Along these lines, it would be great to have the option to privately track certain books we've read. Sometimes I read a particularly "taboo" book, like nonfiction guides on participating in the BDSM community or something, and I'm hesitant to track it under my "read" books in case certain family members or employers manage to come across it.

Yes, I think we'll have something like this in the future, but for now, as Abbie suggested, we've just launched journal entries/notes with progress updates. So when you finish a book, you can now add a note to at least keep track of your private ratings within the app!

That sounds good. I know that the ratings are an easy way to get the algorithm to make recommendations, and I suspect I would get some benefits out of adding my star ratings from the app, so I was hoping to take part in that functionality of thestorygraph without sharing the ratings publicly.

We definitely are open to more nuance in terms of privacy settings. Hopefully the new update for journal entries will be helpful for you, because those updates are visible only to you! You could use that as the main place to record your thoughts, and while star ratings will still be linked to the main review for now, you could still make a note for yourself there and leave off the rating in your review. :-)