Legal
Privacy Policy
Draft for review
This page is a plain-English draft written for Kindred Crown Publishing Group to review. It is not legal advice and may change before it is approved.
This policy explains what the Behind Decaying Walls site stores about you, why, and what choices you have. We have tried to keep it short and in plain English.
Who we are
This site and the shop are provided by Kindred Crown Publishing Group, the publisher of Behind Decaying Walls (“we”, “us”). Our legal name is Mason Media Group, LLC and our postal address is 21803 Morton Rd, Ste 650-1006, Katy, TX 77449, United States. The site is hosted and maintained for us by hTech.
Questions about this policy? Email support@behinddecayingwalls.com.
What we store and why
- Account: your name and email address, so you can sign in and so we can send your orders to you.
- Orders and tax records: what you bought, what you paid and the tax charged, because we must keep them by law.
- Sign-in sessions: so you stay signed in on your device.
- Cart: so your basket is remembered between visits.
- Reviews: your name, account email, rating and comment, if you write one on the website or in Crown Reader.
- Admin notes: short notes our staff keep about an account or order. Only staff see them.
- Email delivery records: that an email was sent to you and whether it arrived, so we can fix problems.
If you use the Crown Reader app, we also keep: an identifier for each device you sign in on (derived from a key on that device, never the key itself) and when each device received a reading license; and, if you use sync, your reading position and bookmarks for each book. These are stored as positions in the book only. We never store any text of the book.
Payments
Payments are processed by Stripe. Your card details go directly to Stripe, and we never see or store your full card number. We receive limited information, such as whether a payment succeeded, the card type and its last four digits. Stripe’s own privacy policy applies to the information it handles.
Emails
We send only emails about what you have done on the site: order confirmations, refund notices, sign-in codes, publication date notices and free-copy notices. We send no marketing emails. They are sent from our own address through our email provider.
Cookies and browser storage
We do not use advertising or tracking cookies, so there is no cookie banner. The site stores only what it needs to work.
| Name or purpose | Why | How long |
|---|---|---|
| __Secure-better-auth.session_token | Keeps you signed in | 30 days |
| bdw-shopping-cart-v1 | Remembers your basket | Until you clear it or finish checkout |
| bdw-signed-in-v1 | Remembers that you are signed in so the header shows the right links | Until you sign out or clear it |
| bdw-reading-sound-muted | Remembers whether reading sounds are muted | Until you clear it |
| bdw-checkout-browser-v1 | Ties a checkout to this browser tab | Until you close the tab |
| Payment security cookies set by Stripe on the checkout page only | Help Stripe protect your payment | Set by Stripe |
Visitor statistics come from Cloudflare Web Analytics, which does not use cookies.
Who can use this site
You must be 13 or older to use the site. If you are under 18, please use it with permission from a parent or guardian. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 13. If you think a child has given us any, contact us and we will delete it.
Reviews
You can write a review on the website or in Crown Reader. After we approve it, we show your first name, last initial, rating and comment publicly. You can ask us to remove it at any time.
We store your full name and your account email, but we do not publish them. A review you write in the app is checked the same way as one from the website.
Deleting your data
This section covers the Behind Decaying Walls website and Crown Reader, the reading app from Kindred Crown Publishing Group. You can delete your account in either place.
In Crown Reader: open Settings, then Account, then Delete account. We email you a code to confirm it.
On the website: sign in, open Account, then Delete account. We email you a code to confirm it, and you type DELETE.
By email: write to support@behinddecayingwalls.com and ask us to delete your account and personal data.
We delete your name, email, sign-in history, notes, reviews and device registrations.
Deleting your account also deletes your synced reading positions and bookmarks and signs out every device.
A device with Crown Reader then removes the publisher’s books and your reading data for them.
We keep order and tax records that the law requires us to keep. We also keep a record of each reading license we issued: the book, the package, the license ID, when it was issued and how many times. It is tied to an anonymised user ID and holds no usable key.
Who we share data with
- Stripe takes your payment.
- Our email provider delivers our emails.
- Cloudflare provides DNS, our content delivery network, bot checks (Turnstile) and cookie-free visitor statistics (Web Analytics).
- hTech hosts and maintains the site and its database.
They may use your information only to provide their services to us. We do not sell your personal information.
Crown Reader has no advertising or analytics tools. It does not track you.
How long we keep data
We keep your account for as long as it is open. We keep order and tax records for 7 years, the period the law requires. Our database backups are kept for 14 days.
Your choices and contact
You can ask for a copy of your information, ask us to correct it, or ask us to delete it. See the contact page for how to reach us.
Changes to this policy
We may update this policy. The date at the top of the page shows the latest version. If a change is significant, we will also tell you by email.