Privacy Policy

1. Who we are and when this policy applies

Noveltree is operated by Fictiondex Inc. dba Noveltree, 18 King Street East, Suite 1400, Toronto, ON M5C 1C4, Canada. Noveltree is the organization responsible for the personal information described in this policy.

Our accountable contact for privacy questions, complaints, and access requests is our Privacy Officer at support@noveltree.ca or Fictiondex Inc. dba Noveltree, 18 King Street East, Suite 1400, Toronto, ON M5C 1C4, Canada.

Noveltree is a Canadian service and is not specifically directed to people in the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom, or Switzerland. People in those regions may nevertheless access Noveltree where it is available. When privacy law applies to our handling of a person's information, we honour the rights and safeguards that law requires. This statement does not limit rights that apply regardless of where Noveltree directs its services.

2. Information we collect

The information we collect depends on how you interact with Noveltree.

If you contact us or sign up for updates, we may collect your email address, name if you provide one, the details of your request, and records showing when and how you consented to receive communications from us.

If you browse our site or use the service, we may collect technical and usage information such as your IP address, browser, device type, approximate location derived from your IP, referral source, pages viewed, timestamps, logs, and information about how you interact with our content and features.

Our current marketing site also relies on third-party providers for hosted fonts and contact or update-signup processing. When you load the site or submit a form, those providers may receive technical information such as your IP address, browser details, device information, and submission details.

If you create an account or use reader features, we may collect account credentials, profile information, profile images or other uploads you choose to provide, library activity, purchase history, Coin balances and transaction records, reading progress, annotations, highlights, searches, collections, tag votes, Sticker activity, content-access records, download records, watermark or license identifiers, device or session signals, and support history.

If you use personal-library upload or import features, we may collect and process the files you upload or import, file names, file metadata, reading progress, annotations, organization data, storage usage, sync data, and related technical information to provide, secure, organize, sync, support, and improve your private library.

If you use creator or publisher features, we may collect the files and materials you upload or import, including EPUB, PDF, Word, manuscript text, chapter organization, cover assets, metadata, pricing, availability settings, content access settings, collaborator credit information, and related publishing records.

If we review authorship, rights, content-integrity, or No-AI compliance concerns, we may collect creator attestations, drafts, notes, sketches, source files, edit history, commissioning records, licenses, publication history, metadata, communications, reports, and related review materials.

If you make a payment, we and our payment providers may collect billing details, currency, payment method information, transaction amounts, refund status, chargeback status, and fraud-prevention signals. We generally do not store full payment card numbers ourselves.

For a refund, reversal, payment inquiry, or chargeback, we may collect or derive the provider order or transaction identifier, Coin package and amount, delivery status, first-in-first-out allocation of Paid Coin use to a purchase, attributable consumption amount or percentage, unlock or Sticker-use event types and timestamps, transaction-relevant access logs, purchase IP address, device or coarse-location signals, receipt and product details, the legal versions accepted for the account or terms shown at purchase, support communications, and consent version and status. Payment-dispute evidence does not include chapter text, annotations, private-library files, full reading history, or unrelated activity.

If you use rewarded ads or advertising-supported features, advertising providers may process device identifiers, ad interaction data, approximate location, consent choices, and similar technical information to provide, measure, secure, and limit those features.

If you are a creator or receive payouts, we and our service providers may collect legal name, address, country, date of birth, tax information, payout method information, PayPal or payout account details, identity verification information, government identification information or images, selfie or liveness data where used, verification status and results, sanctions and fraud signals, Estimated Copyright Royalties records, Approved Copyright Royalties records, Creator Consumable Credit Election records, source-bucket records, payout history, and records of refunds, chargebacks, reserves, deductions, reversals, and adjustments.

If you use business, publisher, payout, or tax features, we may also collect business registration details, control-person and beneficial ownership information, authority verification information, tax residency, taxpayer identification or certification information, payout review notes, and compliance-review records.

3. How we use information

We use personal information to operate, secure, maintain, and improve Noveltree; provide site and account functionality; deliver product updates and service messages; respond to support requests; and enforce our legal terms and platform rules.

Depending on the features you use, we also use personal information to import and organize books, support publishing and collaboration workflows, display credits and profiles, process Coin sales, purchases, refunds, Stickers, Sticker activity, Copyright Royalties, Creator Consumable Credit Elections, payout eligibility, and provide reading, search, annotation, and discovery features.

We may use minimized transaction-specific evidence to match a provider case to a purchase, verify delivery and attributable use, prevent or detect fraud and abuse, assemble and submit a refund or dispute response, automate routine provider-response decisions, preserve financial integrity, enforce our agreements, and establish, exercise, or defend legal claims.

We may use personal-library upload and import information to provide private reading, shelf-space, storage, import, sync, organization, abuse-prevention, copyright-compliance, security, and support features.

We may use account, purchase, content-access, download, device, session, watermark, license, and technical information to apply and verify watermarks, forensic markers, access controls, copy limits, download limits, anti-scraping protections, abuse-prevention measures, copyright-compliance controls, and rights-enforcement records.

We may use authorship, rights, content-integrity, and No-AI review information to assess compliance with Noveltree policies, protect creators and readers, evaluate reports, prevent abuse, resolve disputes, preserve evidence, and enforce our legal terms and platform rules.

We may use automated systems and human review for fraud detection, abuse prevention, sanctions and compliance review, payout eligibility, identity verification, search, ranking, recommendations, content safety, service quality, and service performance. We also use personal information to comply with legal, accounting, tax, and regulatory obligations.

We may use personal information to verify identity or business information, confirm payout-method information, screen for sanctions or restricted-country risk, assess fraud and platform-integrity risk, calculate creator Copyright Royalties, apply reserves or offsets, schedule or decline payouts, approve or deny Creator Consumable Credit Elections, comply with tax and accounting obligations, and preserve evidence of payout and credit-election decisions.

Identity verification may be required when creators reach lifetime earnings thresholds, when risk triggers apply, or when required by law, payment providers, payout providers, tax rules, sanctions screening, fraud review, or platform policy. Payouts and Creator Consumable Credit Elections may be paused if payout eligibility is incomplete.

If you sign up for product, creator, or marketing updates, we may send you commercial electronic messages where you have consented, where consent is implied by law, or where another legal exception applies. You can unsubscribe using the link or instructions in the message. We may still send transactional, account, security, legal, service, or other non-marketing messages where permitted by law.

4. Legal bases where required

Where applicable law requires us to identify a legal basis, we process personal information on one or more of the following grounds: your consent; performance of a contract with you; our legitimate interests in operating, securing, and improving Noveltree; and compliance with legal obligations.

Where we rely on consent, you can revoke it at any time. Revoking consent does not affect prior processing that was lawful before consent was revoked.

For Apple refund-evidence sharing through RevenueCat, we rely on the account-level consent recorded when you affirmatively accept the Terms of Service, which link to and incorporate the relevant disclosures in this Privacy Policy and the Virtual Items Policy. A Coin-purchase clickwrap may separately require acceptance of the applicable Virtual Items Policy and purchase terms; it is not a separate Apple evidence-consent checkbox. You may withdraw Apple consent for future Apple refund reviews in Privacy settings without losing the ability to read or buy Coins.

For Google Play, Stripe, and PayPal refund, inquiry, dispute, and chargeback handling, we rely as applicable on performance and enforcement of the transaction, our legitimate interests in preventing fraud and abuse and defending legal claims, compliance with legal or provider obligations, and other lawful grounds available under applicable law. This processing is not controlled by the optional Apple consent setting.

• Contract: account access, library and reading sync, publishing, digital-content delivery, purchases, Coins, creator participation, payouts, support, and other features you request.
• Legitimate interests: service security and reliability, fraud and abuse prevention, rights protection, non-essential product analytics, discovery quality, enforcement, and defending legal claims, balanced against the impact on users.
• Legal obligations: tax, accounting, sanctions, payment, lawful-request, consumer-protection, and regulatory recordkeeping where applicable.
• Consent: marketing communications and any optional processing for which applicable law requires consent. You may withdraw consent through the relevant control or by contacting us.
• Vital interests or public-interest grounds: only where applicable law permits or requires processing to protect a person or address a serious safety or legal matter.

5. How we disclose information

We do not sell personal information for money. Some privacy laws define "sell," "share," or "targeted advertising" more broadly than a sale for money. Where those laws apply, we will provide any required notices and choices for advertising, analytics, or similar data practices. We may share personal information with service providers that help us operate Noveltree, such as hosting, infrastructure, email delivery, customer support, analytics, advertising and rewarded-ad providers, fraud prevention, payment processing, payout processing, app distribution, identity verification, tax compliance, sanctions screening, compliance review, and content delivery providers.

Our Service Providers page identifies the principal categories of providers we use and the functions for which they may process information. The providers involved depend on the Noveltree feature, payment method, platform, and configuration you use.

Payment, payout, identity verification, tax, fraud prevention, and compliance providers may process relevant information to provide their services, meet legal obligations, verify eligibility, prevent abuse, and support transactions or payouts.

When a refund or payment dispute is reviewed, we may share minimized transaction-specific evidence with the provider responsible for that transaction. For Apple reviews, RevenueCat may provide Apple with consent, delivery-status, sample-content, consumption, and refund-preference fields while your Apple consent is active. Google Play may receive a detailed Google transaction packet, and Stripe or PayPal may receive the corresponding transaction and dispute evidence for their payment channels. Our Payment Dispute Evidence notice describes these provider-specific paths.

Identity verification may be handled by third-party verification providers. Noveltree does not intend to store government identification images longer than necessary unless retention is needed for legal, fraud, tax, security, dispute, audit, or compliance purposes. Verification providers may process or retain verification data under their own applicable terms and policies.

We may share creator, publisher, book, and collaborator information where that information is intended to appear on public-facing pages, profiles, credits, collections, or other platform surfaces.

We do not provide creators with reader personal information merely because a reader views, unlocks, saves, follows, comments on, reports, sends Stickers in connection with, or otherwise interacts with Creator Content. We may provide creators with aggregate, de-identified, or limited analytics and engagement information where permitted by this policy, platform rules, and applicable law.

We may also disclose information to professional advisors, auditors, insurers, regulators, law enforcement, or courts when reasonably necessary to comply with law, protect rights and safety, prevent fraud or abuse, or support a merger, financing, restructuring, acquisition, or sale of assets.

We may preserve, use, or disclose account, device, session, transaction, content-access, communication, security, or other records where required or permitted by law, including in response to lawful access requests, preservation requests, production orders, court orders, regulatory requests, emergency requests, or law-enforcement or national-security requests. Where legally permitted and appropriate, we may notify affected users, but we may be delayed or prohibited from doing so.

We limit access to tax, identity, business verification, sanctions, and payout-review information to personnel, advisors, vendors, and service providers who need it for the purposes described in this policy.

6. International processing and transfers

Noveltree is operated from Canada, but we may use service providers and infrastructure in other countries. As a result, personal information may be stored or processed outside your province, state, or country, including in jurisdictions whose laws may allow courts, regulators, or law enforcement to access that information.

Where the GDPR applies and personal information is transferred outside the European Economic Area to a country not covered by an applicable adequacy decision, Noveltree relies on a lawful transfer mechanism appropriate to the transfer, which may include the European Commission's Standard Contractual Clauses, together with supplementary contractual, organizational, and technical safeguards where required. Where United Kingdom or Swiss privacy law applies, Noveltree uses an applicable transfer mechanism recognized under that law.

You may contact our Privacy Officer at support@noveltree.ca to request information about the transfer mechanism applicable to your personal information or a copy of relevant contractual safeguards, subject to lawful redactions needed to protect confidential information or the rights of others.

7. Retention

We keep personal information only for as long as reasonably necessary for the purposes described in this policy, including to provide the service, maintain records, resolve disputes, enforce agreements, prevent fraud, satisfy legal requirements, and respond to requests about past transactions or account activity.

We determine retention periods using the following criteria:

• For raw product, search, reading, interaction, diagnostic, and security events, we consider sensitivity, troubleshooting value, fraud and security needs, and whether the information can be aggregated or de-identified while the operational purpose continues.
• Aggregated or de-identified statistics may be kept longer where they no longer identify an account or are reasonably needed to measure and secure the service.
• Account-closure archives and retained account records are reviewed based on linked financial, transaction, legal, rights, fraud, safety, audit, and security needs. They are deleted or further minimized when the documented purpose or applicable statutory period ends, unless a legal hold applies.
• Uploads and source files are retained while needed to provide the requested library or creator feature and are deleted when eligible under the account-deletion process or an applicable cleanup cycle.

We may retain transaction, Copyright Royalties, Creator Consumable Credit Election, payout, tax, sanctions, fraud, chargeback, refund, identity verification, and account-integrity records after account closure where reasonably necessary to comply with law, resolve disputes, enforce terms, support audits, prevent abuse, or maintain accurate financial and platform records.

Noveltree may retain tax, payout, identity verification, transaction, Copyright Royalties, Creator Consumable Credit Election, source-bucket, and compliance records as needed to administer payout eligibility, paused payouts, unclaimed or unpaid Copyright Royalties, Creator Consumable Credits, refunds, chargebacks, service-discontinuation remedies, accounting, tax, fraud prevention, dispute resolution, and legal compliance.

Our operational target is to delete a detailed payment-dispute evidence packet 24 months after the related case closes. We may retain minimized financial outcomes, provider references, integrity hashes, and consent records longer for applicable financial-record, audit, fraud-prevention, legal-claims, and compliance periods.

Financial, tax, payout, identity-verification result, chargeback, fraud, dispute, legal-hold, and rights records do not share one fixed period. We retain each category only for the applicable statutory period or while the documented transaction, audit, security, rights, or legal purpose continues, and then delete or de-identify it. Backups and security logs are removed or overwritten under their normal protected rotation unless a legal hold applies.

8. Your rights and choices

You can unsubscribe from marketing emails at any time using the unsubscribe link in the message. You can also manage browser settings and similar controls as described in our Cookie Policy.

Where Noveltree provides account-level privacy controls, those controls apply to the optional processing they describe. They do not prevent the minimum processing needed to deliver content you open, maintain purchases or access rights, secure the service, or comply with law.

You may withdraw Apple refund-evidence consent for future Apple refund reviews in Privacy settings. Withdrawal does not block Coin purchases or reading and does not affect processing already completed lawfully before withdrawal. Noveltree will also instruct RevenueCat not to handle future Apple refund evidence. If that provider update cannot be delivered immediately, the setting is shown as pending and retried until synchronization succeeds. The Apple setting does not disable the ordinary Google Play, Stripe, or PayPal dispute processing described above.

Subject to applicable law, you may have the right to request access to, correction of, deletion of, or a copy of the personal information we hold about you, to revoke consent, to object to or restrict certain processing, or to complain to a privacy regulator.

To make a request, write to our Privacy Officer at support@noveltree.ca or Fictiondex Inc. dba Noveltree, 18 King Street East, Suite 1400, Toronto, ON M5C 1C4, Canada. We may need to verify your identity before responding. Access, correction, deletion, and consent requests are subject to legal, fraud-prevention, tax, accounting, transaction-record, security, and dispute-resolution retention needs. If we cannot fulfill a request in full, we will explain why where required by law.

9. Automated systems, recommendations, and AI-related processing

Noveltree may use automated systems, rules, signals, and service-provider tools to help classify books, rank discovery results, personalize recommendations, detect fraud or abuse, assess payout eligibility, assess Creator Consumable Credit Election eligibility, support identity verification, support sanctions and compliance review, improve content safety, and improve service quality. We do not use solely automated decision-making to make legal or similarly significant decisions about you without any legally required safeguards or notice.

For refunds and payment disputes, rule-based systems may match a provider case to a purchase, calculate a documented Coin-consumption allocation, assemble minimized evidence, and select whether Noveltree will approve, remain neutral, accept, challenge, or route a case for authorized human review. Apple or the applicable payment provider makes the final refund or dispute decision, and these rules do not determine your legal rights.

Noveltree does not use Creator Content, personal-library uploads or imports, public reviews, comments, messages, profile text, collection descriptions, or other user submissions to train or fine-tune any generative AI model, and does not permit service providers to use that content for those training or fine-tuning purposes. Noveltree and specialized service providers may process content using automated systems for moderation, abuse prevention, classification, safety, recommendations, metadata generation, and platform operations. Those operational uses involve processing content; they do not permit model training or fine-tuning.

10. Security

We use reasonable administrative, technical, and organizational safeguards designed to protect personal information against unauthorized access, loss, misuse, alteration, and disclosure. No method of transmission or storage is completely secure, so we cannot guarantee absolute security.

11. Adults-only service

Noveltree is intended only for people who are at least 18 years old. We do not knowingly allow anyone under 18 to create an account, submit a form, or use the service.

If you believe someone under 18 has provided personal information to us, contact our Privacy Officer so we can review and delete that information where appropriate.

12. Changes to this policy

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. If we make material changes, we will update the "Last updated" date and provide any additional notice required by law.

13. Contact

If you have questions, want to access, correct, or request deletion of your information, or want to make a privacy complaint, contact our Privacy Officer at support@noveltree.ca or Fictiondex Inc. dba Noveltree, 18 King Street East, Suite 1400, Toronto, ON M5C 1C4, Canada.

If you are not satisfied with our response, you may have the right to complain to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada or, where applicable, another competent privacy or data protection regulator in your jurisdiction.