Privacy Policy

WoodWork for iPhone and WoodWork Scanner for Mac · Last updated 3 September 2026

WoodWork collects nothing. There is no account, no analytics, no advertising, no tracking, and no server operated by us. Your library never reaches anyone but you.

The iPhone app and widget

The iPhone app and its home screen widget make no network requests of any kind. They read two things: the shelf your Mac published to your own iCloud account, and the display settings you choose in the app. Both stay on your device and in your personal iCloud storage, which only you can access.

The Mac scanner

The scanner reads the Apple Books and Kindle databases already on your Mac, and only after you grant access to them yourself. It runs inside Apple's App Sandbox and is signed and notarized by Apple.

It makes exactly one kind of outbound request: a book's title and author are sent to Open Library, a project of the Internet Archive, to look up how many pages the book has. That page count is what gives each spine on the shelf its thickness. No identifier of you, your device, or your library as a whole is included. Open Library's own privacy policy governs what they log about that request.

The resulting shelf — titles, authors, and page counts — is written to your own iCloud container so your iPhone can read it. It is not sent anywhere else.

The website

The browser bookshelf at bookshelf.josephruocco.net runs entirely in your browser. Books you add are stored in your browser's local storage and are never transmitted. Opening a public domain book fetches its text from Project Gutenberg through a text-extraction proxy; those services see the request for that book, as they would if you visited them directly.

Children

WoodWork does not collect personal information from anyone, including children under 13.

Changes

If this policy ever changes, the updated version will be posted on this page with a new date. Since the apps collect no data, any change would be a clarification rather than a new use of information.

Contact

Questions about privacy in WoodWork can go to ruoccoj19@gmail.com.