personal Voice, then Delete Voice. Deleting your voice, or closing your account, deletes the voice models at Fish Audio and Google, our consent record, and the audio of our books made in your voice. Audio made in your voice of a book you added yourself stays with that book until you delete the book or close your account.

Your files lets you bring your own books to be read aloud. You can upload a file such as a PDF or an EPUB, photograph pages with the camera or choose photos of them, paste text, or give us a link to a web page.

• Files: we keep the file, the text taken from it, and the audio made from it, in storage that belongs to your account, so the book opens on any device you sign in on.
• Photos of pages, and pages of a file that carry no text: each image is sent to a text-reading service, Google Cloud Vision or Microsoft Azure. A page they could not read well, and any page in Urdu, Arabic or Persian script, is sent on to Google’s Gemini or Anthropic’s Claude. We do not keep the photos. We keep the words, and where they sat on the page.
• Links: our server fetches the page you name. The site you link to sees a request from us, not from you.
• Listening: when you play a chapter, its text is sent to Fish Audio, or for a book in Urdu, Arabic or another language Google reads, to Google, which reads it aloud in the voice you chose. We keep the audio so a chapter is made only once.

What you add is kept under your account and is not shown to any other reader. Deleting a book in Your files deletes its file, its text and its audio.

The app asks for each of these only when you first use the thing that needs it, and you can say no. Everything else in the app works without them.

• Camera: to photograph the pages of a book you add.
• Photos: to open the photos of pages you choose. The app sees only the photos you pick.
• Microphone: to record your voice for a Personal Voice. Nothing is recorded until you press record.

On the website, your browser asks before the camera or the microphone is used. You can withdraw any of these permissions in your phone’s or your browser’s settings.

We use a small number of processors, each doing one job under contract:

• Supabase: accounts, libraries, reading progress, orders and AI conversations.
• Vercel: runs the website, and the servers the app talks to.
• Cloudflare: stores audio, the books you add, and voice consent recordings.
• Stripe: card payments and subscriptions. They handle the card; we receive only the result.
• Resend: email, such as sign-in codes, order confirmations and receipts.
• Fish Audio: Personal Voice, and reading text aloud.
• Google: the Gemini API, for Ask Hermes, for pages that are hard to read, and for reading books aloud in languages other than English, in our narrators’ voices or in your Personal Voice; Cloud Vision, for reading photos of pages.
• Microsoft: Azure, for reading photos of pages.
• Anthropic: Ask AI, and pages the other services could not read.

Each receives only what its job needs, as described above. We may also disclose data where the law compels it, or to establish or defend a legal claim. We do not sell personal data, and we do not share it with advertising networks.

Our processors operate internationally, so your data may be handled outside Pakistan. Where it is, we rely on the transfer safeguards in our contracts with them.

• Account, library and AI conversations: while your account is open. They are deleted when you close it.
• Your voice: until you delete it or close your account. The consent recording is deleted with it.
• Books you add yourself: until you delete them or close your account. Photos of pages are not kept once they have been read.
• A word you hold to ask about: not kept by us.
• Order and payment records: as long as tax and accounting law requires. If you close your account, your orders stay on our books with your name, phone number and street address removed. Stripe keeps its own record of each payment, as the law requires of it.
• Correspondence: long enough to be useful if you write again.
• Server logs: a short rolling window, then discarded.
• Backups: our database is backed up, and a backup is kept for to be confirmed. A closed account can remain in a backup until that backup expires.

You can ask us to: give you a copy of your data; correct it; delete it; restrict or stop a particular use; or hand it over in a portable form. Where we rely on your consent, you can withdraw it.

Two of these you can do yourself, in the app or on the website. Download your data: Settings, then Download my data. Delete your account: Settings, then Close the account. The page Delete your Roman Reads account gives the steps in full, and says what is kept.

For anything else, write to info@romanreads.com. We will answer within one month. If you are unhappy with the answer, you may complain to the data protection authority where you live.

This site is not intended for children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect their data. If you believe a child has given us personal data, write to info@romanreads.com and we will remove it.

The revision date at the head of this page is when it last changed. Where a change materially affects how we use your data, we will tell account holders by email.