Privacy Policy
What we collect when you use ZPubHouse, why we collect it, and how to tell us to stop.
Effective 7 September 2026
This Privacy Policy explains how Carolina E. Zambrano, an individual doing business as Zambrano’s Publishing House / ZPubHouse (“ZPubHouse”, “we”, “us”) handles information about the people who visit zpubhouse.com, read and watch on BookStreamTV, subscribe to our newsletter, enter our contests, and publish as authors on our platform.
It covers zpubhouse.com and every part of it, including the BookStreamTV browsing pages, the author Studio and the shop.
1.The short version
If you read nothing else, read this. The detail below says the same things more carefully.
- You can browse without an account. We do not ask who you are to let you read or watch.
- We do count visits. We record which pages are opened, where visitors arrived from, which country the visit came from and what browser was used. We give each browser a random number so we can tell one visitor from twenty visits. We do not store your IP address, and we do not know your name.
- We never see your card. Payments go directly to Stripe. We store a customer reference and whether a subscription is active — never card numbers.
- Some pages embed YouTube and Spotify players. Those companies can set their own cookies and can see that you loaded the player. That is their doing, not ours, and we cannot switch it off for you.
- We do not sell your information, and we never will.
- You can leave. Unsubscribe from any email in one click, and ask us to delete your account and your data at any time.
2.Who we are
ZPubHouse is operated by Carolina E. Zambrano, an individual doing business as Zambrano’s Publishing House / ZPubHouse.
Postal address: PO Box 1880, Collierville, TN 38017, United States.
For anything about this policy, or to exercise any of the choices below, use the contact form at zpubhouse.com/contact, write to us at zpubhouse@gmail.com, or post to the address above.
3.Information you give us
This is information you type in or upload. We only have it because you chose to provide it.
- When you create an account — your email address and a password. The password is handled by our authentication provider, Supabase; it is stored as a cryptographic hash, and nobody at ZPubHouse can read it.
- When you apply to become an author — your author name, biography, profile photo, social and store links, and your answers to our author qualification questions. We keep a dated record of the exact wording you agreed to.
- When you publish as an author — everything you upload or enter about your work: book covers and artwork, titles, descriptions, categories, prices and price labels, purchase links, music and video links, merchandise images, and anything else you add to your author page or store. Our Terms of Use set out the promises you make about that material.
- When you join the newsletter — your email address, and a note of where you signed up (the footer, a pop-up, a contest entry, or account creation).
- When you use the contact form — your name, email address, subject and message. These are saved so that an enquiry is never lost, and are also emailed to us.
- When you enter a contest — your name, email address, your story title, and the story file you upload.
- When you subscribe or buy something — see “Payments and card details” below. Your billing details go to Stripe, not to us.
4.Information collected automatically
Two separate systems measure how the site is used. Both are described here, because both apply to you.
- Our own visit counter. When you open a public page, we record the page path, the address of the page that referred you, the two-letter country code that our host works out at the network edge, your browser’s user-agent string (the text your browser sends to identify itself), and a random visitor identifier stored in your browser. We use this to understand which stories are being read, and to report honest audience numbers to advertisers. We do not store your IP address, and we do not log pages inside the admin area, the author Studio or the sign-in screens.
- Vercel Analytics. Our hosting provider, Vercel Inc., runs its own privacy-focused analytics on every page of this site, and reports aggregate page views and visitor counts to us. We do not receive individual visitor profiles from it, and it does not build a cross-site advertising profile of you.
- Server and hosting logs. Vercel keeps standard technical logs of requests to the site, which include IP addresses, for security and troubleshooting. We do not use those logs for marketing.
6.Embedded video and music from YouTube and Spotify
Some of our pages — book pages, BookStreamTV episode pages, author music sections, and the featured player on our browse pages — embed a video or audio player served directly by YouTube (Google LLC) or Spotify AB.
When a page containing one of those players loads, your browser contacts YouTube or Spotify directly. That means those companies can see that a request came from your browser, together with your IP address and the page you were on, and they may set or read their own cookies on your device — including if you are signed in to a Google or Spotify account. This happens whether or not you press play.
That processing is under their control, not ours. We cannot turn it off on your behalf, and we cannot see what they collect. Their practices are described in the Google Privacy Policy (policies.google.com/privacy) and the Spotify Privacy Policy (spotify.com/legal/privacy-policy).
If you would rather not be seen by them, most browsers can block third-party cookies, and browser extensions can stop the players loading at all.
7.Who else handles your information
We do not sell personal information, and we do not share it for advertising. We do rely on a small number of service providers to run the platform, and each receives only what it needs to do its job.
- Supabase — our database, sign-in system and file storage. Holds accounts, author profiles, uploaded images and files, newsletter subscribers, contact messages, contest entries, and our visit records.
- Vercel Inc. — hosting, content delivery, and the analytics described above.
- Stripe, Inc. — payment processing and subscription billing.
- Resend — sends our transactional and notification email.
- Google LLC (YouTube) and Spotify AB — only through the embedded players described above.
We may also disclose information if the law requires it, to protect our rights or someone’s safety, or as part of a sale or transfer of the business — in which case this policy would follow the information.
8.Payments and card details
Author subscriptions and shop purchases are processed by Stripe. You enter your card details on Stripe’s own checkout page, and they go to Stripe, not to us. We never receive, see or store your card number.
What we do store is a Stripe customer reference, whether your subscription is active, and when it renews or ended, so that the Studio knows what you have access to. Stripe handles your payment information under its own privacy policy at stripe.com/privacy.
9.Email we send, and how to stop it
- Service email — password resets, confirmations, and contest or account notices. These come with using the platform and cannot be switched off while you have an account.
- Newsletter and announcements — only if you signed up, entered a contest, or created an account. Every one carries an unsubscribe link, and unsubscribing takes effect immediately. Once you have unsubscribed, ordinary use of the site will never put you back on the list; only a deliberate new sign-up will.
10.How long we keep things
- Account and author profile information — for as long as your account exists, and for a short period afterwards while backups roll over.
- Published author content — until you remove it or your account is closed. Copies may persist briefly in backups and in caches operated by our hosting provider.
- Newsletter subscriptions — until you unsubscribe. We keep a record that you unsubscribed, so that we do not email you again by accident.
- Contact messages and contest entries — three years, then deleted. Contest entries from a completed contest are deleted sooner if you ask.
- Visit records — 24 months, then deleted. These are the page-view records described above; they are not linked to your name.
11.Children, parents, and COPPA
ZPubHouse publishes stories written for young readers, and we expect children to be among those reading and watching. We take that seriously, and this section says plainly what it means.
Accounts are for adults. You must be 18 or older to create an account, apply as an author, subscribe, or buy anything. We do not offer accounts to children, and we do not knowingly let a child create one. Children are welcome to read and watch, and we encourage them to do so with a parent or guardian.
- We do not ask children for their name, email address or any other personal detail. Reading a story and watching an episode require nothing from you at all.
- Our visit counter and COPPA. The random identifier described above is used only to count how many people read a page, and to keep the site working. The Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act permits a persistent identifier used solely to support a site’s internal operations, which is what this is. It is never used to build a profile of a visitor, to follow anyone across other websites, or to target advertising, and we do not permit any third party to use it that way.
- Advertising on ZPubHouse is not targeted. Where a sponsor appears, it is a fixed image and a link chosen by us — the same for every visitor. We do not run behavioural or interest-based advertising anywhere on this site, and we will not introduce it on pages made for children.
- Our contests are for adults. A contest entry asks for a name, an email address and a story file, which is real personal information — so entrants must be 18 or older, and we do not knowingly accept an entry from a child. The stories themselves are written for children; it is the entrant who must be an adult.
- Embedded YouTube and Spotify players are the exception we cannot control. As explained above, those companies receive a request directly from the viewer’s browser. If your child watches an embedded video, that is a visit to YouTube as far as Google is concerned, and Google’s own privacy terms apply to it.
Parents: if you believe your child has given us personal information, tell us and we will delete it. Write to zpubhouse@gmail.com or use the contact form, and we will remove it and confirm when it is done. You may also ask us what we hold about your child, and refuse any further collection.
12.Your choices and your rights
- See and correct — most of what we hold about you is visible and editable in your account and Studio profile. For anything else, ask us.
- Delete — ask us to close your account and delete your personal information. We will do it, unless we are required to keep something.
- Unsubscribe — use the link in any newsletter, or ask us.
- Opt out of our visit counter — clearing this site’s browser storage removes your visitor identifier, and blocking cookies for this site prevents a new one being kept.
- Complain — tell us first and we will try to put it right. Depending on where you live, you may also have the right to complain to a data protection authority.
We give you these rights whether or not a law requires it. ZPubHouse is a small independent publisher. The comprehensive privacy statutes people usually ask about — the California Consumer Privacy Act, the Tennessee Information Protection Act and their equivalents in other states — set size thresholds measured in tens of millions of dollars of revenue or hundreds of thousands of consumers, and we are far below all of them, so none of them currently applies to us. We are telling you that rather than reciting rights under laws we are not subject to. The rights above are ours to honour, and we honour them for everyone who asks, wherever they live.
Two things we can promise regardless of any threshold: we do not sell personal information and never have, and we do not share it for anyone’s advertising. If ZPubHouse ever grows past one of those thresholds, this policy gets updated before that happens, not after.
The Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act is different — it applies to us regardless of our size, and the section above sets out how we comply with it.
13.Where your information is handled
ZPubHouse is operated from the United States, and our service providers store and process information in the United States and in other countries where they operate. If you use the site from outside the United States, you are sending your information to the United States, where privacy laws may differ from those where you live.
14.Security
The site is served over HTTPS, passwords are stored as hashes by our authentication provider, and access to our database and admin tools is restricted to the accounts that need it. No system is perfectly secure, so we cannot promise that a determined attacker will never succeed — but if a breach affects your information, we will tell you as the law requires.
15.Changes to this policy
We will update this policy when what we do changes. The effective date at the top always tells you which version you are reading, and if a change matters to you, we will say so on the site or by email before it takes effect.
16.How to reach us
Carolina E. Zambrano, an individual doing business as Zambrano’s Publishing House / ZPubHouse
PO Box 1880, Collierville, TN 38017, United States
Email: zpubhouse@gmail.com · Contact form: zpubhouse.com/contact
See also our Terms of Use, which cover publishing on ZPubHouse.