Privacy Policy

Rabenu (rabenu.app, together with the mobile and desktop apps published under that name — the “Service”) is a free digital library of Breslov texts. This page explains what data the Service collects, why, who it is shared with, and what you can do about it.

The Service is operated by itamar haim, who is the data controller for the purposes of this document and of all processing of personal data described in it.

This document, and your use of the Service, are governed by the law of the State of Israel — principally the Protection of Privacy Law, 5741-1981 and the regulations under it. In addition, the Service is operated to comply with the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). For that reason the rights set out in section 6 are extended to every user, including users who live outside the EU and the UK: we do not run a separate privacy policy per country of residence.

At a glance

• You can read, search and listen without registering at all. An account is only needed to save personal content (bookmarks, highlights, notes, booklets, playlists and so on).
• There is no advertising, there are no payments, and personal data is never sold or rented to third parties.
• Reading is open at any age (our store content rating is 3+), but holding an account requires you to be 13 or older — two separate things; see section 8.
• Usage measurement (Google Analytics) runs only after you explicitly agree to it, and you can withdraw that at any time — see section 3.
• No location data is collected, there are no push notifications, and the Service does not access contacts, camera or microphone.
• Your IP address is not stored in the Service’s database.
• Deletion: individual items can be deleted yourself from your personal area, and so can the whole account — see the account & data deletion page.

1. What data is collected

1.1 Account details

Sign-up and sign-in are handled by an external identity provider (see section 4). Creating an account provides that provider with your email address and a password, or — if you choose to sign in with Google — your user id, email address, full name and profile picture as returned by Google.

The Service itself keeps no user table of its own: every personal row in the Rabenu database is keyed by a user id alone. Email, name and picture are read from the identity provider at request time purely to display them in the interface.

1.2 Content you create

The main personal data in the Service is the content you create:

• Bookmarks and highlights — including the exact position in the text, the passage you selected, a colour, and any free text note you wrote.
• Favourite excerpts, excerpt notes and tags, including the tag names you chose.
• Booklets (kontrasim) — title and subtitle, layout and export settings, and the excerpts collected into them (including the excerpt text and your notes).
• Projects, teams and their sharing — membership, roles, invite links, chat messages, polls and votes, shared documents, knowledge-map nodes, annotations, comments and emoji reactions.
• Audio library — playlists, audio bookmarks and their notes, favourites, recommendation feedback, and listening preferences (preferred topics, duration, playback speed, whether history affects recommendations).
• Notifications generated for you by other people’s activity in a shared project or team.

1.3 Reading and listening progress

• Your last reading position in each book, progress percentage, and whether a book was completed.
• Your playback position in each recording, learning streaks, and daily totals of listening time and items played.

1.4 Searches

Every search is written to the Service’s search log: the query exactly as typed, a normalised form of it, the number of results, the top result score — and your user id if you are signed in. This is used to improve search quality and to monitor performance, and is kept for up to 90 days (see section 5).

Please note: anything personal you type into the search box is stored as part of the query. Please avoid doing so.

1.5 Usage and measurement data

• Listening events — event type, recording, position in seconds, playback speed, where playback started from, and device type (mobile/desktop), together with a random session id. These are recorded even when you are not signed in, in which case there is no user id.
• Popup events (shown, dismissed, clicked) with the path the popup appeared on and a session id, plus clicks on the “daily inspiration” item.
• Browser performance metrics (Core Web Vitals) — the page path only, with the query string and fragment explicitly stripped on the server, plus “mobile/desktop” and the measured values. Collected with no user id, no cookie, and only from a sampled share of visits.

1.6 IP address

Your IP address is read from the request headers in order to rate-limit requests (abuse protection) and is not written to any database table — not to the search logs, not to the usage events, not to the deletion record. Rate limiting is performed by a counter held in the Service’s own Redis, on our own server: your IP is used as a short-lived counter key only, with no user id and none of the request content (see section 4), and it is not sent to any third party. Until August 2026 this was done through an external service (Upstash); that dependency was removed and no rate-limiting data leaves our infrastructure.

1.7 What is not collected

• No payment details are collected or stored — the Service is free.
• No geolocation data is collected.
• The full User-Agent string is not stored in the database.
• There are no ad networks, no marketing pixels and no advertising profiling.
• There is no push-notification service, and no access to contacts, camera or microphone.

2. Why the data is used

• To provide the Service — to remember your reading position, your highlights and your content.
• To enable collaboration in the projects and teams you chose to join.
• To improve search quality, recommendations and performance.
• To secure the Service and prevent abuse (rate limiting).

Data is never sold, rented, or passed to advertisers.

3. Cookies and local storage

3.1 Cookies

• Authentication cookies set by the identity provider — strictly necessary to operate an account.
• Popup cookies (dismissed_popups, popup_freq_*, popup_count_*) — httpOnly cookies that stop the same message being shown again. They expire within 30 days.
• The consent cookie (rabenu_consent) — records your decision about measurement so you are not asked again on every visit. It is a strictly necessary cookie: it carries no user id and performs no measurement itself. It lasts 180 days, after which we ask again.
• Google Analytics cookies (_ga, _ga_*) — created by Google’s measurement script, and only if you agreed to measurement.

Consent to measurement. Aggregate usage measurement (Google Analytics) and Sentry’s masked session replay do not run by default: they load only after you have explicitly agreed. Until you decide — and if you decline — no measurement script is loaded and no event is sent. There is no “consent by continuing to browse” and no pre-ticked box. The strictly necessary cookies (sign-in, popups, and the consent record itself) do not require consent and are not used for measurement. You can withdraw consent at any time, or clear the site’s data in your browser and the decision resets. Either way we ask again after 180 days.

3.2 Storage on your device

To support offline reading and to remember preferences, the Service stores data on your device only: a local database (IndexedDB, named BookReaderOfflineDB) holding the books and chapters you viewed, reader preferences (font size, column width, theme, typeface), audio-player state, and — when you act while offline — a queue of pending actions that includes the request body (for example a highlight you created) until it can be sent. Basic account details are cached locally so the interface still works without a network connection.

All of this is removed when you clear the site’s data in your browser, or uninstall the app.

4. Who the data is shared with

These are all the third parties data may reach, as they appear in the Service’s source code:

Transfers outside your country. The Service is delivered through Cloudflare’s global edge network, and several of the providers listed above (Google, Sentry, Supabase) run servers in a number of countries. That means data may be transmitted to or stored outside your country of residence and outside Israel, including in the United States. Such transfers rely on the transfer mechanisms those providers operate under, including the EU Standard Contractual Clauses where applicable. If you want to keep this to a minimum: do not open an account (reading does not need one) and do not consent to measurement.

5. How long data is kept

The personal content you create is kept for as long as your account exists, until you delete it — either item by item from your personal area, or the whole account from the account screen in that same area (see the account deletion page).

Retention by record type:

Backups. Deletion removes your data from the live service immediately. Copies may remain in operational backups for some time afterwards. We do not restore a backup in order to recover deleted account data, and a copy that remains in a backup is not returned to the live service.

6. Your rights

You may:

• access the data held about you and obtain a copy of it;
• correct inaccurate data;
• delete your content, or your whole account;
• object to or ask us to restrict particular processing.

Most of this is available immediately in the interface: deleting a highlight, excerpt, note, document or message is done directly from your personal area, and the account screen there both exports your data and deletes the whole account. For anything else, see the account & data deletion page or write to [email protected].

[email protected] is a monitored mailbox. We will respond without undue delay and in any event within one month of receiving your request — the period set by GDPR Article 12(3). If we cannot act on a request, we will explain why.

6.1 Lawful basis for processing

Under the GDPR every processing operation needs a lawful basis. These are the ones we rely on:

• Performance of a contract (Art. 6(1)(b)) — storing the personal content you create, your reading position, your progress, and your participation in projects and teams. Without it we cannot deliver the thing you asked for: an account that remembers what you saved.
• Consent (Art. 6(1)(a)) — usage measurement (Google Analytics) and masked session replay. Neither runs before you agree, and you can withdraw at any time without losing access to the Service (section 3.1).
• Legitimate interests (Art. 6(1)(f)) — securing the Service and preventing abuse (rate limiting by IP address, which is not stored), and improving search quality from the search logs. We weighed this against your privacy and narrowed it accordingly: the IP address is never stored, and search logs are deleted after 90 days.
• Legal obligation (Art. 6(1)(c)) — where we are required by law to retain or disclose information.

Under Israeli law, providing your data is voluntary: you are not obliged to open an account, and most of the Service can be used without giving us any identifying detail at all. If you do not agree with this policy, do not open an account — reading, searching and listening will keep working.

7. Security

Traffic is encrypted with HTTPS and enforced with HSTS. The Service sets a Content-Security-Policy with a per-request nonce, blocks framing by other sites, and gates administrative areas behind a role check. No system is perfectly secure, and we cannot guarantee absolute security.

7.1 Breach notification

If a security incident exposes personal data, we will give notice within 72 hours of becoming aware of it. The notice is published in the Service itself, prominently, so that it is available to everyone whose data may have been affected. It will say what happened, which data is involved, and what we recommend you do. We will also report the incident to the competent authority where the law requires it.

8. Age

Two different things, not to be confused: who may read, and who may hold an account.

8.1 Reading — open at any age

The content is religious and study literature, and our store content rating is 3+: reading, searching and listening are open to anyone, at any age, and require no registration. Someone who does not open an account gives us no identifying detail whatsoever.

8.2 An account — 13 and over

Holding an account is a separate matter from the content rating: an account is for people aged 13 or over. That age applies to the account alone — to saving personal content, sharing, and taking part in projects — and does not restrict reading. Anyone under 13 can still use the whole Service, other than saving personal content.

We do not ask for a date of birth and we do not verify age. Registering is your declaration that you are at least 13. We do not collect information about our users’ ages and we do not attempt to infer it.

If we are made aware that an account was opened by someone under 13, we will delete the account and the content saved in it. A parent or guardian who believes their child has opened an account is welcome to write to [email protected] and we will deal with it.

9. Changes to this document

If this policy changes, the “Last updated” date at the top of the page changes with it. A material change will be announced in the Service itself.

10. Contact

For privacy questions, to exercise your rights, or to request deletion: [email protected]. Accessibility enquiries and security reports have a separate address: [email protected].

Relationship to the Terms of Use. The Terms of Use page also contains a section touching on privacy. This document governs everything to do with the collection, processing, retention and deletion of personal data; in the event of any inconsistency or conflict between the two, what is written here prevails.

See also: Terms of Use · Accessibility Statement · Account & Data Deletion.