Privacy notice

Who runs this library

Mana Jardin Children's Library is a free, volunteer-run library for children in Mana Jardin. It is not a business, it sells nothing, and it has no advertisers.

The people who can see a child's record are the librarians and the administrator, all of whom are neighbours who live here. Write to jardin.owners@gmail.com, or speak to a librarian in the Yoga Room, Mana Jardin Apartment.

Who is answerable for this information

Mana Jardin Children's Library decides what is collected about a child and why, so under India's Digital Personal Data Protection Act 2023 the library is the data fiduciary. Questions about a child's record go to the library first.

The software this library runs on was built and is hosted by Mrinal Singh Raja, an individual publishing under the name "MSRX". MSRX is a brand name, not a registered company. He acts on the library's instructions as a data processor: he keeps the system running and can reach the database to fix a fault, and he does not use anything in it for any purpose of his own.

A complaint the library cannot resolve can be raised with him at mrinalsinghraja@gmail.com, which is also the grievance contact under India's Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021. If you are in India you may also complain to the Data Protection Board.

What we hold about a child

Only what is needed to lend a book to the right child and let a guardian reach them. Specifically:

• Their first name or the name they chose to be known by.
• Their year of birth — the year only, never a full date of birth. We record this so we know a reader is roughly the right age for the library, and a year is enough for that.
• Their flat number, so a librarian knows where a book has gone.
• A picture, if a guardian chose to add one: either a cartoon avatar or a photograph.
• Which books they have borrowed, when, and when each came back.
• Any rating or short review they have written about a book.
• The name, email address and phone number of the guardian who signed them up.
• Anything a librarian has written in the notes on their record — for example that a book came back damaged, or why an account was paused. These are written by people, about your child, and you are entitled to ask what they say. Ask a librarian and they will read them to you.

The record of who did what

The library keeps an activity log so that a change to a child's record can be traced to the librarian who made it. Each entry records who acted, what they did, which record it touched and when.

Two technical details go with it: a scrambled form of the internet address the action came from, and a scrambled form of the browser used. They are one-way scrambles kept to spot somebody trying to break into an account. They are not readable as an address, they are not used to work out where anybody lives, and they are never looked at in the ordinary running of the library.

What we deliberately do not hold

• A full date of birth. Only the year.
• A home address beyond the flat number, a school, or any government identifier.
• Any payment detail. Nothing here costs anything.
• Any tracking of what a child reads on the site. There are no analytics, no advertising pixels and no third-party trackers on the pages children use.
• A child's password. It is stored as a one-way hash, so nobody at the library — including the administrator — can read it or tell it to anyone.

Photographs of children

A child's photograph is private. It is shown to that child, on their own page, and to a librarian at the desk — and to nobody else, ever.

Photographs are never public, never included in anything the library publishes, and never sent to any other service. Each request for the image file is authorised on its own, so a link to it cannot be shared and made to work for somebody who is not allowed to see it.

A guardian can remove a child's photograph at any time by asking a librarian.

The AI Librarian

This site has an AI helper that answers questions about books and suggests what a child might read next. It is a service called Groq, run by a company outside India, and it is worth being precise about what reaches it.

What is sent: the title, author and shelf of the book being asked about, or — when suggesting what to read next — the titles of books the child has borrowed and any star ratings they gave them.

What is never sent: a child's name, library card number, age, year of birth, flat number, photograph, or any contact detail. There is nothing in what leaves this library that could identify which child is asking.

Conversations with the AI Librarian are not stored by this library. Suggestions are stored as a short list of book numbers so the page loads quickly, and each new suggestion replaces the last one — we do not keep a history of what a child has been recommended.

Email

Email to a guardian — an invitation, a reminder that a book is due, a password reset — is sent through a delivery service called Brevo, which needs the recipient's address in order to deliver it.

We never email a child directly. Password reset links always go to the guardian on the account.

Where the information lives

The library's database is hosted by Neon and the site itself by Vercel, both running in Singapore, which is the nearest region either offers to here. Book cover pictures and children's photographs are held in Vercel's file storage.

The site sets one cookie, which is what keeps a reader signed in. It cannot be read by scripts in the page, it is not used to follow anybody around the internet, and signing out deletes the session on the server rather than only in the browser.

How long we keep it

When a reader grows out of the library, or a family leaves the building, the account is closed rather than deleted straight away: they can no longer sign in and can no longer borrow, but the record of which books they borrowed stays, so the library's own history stays honest.

Accounts are deleted outright only when they were created by mistake — a test account, or one entered with the wrong details.

The library has not yet set how long a closed record is kept, so nothing is removed automatically. Until it does, a closed account and its borrowing history stay as they are, and anything you want removed sooner can be asked for.

A guardian may ask for their child's record to be removed sooner. Tell a librarian and they will explain exactly what can go and what has to stay in the lending history.

Correcting something

A reader can propose a correction to their own name, flat or guardian's contact details from their own page. Nothing changes until the administrator approves it — which is deliberate, because one of those fields is where a password reset link would be sent.

A guardian can ask a librarian to correct anything at all. Write to jardin.owners@gmail.com, or speak to a librarian in the Yoga Room, Mana Jardin Apartment.

If something goes wrong

Tell us. Write to jardin.owners@gmail.com, or speak to a librarian in the Yoga Room, Mana Jardin Apartment. If information about a child has been seen by somebody who should not have seen it, we will tell the family concerned.