Privacy Policy

Effective date: July 18, 2026 · moved to rakescan.com August 2026 · Teams section added August 18, 2026

RakeScan is a book-scouting app operated by BookToCash (booktocash.com), a service of SEF Inc., the company responsible for the information described here. This policy explains what information the RakeScan app collects, why, and the choices you have. We keep it short and honest.

What we collect

• Account information. Your email address (to create and sign in to your account). If you choose to sell books to BookToCash from the app, your name, mailing address and preferred payment method are collected to fulfil the order and pay you.
• Scans and app activity. The ISBNs you look up, your scan history and your trigger settings. Your trigger settings follow your account, so the same rules apply on every device you sign in to. Your scan history is kept on the device itself, is trimmed after seven days, and does not sync between devices.
• Location (optional). With your permission, your device location is used in the foreground only to sort nearby book sales by distance on the Sourcing Map. If you decline, the app falls back to your ZIP code area. We never track location in the background. While that permission is granted, a book you scan is also tagged with where you scanned it — rounded coordinates (about 11 m) stored with your account alongside the ISBN and the verdict, so that a later version can tell you which shops and sales actually produced good books. Nothing in the app reads that history back today; it is collected only. These scan locations are deleted automatically after 90 days, and the shorter usage record described below after 30. If you do not grant location permission, scans carry no coordinates at all. On a helper seat (see Teams below) location is never kept: the app does not save it and our servers discard any coordinates on arrival.
• Microphone (optional). Voice Feed lets you read ISBN digits aloud instead of typing them. The microphone listens only while you turn Voice Feed on, and stops when you turn it off. Speech is converted to digits by your phone's own speech recognition: on iPhone that is Apple's speech recognition service, which may send the audio to Apple to transcribe it. We never receive the audio. RakeScan does not record it, does not save it to a file and does not upload it to our servers — only the digits that come back are used, as if you had typed them.
• Camera and photos (optional). The camera is used on your device to read book barcodes. If you use Shelf Scan, the shelf photos you take are uploaded to our servers to identify the books in them.
• Amazon selling account (optional). If you choose to connect your Amazon selling account, we store your seller identifier and an encrypted authorisation token so RakeScan can ask, on your behalf, whether that account is allowed to list a book you scan. See Your Amazon selling account below for exactly what we ask for and what we never touch.
• Launch list (this website). If you leave your email on rakescan.com, we store the email address you enter, solely to send you the download link and launch updates. No analytics or advertising trackers run on this site.

What we don't do

• No ads and no advertising SDKs in the app.
• We do not sell your personal information to anyone.
• No background location tracking.
• No audio recordings. We never receive or store microphone audio.
• No access to your contacts, messages or files.

How your information is used

We use the information above to run the service: compute buy/reject verdicts, show nearby sales, process book sales you choose to make, pay you, and answer support requests. Usage statistics — which features are used and how quickly verdicts come back — help us improve the app. These events are stored against your account and expire after 30 days; we read them in aggregate. When the app runs into an error, it sends us a short technical report: the kind of error, where in RakeScan's own code it happened, how many times, and the app version. It never includes the error message, your scans, photos or location, is not stored with your account, and is deleted after 30 days.

Your Amazon selling account

Connecting an Amazon selling account is optional. RakeScan works without it; when no account is connected the app reports that eligibility is unknown rather than guessing, because listing restrictions differ from one account to another.

• What we store. Your seller identifier, the marketplace you sell in, and an authorisation token that lets RakeScan act for you. The token is encrypted at rest with AES-256-GCM. It is decrypted only in memory at the moment a request is made and is discarded immediately afterwards.
• What we ask Amazon. One thing: whether your account may list a given book, and in what condition. RakeScan is scoped to the Product Listing role, which carries no personal information. It does not read your orders, your buyers, your payouts, your inventory or your financial reports, and the code that performs these calls is written to refuse any wider access.
• Short-lived working data. Access tokens live in server memory only, expire in about an hour and are never written to disk. Eligibility answers are cached for up to twelve hours so repeat scans do not re-query Amazon.
• Disconnecting. You can disconnect at any time from the Account screen in the app. Disconnecting removes the stored token and seller identifier from our servers. Deleting your account removes them as well.
• Not shared. Information obtained from your Amazon selling account is used only to answer the eligibility question inside your own app. It is not sold, not shared with other scouts, and not used to build any public data set.

Teams (helper seats)

An account owner can invite a helper to scan for them. The helper signs in with their own email; their phone then works as a helper seat on the owner's team. Three things are different on a helper seat, and this section is the record of them.

Activity

We record the books a helper scans and claims for the team — the ISBN, how many copies, and when — tied to the helper's seat and to the owner's team, along with an app-generated install id and the label the helper gives the phone. The owner sees that activity and the per-copy earnings it produces; the helper sees their own copies and earnings. The helper's phone is not sent the owner's prices, trigger settings, profit figures or ledger, and does not store them.

Location

A helper seat's location is never recorded. If a helper's phone includes coordinates in a request, our servers discard them before anything is stored: no sourcing trip is logged for a helper, under the helper's identity or the owner's, and the app on a helper seat does not save location on the device.

Retention

Claim records are part of the owner's team ledger — they are the record of what a helper is owed — and are kept while the owner's account is active, in the same way as records of completed book sales. Closing a seat stops new activity; it does not erase what was already earned. Either the owner or the helper can request deletion of their own account and associated data on the account deletion page; after a deletion request the requester's identity is removed, and the copies and amounts stay in the owner's ledger as anonymised bookkeeping records, like completed sales.

Service providers

We do not sell your data, and we do not share it with other companies for their own purposes. To run RakeScan we use service providers that process data on our behalf: for example cloud hosting, email delivery, shipping-label and payment providers, and AI image processing used to identify books in shelf photos. They are bound by contract to use the data only to provide the service to us, and may not use it for anything else. We may also disclose information if the law requires it.

The AI provider, by name. When you use Shelf Scan or photograph a cover, the photo is sent from our server to Anthropic (the maker of Claude) so its model can read the titles on the spines or the cover. Only the photo and a one-line instruction are sent — not your name, email, account, or location. You can see the same list inside the app under Settings › Your data.

Security & retention

All traffic between the app and our servers is encrypted in transit (HTTPS). We keep your account data while your account is active. Records of completed book sales are retained as required for accounting and legal purposes.

Two records expire on their own: the usage events that tell us how the app is performing are deleted after 30 days, and the scan locations described above after 90 days. Neither is needed to use RakeScan, and both disappear on account deletion as well.

Deleting your account

You can request deletion of your RakeScan/BookToCash account and associated data at any time. See the account deletion page or email [email protected] from your account email.

Children

RakeScan is intended for adults (18+). We do not knowingly collect personal information from children.

Changes

If we change this policy, we will update this page and the effective date above.

Contact

Questions? Email [email protected]. A human answers.