Bergotte Privacy Policy
Version 1.12 — effective 1 November 2026
This is an English translation of the French « Politique de confidentialité », which is the reference version: in case of any difference, the French text prevails.
1. Who is responsible for your information
1.1. The controller of your personal information is Jade Coutu, a self-employed worker doing business as "Bergotte", established in Québec City (Québec), Canada ("we").
1.2. Person in charge of the protection of personal information: Jade Coutu, who can be reached at bonjour@bergotte.com, with "Privacy" as the subject, or by post (section 15).
1.3. Representative in the European Union: to come.
1.4. This policy applies to the Bergotte service (app.bergotte.com) and its presentation site (bergotte.com). It forms an integral part of the Terms of Use and Sale, whose definitions it uses.
2. The laws that apply
We process your information in accordance with Québec's Act respecting the protection of personal information in the private sector, Canada's Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act where it applies, and, if you reside in the European Union, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Where these laws differ, we apply the rule that protects you most.
3. What we collect
| category | what it is | where it comes from |
|---|---|---|
| Identification | your email address; your password, stored only in an irreversible hashed form; if you use Google, the identifier and address Google sends us | you, or Google at your request |
| Your content | your manuscripts, their titles, chapters and successive versions; the files you import; your questions, instructions, answers and corrections; your margin notes and the passages you set aside; what you say about your characters and places (on their pages and in answer to Bergotte's questions); the threads you leave hanging; the genre, readership and market you state for your book, and whether it is your first novel | you |
| What Bergotte derives from it | the Results of the reading: characters, places, story notes, one sentence per chapter, how each chapter is told and how it ends, a genre's key moments, inconsistencies, answers, as well as search indexes and mathematical representations of the text | produced by the Service |
| Subscription and billing | your free trial (when it began, or the dates of your free period if it began before 19 October 2026); your plan, its interval and dates, the currency, the status of payments, receipts, the country used for taxes; never your full card number | you, Stripe and Link |
| Usage | the use of your Allowance, the date and nature of the operations carried out, their cost | produced by the Service |
| Technical | IP address, browser type, date and time of connections, error logs — without the text of your manuscript | your browser |
| Preferences | language, light or dark theme, reading settings | you |
| Where your account came from | the bergotte.com page you arrived on, the campaign named in the link you followed (for instance "meta" or "fr-a-coherence"), whether you came to import a manuscript, the interface language, your browser's time zone and the country it implies; your answer to "How did you hear about Bergotte?" | the link you followed, your browser, you |
| Correspondence | the content of the emails you send us | you |
| Report without an account | the manuscript you leave, its title, its number of words and chapters; your answers to the questions asked before payment, and to the optional ones asked while Bergotte reads (including the characters you name); the questions you set aside; the time of each step of the reading; the email address given at payment | you, Stripe and Link for the address, the Service for the times |
We do not deliberately collect any sensitive information. Your manuscript may, however, contain some — about you or about other people, real or not: we then treat it with the same care, and only to provide the Service to you.
4. Why we use it, and on what basis
| purpose | information | legal basis (GDPR) |
|---|---|---|
| Create and secure your account, authenticate you | identification, technical | performance of the contract |
| Keep, display and export your manuscript | your content | performance of the contract |
| Read your manuscript and produce the Results | your content | performance of the contract; can be turned off per novel, on request |
| Manage the subscription, the Allowance, billing and taxes | subscription, usage | performance of the contract; legal obligation (accounting, tax) |
| Send you the emails the service needs (confirmation, security, invoice, end of a reading, closure, changes to the terms) | identification | performance of the contract |
| Send you a single reminder the day after you sign up, if you have not yet imported a manuscript or written in Bergotte, at about 9 am in your browser's time zone | identification; where your account came from (the time zone); usage (whether a manuscript was imported or written, yes or no, never its text) | legitimate interest: helping you begin what you opened your account for; one click stops it |
| Send you, at your request on bergotte.com, a single email with the link to Bergotte, to open it on your computer | your email address, used for that sending and never kept by Bergotte (our sending provider keeps its technical record) | performing your request |
| Prevent fraud, abuse and technical errors; ensure security | technical, usage | legitimate interest: protecting the Service and its users |
| Answer your requests | correspondence; your content only if you allow us | performance of the contract; consent |
| Improve the Service from aggregated measurements (costs, durations, error rates) | usage, technical — never your text | legitimate interest |
| Audience measurement: understand which pages and features are used, and where the journey stalls | pages viewed (without ids or names), actions taken (without any text), an opaque id of your account | consent, which you can withdraw at any time |
| Our ads: know whether a Meta ad led you to create an account, import a manuscript, buy a report or subscribe, and show you our ads again on Facebook and Instagram after a visit to bergotte.com | the event, its time, a random event id, the page address, your IP address and browser, the ad's click identifier and Meta's cookie — never your email address, your name or any text | consent ("Advertising"), which you can withdraw at any time |
| Know which channels and campaigns bring writers, and at what cost | where your account came from | legitimate interest: knowing whether our communication works, with minimal data, never sold |
| Comply with our legal obligations and respond to authorities | as the request requires | legal obligation |
This reminder is sent only once. The link « Stop receiving messages like this one » at the bottom of the email is enough to stop it: we note it on your account and will not send you any reminder of this kind again. The emails the service needs (confirmation, security, invoice, end of a reading) keep arriving.
What we never do:
- use your manuscript to train, fine-tune or evaluate an artificial intelligence model;
- sell, rent or exchange your information;
- use it for commercial profiling, or to show you ads chosen from your manuscript or your use of Bergotte; the only exception is Meta measuring our own ads and showing them again to bergotte.com visitors (the site, never the app), described below, and only if you accept it;
- make a decision about you based solely on automated processing that would produce legal effects or significantly affect you.
The Service's automatic protective measures (article 29 of the Terms) may pause a reading until the next day; they never close an account. A suspension or a closure for breach is always decided by a person.
5. How the artificial intelligence reading works
5.1. To read your novel, Bergotte sends an artificial intelligence provider paragraphs and chapters of your manuscript, with the necessary instructions, and receives analyses in return. When you ask a question, the question and the relevant passages are sent. To check your novel's plotlines, however, Bergotte sends your whole book, at once: at the end of its first reading, then, if you change it, at most once every twelve hours when you open its Story. A book of more than about one hundred and forty thousand (140,000) words is not sent this way. Also sent, only when the feature that needs it is used:
- what you say about a character or a place, and your answers to its questions, to compose its page and its path, answer your questions about the book and check a passage;
- the word or passage you select, with the paragraphs around it, when you ask for « Autre mot » (another word), « Est-ce cohérent ? » (is it consistent?) or where a thread is resolved — and, for « Est-ce cohérent ? », the pairs you have said are intended;
- a note, when you choose to talk it over with Bergotte;
- your book's genre, when you open the detail of « Face aux éditeurs » (facing publishers);
- to write a reading report you order: your whole book, at once, and your answers to the report's questions (the genre, the readership, what you say about your book and its characters).
5.2. To search your text, Bergotte sends a search provider paragraphs with their immediate context, and, when you ask a question, that question and a selection of passages.
5.3. These providers act on our behalf and on our instructions. Their contractual terms, in the version applicable to our account, exclude the use of your data for training their models. They may keep the data sent temporarily, for security and abuse-prevention purposes, for the period shown in the table in section 6.
5.4. You can ask for the reading to be turned off for a novel, by writing to bonjour@bergotte.com. While it is off, no passage of that novel is sent to these providers.
5.5. What you see in Bergotte is produced by an artificial intelligence and is presented to you as such.
5 bis. The reading report without an account
5 bis.1. The account created at payment. When you pay for a report without being signed in, the email address given at payment creates a Bergotte account, to hold your book and your report. This account stays invisible and unusable until a link sent to that address has been clicked: nobody can sign in to it before then, not even the browser that paid.
5 bis.2. An address already registered. If the address given at payment matches an existing Bergotte account, nothing is attached to it or read before you click the « Confirmez que c'est vous » (confirm it's you) link.
5 bis.3. The link in your emails is a key. The links in the « Votre rapport est en route » (your report is on its way) and « Votre rapport est prêt » (your report is ready) emails open your report, read-only, to anyone who holds the link, for seven (7) days. Do not forward them: someone who receives the email can read the report. These links never open the rest of your account. For that, Bergotte sends a sign-in link to your address, valid once, for one hour, or offers to sign in with Google.
5 bis.4. No measurement tool on the report's page. The page that shows your report through its link loads no audience measurement tool and no advertising tag, and does not pass its address to the sites you might leave it for.
6. Who we share it with
We share your information only with the following providers, each for what it needs, and bound to us by a data processing agreement:
| provider | role | what it receives | where | retention on its side |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Supabase Pte. Ltd. (Singapore) | database, authentication, file storage | all your data | European Union (Ireland) | as long as we keep it; daily backups: seven (7) days |
| Fly.io, Inc. | hosting of the application | data in transit; technical logs without manuscript text | European Union (Netherlands) | logs: seven (7) days |
| Anthropic, PBC | artificial intelligence (reading, answers, rewordings, character and place pages, plotlines, the toolbar's tools) | passages and chapters of the manuscript, and the whole book to check its plotlines or to write a reading report you order; your questions, the instructions; what you say about your characters and places, your answers to their questions, the notes you talk over with Bergotte, your book's genre (section 5.1) | United States | thirty (30) days at most, and up to two (2) years for content flagged as breaching its usage policies; no training |
| Voyage AI (MongoDB group) | search in the text | paragraphs and their context, your questions, a selection of passages, the words and passages searched from the toolbar | United States | none kept, training being turned off for our account |
| Stripe, and Link, its payment service | Link sells the subscription as reseller (merchant of record): payment, receipts, calculating and collecting taxes; for that sale, Link processes your data under its own privacy policy | your email address, your plan, your country and, if asked for, your billing address; your means of payment (held by Stripe and Link alone) | United States, Canada and others | according to their legal obligations |
| Resend | sending emails | your email address, the text of the email (in the end-of-reading email: your novel's title, a sentence about one of its plotlines and a short quotation from your manuscript, of two hundred and twenty characters at most) | United States | thirty (30) days |
| ImprovMX | receiving emails sent to bonjour@bergotte.com and passing them on to our mailbox | the emails you send us (your address, their content, their attachments) | France (transient relay); company established in the United States | no content kept once the email is delivered; delivery logs: seven (7) days |
| Meta Platforms Ireland Ltd. (Facebook, Instagram) | measuring our ads, and showing them again to bergotte.com visitors, only if you accept advertising | the event ("visit to a bergotte.com page", "sign-up", "import of a manuscript of more than 30,000 words" (never its text or its title), "subscription", "purchase of a reading report", with its amount and currency), its time and an event id drawn at random (never an id of your account), the page address, your IP address and browser, the ad's click identifier and Meta's cookie (_fbp); never your email address, your name or any text | European Union and United States | per Meta's policy |
| PostHog, Inc. | audience measurement, only if you accept it | pages viewed and actions taken, without any text of your manuscripts or email address; an opaque id of your account | United States | one (1) year, under PostHog's plan |
| sign-in with Google, if you choose it; the mailbox where we read the emails you send us | for sign-in: nothing of your manuscript; for the mailbox: your emails and what you attach to them | United States and others | according to its own rules; for the mailbox, the period set out in section 8 |
We may also share your information:
- with an authority, where the law requires us to, after checking that the request is valid;
- with a possible successor to the business, under the conditions of article 53 of the Terms, who will take over the commitments of this policy.
No other third party — advertiser, data broker, other social network — receives your information.
7. Transfers outside Québec and the European Union
7.1. Some providers are located outside Québec, and some outside the European Union, in particular in the United States. Before these communications, we assessed, as Québec law requires, that the information would receive adequate protection, given its sensitivity, the purpose, the contractual measures and the applicable legal regime.
7.2. For people residing in the European Union, these transfers rely, depending on the provider, on its certification under the EU–US Data Privacy Framework or on the standard contractual clauses adopted by the European Commission.
7.3. You can obtain a description of these safeguards by writing to bonjour@bergotte.com.
8. How long we keep it
| data | period |
|---|---|
| Account and content | as long as your account is open |
| Where your account came from | as long as your account is open; erased with it |
| Deleted novel | thirty (30) days in the bin, then permanently erased |
| Closed account | thirty (30) days, during which you can come back, then permanent erasure of all your data |
| Backups | erased by rotation, no later than seven (7) days after the original data is erased |
| Invoices and accounting records | six (6) years after the end of the financial year concerned, as tax law requires |
| Usage and cost data | kept after the account is closed in a form that contains no extract of the manuscript and no longer identifies you |
| Technical logs | seven (7) days at our host |
| Correspondence with us | three (3) years after the last exchange |
| Manuscript left, not paid for | twenty-four (24) hours, file included, then permanent erasure; only an anonymous count remains (times, step reached, length band, number of chapters and answers, origin without click identifiers), itself erased after thirteen (13) months |
| Manuscript left, paid for | becomes a novel in your account, kept as such; the original file is kept with it, as an import |
| Links in your report emails | seven (7) days; a sign-in link: one (1) hour and a single use |
| Inactive account without a subscription | may be closed after twenty-four (24) months without sign-in, after a warning sixty (60) days in advance |
9. Cookies and trackers
9.1. Bergotte uses cookies that are strictly necessary for it to work or to remember a choice you made, an origin cookie when you arrive through a campaign link, and, only if you accept it, an audience measurement tool:
| cookie | role | duration |
|---|---|---|
session cookies (sb-…) | keep you signed in securely | the length of the session, renewed while you use it |
language (leaf.locale) | remember the language you chose | one (1) year |
theme (leaf.theme) | remember the light or dark theme you chose | one (1) year |
sidebar (leaf.sidebar) | remember whether you left the sidebar open or collapsed | one (1) year |
| subscription confirmation | show the message that follows a payment only once | a few minutes |
your choice (bergotte.consent) | remember your answers: audience measurement, and advertising | one (1) year |
Meta (_fbp, _fbc), only after your consent to advertising | link a sign-up to the Meta ad that led to it; show you our ads again after a visit to the site | three (3) months |
where you came from (bergotte.arrival) | remember the campaign and the landing page until your account is created, only if the link you followed names a campaign; deleted as soon as the account is created | seven (7) days at most |
your intention (bergotte.intent) | open the import of your manuscript right after your account is created, if you came through "I have a manuscript" | the browser session |
your deposit (bergotte_depot) | find the manuscript you have just left, then your report's progress, in the browser that paid; it gives no access to your account | twenty-four (24) hours before payment, seven (7) days after |
your report link (bergotte_lecture) | keep the key from your email's link to show your report and its progress without leaving it in the page's address | thirty (30) days (the key itself is valid for seven days) |
your password link (bergotte_recovery) | allow choosing a new password only from the « forgot password » link | thirty (30) minutes |
audience measurement (ph_…), only after your consent | tell one visit from another, for PostHog | one (1) year |
Bergotte also keeps a few display preferences in your browser (local storage), sent to no one: the order you read the chapters in, the words you chose to stop flagging as repeated, a suggestion put off for later, and that you have already seen the end of a reading.
So that nothing you write is lost if the connection drops, Bergotte also keeps in your browser (IndexedDB), tied to your account, a copy of your chapters: those you open or write, and the whole novel when you search it for a word. It is used to reopen a chapter at once and to send our servers whatever could not reach them yet; it is passed to no one else. It stays after you sign out, so that a passage not yet saved is never lost; you can erase it by deleting the site's data in your browser.
Finally, in the open tab only (session storage), Bergotte keeps a temporary copy of the pages already shown — your library, the summaries of your books, the character and place cards, the Relecture list — to show them again at once when you come back to them. It is passed to no one, never contains your subscription, your usage or your purchases; it is erased when you sign out and when the tab is closed, and is no longer used after twelve hours.
9.2. Necessary cookies and the origin cookie (used only to know which campaign brought you, without following you from one site to another, and gone once your account is created) are set without asking for your consent. Audience measurement, however, is switched on only after your « Accept »: nothing is measured before, declining is as easy as accepting, and you can change your mind at any time with the « Cookies » link at the bottom of the pages. It never collects the text of your manuscripts, your questions or your email address, and it does not record your screen. Our ads with Meta (measuring them, and showing them again to site visitors) are a second, separate question: none of it is turned on except after your "yes" to "Advertising" ("Accept", or "Choose" then the "Advertising" box). Declining is as easy as accepting; "Cookies" at the foot of every page lets you change your mind. Without that yes, no Meta tag is loaded and nothing is sent to Meta, neither by your browser nor by our servers.
9.3. Images in emails: our emails show our logo and, for some, an illustration, loaded from our servers. When your mail client displays these images, our host records the request in its technical logs (IP address, date and time), unless your mail client goes through an intermediary that hides this information. These data are not used to find out whether you read the email. You can turn off the display of images in your mail client.
10. How we protect it
Among the measures we apply:
- encryption of exchanges between your browser and the Service (HTTPS);
- strict separation of data between users, enforced at the database level;
- access by technical staff limited to what is strictly necessary, without reading the manuscript;
- technical logs that do not contain the text of your manuscript;
- artificial intelligence processing carried out only from our servers, never from your browser;
- card data held by Stripe and Link alone;
- continuous monitoring of the Service.
No measure offers absolute security. We encourage you to protect your password and to export your manuscript regularly.
11. In case of an incident
If a confidentiality incident affects your information and presents a risk of serious injury, we notify you promptly, as well as the Commission d'accès à l'information du Québec, and, if you reside in the European Union, the competent supervisory authority within the time limits set by the GDPR. We keep a register of these incidents.
12. Your rights
12.1. You can, at any time and free of charge:
- access your information and obtain a copy;
- have it corrected if it is inaccurate, incomplete or equivocal;
- have it erased, in particular by closing your account;
- take it with you in a structured, commonly used format (portability);
- withdraw your consent where a processing depends on it, and have the reading turned off for a novel;
- object to a processing based on our legitimate interest, or ask for it to be restricted;
- be informed of the use of automated processing and make your observations about it;
- give instructions on what happens to your data after your death, where the law applicable to you provides for it.
12.2. Several of these rights can be exercised directly in Bergotte: exporting each manuscript (Word format), exporting all your data (JSON file) and closing the account are available in the Service and its settings.
12.3. For the others, write to bonjour@bergotte.com. We may ask you to confirm your identity. We reply within thirty (30) days; this period may be extended where the law allows, and we then let you know.
12.4. You can lodge a complaint with the Commission d'accès à l'information du Québec (www.cai.gouv.qc.ca), the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada (www.priv.gc.ca), or, if you reside in the European Union, the data protection authority of your country — in France, the CNIL (www.cnil.fr). We invite you to write to us first: we will do everything we can to settle the matter.
13. Minors
Bergotte is reserved for people aged eighteen (18) and over. We do not knowingly collect information about minors. If we learn that an account was opened by a minor, we close it and erase its data.
14. Changes to this policy
We may change this policy to reflect developments in the Service, its providers or the law. Any significant change is notified to you by email at least thirty (30) days in advance, under the conditions of article 46 of the Terms. The version in force and its date always appear at the top of this document.
15. Write to us
- By email: bonjour@bergotte.com, subject "Privacy"
- By post: Jade Coutu (Bergotte), to come