What We Collect.
Fond Books does not ask you for anything. There are no accounts, no logins, no newsletter, and no forms that collect personal information. You can read every page on this site without telling us who you are.
Analytics
We use Cloudflare Web Analytics to see which pages people read. It is cookieless: it sets nothing on your device, does not fingerprint your browser, and does not follow you to other sites. It records aggregate counts such as page views, referring sites, and rough country level location, and none of it identifies you.
We previously used Google Analytics and removed it in August 2026, because it set cookies and sent data to a third party for a service we only ever used to count page views.
Advertising
There are no ads on this site and no advertising trackers. We ran Google AdSense briefly and removed it in August 2026. Nothing on these pages is now serving or measuring advertising.
Cookies
One cookie is set, by us, and it is not for tracking. Rails gives every visitor a session cookie named _fond_books_session, which holds the token that protects our search form from cross site request forgery. It contains no identifier for you, it is not readable by scripts, it is not shared with anyone, and it disappears when you close your browser. We do not use it to recognise you on a later visit.
Our analytics sets nothing, and no third party sets a cookie on any page of this site. Bookshop.org and Amazon set their own once you click through to them, which is described below.
Until September 2026 that was not quite true. The home page carried a book recommendation card served by Bookshop.org, and because it loaded from their servers rather than ours it set two Bookshop cookies as the page opened, before you clicked anything. We replaced it with a card built from our own catalogue. Nothing on this site is now loaded from a third party except the page typefaces, described below.
Bookshop and Amazon Links
When a book page links you to Bookshop.org or Amazon, those links carry an affiliate code. If you buy something, the retailer pays us a small commission at no extra cost to you. Clicking through means Bookshop or Amazon sets its own cookie so it can attribute the sale, and from that point their privacy policy applies rather than ours. The search box in our footer is ours, not theirs: it searches this site and contacts nobody else.
Fonts
Page typefaces load from Google Fonts, which means Google receives your IP address as part of serving the file. No cookie is set for this.
What We Never Do
We do not sell data, because we do not have any to sell. We do not build profiles of readers, run email tracking, or share anything with data brokers. The book data itself lives in plain text files in this site's source code, with no database of visitors behind it.
Changes
If we add or remove a service that touches your data, we will update this page and change the date below.
Questions
Ask us at [email protected], or see the contact page for what else we can help with.
Last updated 2 September 2026.