Privacy
Privacy at BLOOM
What BLOOM collects, why, where it lives, who can see it, and how to have it removed.
This page describes what BLOOM actually does with your information, in plain terms. It is not legal advice. If a law in your country gives you specific rights over your data, those rights still apply; send a note through the contact form and I will honor them.
The short version
You can read everything on BLOOM and leave field notes without an account, and without giving me anything beyond the ordinary request data every website receives. You only create an account when you want to contribute a resource, serve as a peer reviewer, or keep a profile, and an account is a single thing: an e-mail address you sign in with. Everything else in your profile is what you choose to add. I do not sell anything, I do not run advertising, and I do not load third-party tracking, cross-site tracking, or fingerprinting. The site does keep a simple, privacy-respecting count of page views (see “Analytics,” below), and that count is cookieless and collects nothing personal.
What an account is
Signing in uses a one-time link sent to your e-mail; there is no password. To make that work, the sign-in service (Supabase, below) stores your e-mail address. That is the only thing an account requires. The same link creates your account the first time you use it.
If you go on to build a profile, you choose what to add: a display name and handle, a short bio, your institution, an ORCID, links to your work, and a photo. Anything you put in a profile is yours to edit or leave blank. A profile can be public (it gets its own page on the site that others can find and link to) or private (no public profile page); either way, your display name still shows as credit on anything you contribute. You set this, and you can change it at any time. A private profile mainly means “no public page” rather than hidden data, so it is best not to put anything you would not want seen into a profile.
What gets stored when you contribute
When you submit a resource, leave a field note, or take part in peer review, that content is stored and attributed to you so you get credit. Submissions arrive unpublished and an editor reviews them before they go public. Peer-review notes and field notes are tied to your account for the same reason: so the work is properly credited and can be moderated.
Contributing a resource or reviewing needs a quick check that you work in education, such as an institutional e-mail, an ORCID, or a vouch from an editor. That check is about eligibility to contribute, not about gathering data on you.
A record credits its author by linked BLOOM account, by another member, or by name when that person does not have an account yet. So your name may appear as the credit on a record an editor adds before you have joined. If that is you, you can make an account and claim the record; an editor approves the claim and links it to your profile. To remove a by-name credit, see “Getting your data out, or removed,” below.
Where your information lives
BLOOM is a small project that runs on a few well-known services. Each one that handles your information is listed here, with what it sees and why.
- Supabase: the database, the sign-in service, and file storage for avatars. This is where your e-mail, your profile, and your contributions actually live. Access to that data is enforced by row-level security rules, so people can only read and change what they are allowed to.
- Cloudflare: hosts and serves the site, and provides its analytics. Like any host, it sees ordinary request data (your IP address and basic details about your browser and the page you asked for) as part of delivering pages and guarding against abuse. The analytics piece is cookieless and is described under “Analytics,” below.
- jsDelivr: a code delivery network that serves a shared library the site uses (the Supabase client). Your browser fetches that file directly, so your IP address is shared with jsDelivr for those requests.
- Open Library: serves book-cover images for some records. Your browser fetches a cover directly from Open Library only on a page that shows one.
- Discogs: looks up album-cover art for the optional “currently listening” field on a profile. It is reached through a same-origin proxy on BLOOM, and only when that feature is used.
The site's typefaces (“Baloo 2” and “Nunito Sans”) are self-hosted on BLOOM, so loading them does not contact Google or share your IP address with any third party.
Analytics
BLOOM uses Cloudflare Web Analytics to see roughly how many people visit and which pages get used. It is privacy-first by design: it is cookieless, it stores nothing on your device, it collects no personal data, and it does no cross-site tracking and no fingerprinting. It cannot follow you from site to site or build a profile of you. To gather these counts, your browser sends a small measurement request to Cloudflare when a page loads.
Cookies and local storage
BLOOM sets no advertising or tracking cookies, and the analytics above set none either. The only thing BLOOM itself stores on your device is your sign-in session, which the sign-in service keeps in your browser's local storage so you stay signed in between visits. It is first-party and essential to staying logged in, signing out clears it, and if you never sign in there is nothing to store.
Because the site runs on Cloudflare, and because the contact form uses Cloudflare Turnstile to keep out bots, Cloudflare may set its own strictly necessary security cookies, for example to tell a real visitor apart from automated abuse. These are operational, not tracking. They are not used to advertise to you or to follow you across other sites.
A few pages embed content from other services, such as YouTube, itch.io, H5P, and LibGuides. When that content loads, those third parties can set their own cookies under their own policies. BLOOM uses YouTube's no-cookie embed, so a video sets nothing until you press play, and embedded content only loads on the specific pages that show it.
None of these are advertising or cross-site tracking cookies, and the essential and security ones are exempt from consent, so BLOOM does not show a cookie-consent banner. You can clear or block cookies and local storage at any time in your browser settings, though blocking the essential ones will sign you out.
Who can see what
Published resources, public profiles, and approved field notes are meant to be seen; that is the point of an open repository. A private profile simply has no public profile page (your name still appears as credit on your contributions). Your sign-in e-mail address is never shown on the site; it is used for sign-in and, if you ask, to reach you about your contributions. Editors can see submissions and moderation queues so they can review and publish them.
Getting your data out, or removed
You can edit your profile and change its visibility yourself at any time. To get a copy of what BLOOM holds about you, or to delete your account and your data, send a request through the contact form and I will take care of it. A self-serve account-deletion option is something I plan to add; until then, a request through the form is the way, and I will not make it difficult. If a record credits you by name and you would rather it did not: when a BLOOM member added that credit, the quickest route is often to ask them directly, and many will update it. If you would rather not contact them, if they do not respond, or if the credit was added by BLOOM itself, let me know through the form and I will change or remove it. Note that openly licensed work you have already contributed and that has been published may remain available under its license and credited to you, even after your account is gone; tell me if that is a concern and we will sort it out.
Children
BLOOM is built for librarians, educators, and knowledge workers. It is not directed at children, and accounts are meant for adults working in education.
Changes to this page
If what BLOOM does with your information changes, I will update this page and move the “last updated” date. There is no mailing list to manage, so the page itself is the record.
Contact
Questions about privacy, or a request about your data, can be sent through the contact form. See also the Terms of Use.