Privacy Policy

1.Who we are

The Ferrand Library is a small private library and bookshop operating from Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, at ferrandlibrary.com. When this policy says we, it means the library. When it says you, it means whoever is reading, which for most of these pages is a stranger we are glad to have.

Questions about anything below go to dewey@ferrandlibrary.com. A person reads that address.

2.What we collect, and only when

When you are just looking

Nothing is stored on your device. No analytics cookie, no advertising pixel, no tracker. Our web host keeps ordinary server logs, which record the address your request came from, the page you asked for, the time, and what browser asked. Those logs exist so the server can be run and defended, they are not read for marketing, and the host rotates them out on its own schedule.

Your browser does keep two small local notes for you, and neither is a cookie and neither leaves your device: one remembers that you have already seen the date stamp animation this session, and one remembers whether you switched on After Hours mode.

When you write to us

The contact form and the suggest-a-book form pass us whatever you type, which is normally a name, an email address and a message. That is stored in this site’s own database so we can answer you, and it is not passed to anyone else.

When you ask for the newsletter

We keep your email address, the name you gave, which list you asked to be on, and the ordinary sending record of whether a given email was delivered, opened or clicked. This runs on software installed on our own server, so your address is not being handed to a third-party mailing company. Every email we send carries a one-click unsubscribe, and it works immediately.

When you buy something

We keep what an order needs: name, email, delivery address, what you ordered and what you paid. Payment card details are never sent to this site and are never stored here. Card handling happens inside Stripe, who are the payment processor and who publish their own privacy terms. We receive back only the confirmation that a payment succeeded and the last digits of the card, which is what lets us match a payment to an order.

When you hold a reader’s card

An account on this site means WordPress sets the usual sign-in cookies so you stay logged in. If you use the reading desk, the library records where you are in a book, whether you have finished it, and the date. That reading record is yours: it is not public, it is not sold, and it is not used to advertise anything to you. It exists so the shelf can remember your place.

3.Cookies

The full register of what may be set, and when, is on the Cookie Policy. The summary is that a visitor who only reads gets no cookies, and everything beyond the strictly necessary waits for you to allow it.

4.Who else can see any of it

A short list, and it is the whole list:

• Our web host stores the site and its database, and therefore technically holds everything the site holds.
• Stripe processes payments, and sees what a payment needs.
• Google Fonts serves two typefaces used across the site. Because your browser fetches them from Google, Google can see the address that asked. We mention it because it is true and most sites do not.

We do not run advertising networks, we do not embed social media trackers, and we have never sold or rented information about a reader. If that ever changed, this page would say so before it happened, not after.

5.How long we keep things

• Form messages: until they are answered and no longer useful, then deleted.
• Newsletter records: until you unsubscribe, and the record of the unsubscribe itself is kept so we do not accidentally write to you again.
• Orders: kept as long as tax and accounting rules require, which in practice is several years.
• Reading records: for as long as you have a card, and deleted with the account.
• Consent choices: your cookie answer is remembered for one year, then you are asked again.

6.What you can ask us to do

Wherever you live, we will honour these. If you are in the UK, the EU or a US state with its own privacy statute, you already have most of them by law, and we would rather just apply them to everybody than sort readers by geography.

• Ask what we hold about you, and get a copy.
• Have anything wrong corrected.
• Have your record deleted, subject only to records we are legally required to keep, such as a completed sale.
• Withdraw consent for anything you previously allowed, including cookies and email.
• Object to a use you dislike, and be told plainly whether we can stop.

Write to dewey@ferrandlibrary.com. We aim to answer within a few days and will not make you prove a legal right before we help you.

7.Children

This site is not built for children and we do not knowingly collect anything from a child under 13. If you believe a child has given us something, write to us and we will remove it.

8.Security, honestly stated

The site runs over HTTPS, sign-ins are rate limited and monitored for brute force attempts, and the private part of the library sits behind a login and is refused outright by the web server to anyone who is not signed in. No site can promise perfect security and we will not pretend otherwise. What we can promise is that we hold as little as possible, which is the only real protection there is.

9.When this changes

If we change how any of this works, we will update this page and move the revision date at the top. If a change is significant, and particularly if it affects anything you have already consented to, we will say so directly rather than quietly editing a paragraph.