Ascon privacy policy

Draft. Not yet in force.

Effective date: [date]

Ascon is a reading tracker for Android, made by DarmaoneProduction, Indonesia. This policy explains what Ascon keeps on your phone, what it sends to Ascon's server, and what goes to other companies. Contact: [email protected].

Ascon never hosts, copies or shares manga or comics. Page images stay on your phone.

What stays on your phone

These are kept only on your phone. Ascon's server never receives them.

• Page images, and chapters you save to read offline.
• Text read from pages for translation, and the translations, including your edits.
• The glossary and story summaries Ascon builds for each series to help translation.
• Your browsing history in Ascon's browser, its cookies, and site logins.
• The email address and profile picture of your Google account.

Your library is kept on your phone too. If you sign in and use sync, a copy goes to the server, as described below.

Using Ascon without an account

Ascon works without an account. To find reading rules for sites, the app registers with the server once and gets a random device ID. The server keeps:

• Your device's ID, with the app version, the version of Android System WebView, and when it registered. Registering takes a small amount of computing work on your phone, which keeps automated sign-ups expensive.
• Rule lookups. When you open a site, the app doesn't send its name. It sends a 16-bit piece of a hash of the domain, and the server answers with every rule in that group. The server sees that your device asked for that group, at that time, from your IP address. Because few sites have rules, the group can still point to a site. The server counts lookups per device per day to limit misuse. It doesn't keep a list of which groups you asked for.
• A structure fingerprint, once per site, when you read a chapter on a site with no rule of its own. It describes the page's layout, not its text or images.
• Rule health. For sites with a rule from Ascon's server, the app sends daily counts of how the rule worked, such as pages read correctly and pages where it found nothing, by domain. The server also counts, per device, which of those sites the device read on and how often. This stops one device from marking a working rule as broken.
• Reports, when you report that a site was read wrongly: the domain, the page's address, the kind of problem, the correction you entered, and your device ID.
• Title searches. When Ascon looks up a series, the title is sent to the server, which asks AniList and MangaUpdates. Answers are kept in memory by title for up to an hour, so the same search isn't repeated, and aren't tied to your device. Importing a library can send many titles this way, see Importing a library.

Importing a library

Settings > Import library reads a Mihon or Tachiyomi backup file, your AniList or MangaUpdates list, or the browser tabs you share from Firefox or Chrome. All of it is read on your phone. The backup file, your list and your tab addresses are never sent to Ascon's server, and Ascon keeps only which apps you imported from.

• Titles. To link each series to its details, Ascon searches the titles with the server, the same title search as above. The server doesn't keep them.
• AniList and MangaUpdates accounts. Your phone talks to AniList and MangaUpdates directly. Your AniList sign-in token and your MangaUpdates username and password go only to them, are used for that import, and are not saved by Ascon or sent to Ascon's server.
• Browser tabs. Ascon opens each shared page in a hidden browser on your phone, with no images, to read the series and chapter. The sites see those visits like any visit from your phone. Looking up reading rules for those sites works as described above.

New-chapter alerts

New-chapter checks run on your phone and send nothing to the server. If you turn on faster alerts, the server keeps your device's Firebase push token and the AniList and MangaUpdates IDs of the series you follow, never the sites, so it can tell your phone when a new chapter comes out. Turning faster alerts off deletes your device's record on the server, with them.

News from Ascon

Ascon may send rare service notices, such as an outage or an app update, never ads. To get them, the app registers your phone with Google's Firebase Cloud Messaging and joins its "news" topic. Firebase keeps that registration and the topic. Ascon's server keeps nothing about your phone for news: no token, no list. News is on by default. Turning it off in Settings > New chapters leaves the topic, and when faster alerts are off too, the app deletes its Firebase registration.

Using Ascon with an account

You sign in with Google. The server keeps Google's ID for your account and never your name, email or picture. It also keeps:

• Your plan, free or Ascon Pro, and when the account was made.
• Signed-in phones. For each phone: its maker and model, such as "Google Pixel 8", when it signed in and when it was last used. Ascon never reads the name you gave your phone. A phone's sign-in ends after 90 days without use. Settings shows the list and can sign out every phone.
• Sign-in tokens, stored only as hashes.

Sync

If you're signed in, your library syncs through the server: series titles, the sites you read each series on and their addresses, the chapters you opened and their addresses, your progress and when you read, and each series' status. This is not end-to-end encrypted. Ascon's server can read it, so it shows which sites you read on. It is protected in transit and access to the server is restricted. Removing a series from your library leaves a short deletion record, so your other phones remove it too.

AI detection

When Ascon meets a site it can't read and you're signed in, it can ask the server to write a reading rule. The app sends a cleaned copy of one or two of the site's chapter pages, with scripts removed and text shortened, and the chapter you confirmed. The server sends this to the AI provider named below. If the new rule works, it is stored by domain and shared with every Ascon user. Your account isn't attached to the shared rule. The server keeps which account asked for each site, and how many detections each account used this month.

Cloud translation

When you choose Ascon cloud for translation, the app sends the text of the speech bubbles, the series title, the languages, the glossary and recent story summaries. It never sends page images, the site, or the chapter's address. The server passes this to the AI provider and returns the translation. The server does not store or log the text. It counts pages and processing used per account per day, and keeps those counts for a week.

Ascon Pro

Payments go through Google Play. Ascon never sees your card or payment details. The server keeps a hash of each purchase token, the plan, its state, its expiry date, the price and currency charged, and whether it was a free trial or a test purchase. The price is kept so Ascon can total its income. Ascon doesn't keep order numbers.

What Ascon's operator can see

Ascon's operator has a private page on the server, reached only from the server itself, with counts: how many people use AI detection and translation, how many accounts are Pro, how many reading rules each site has, how often rules work, and the month's Pro income against AI cost. It names site domains with their rule counts. It never shows page text, translations, which sites one person reads, or your library. The operator can switch AI detection or cloud translation off for everyone, and can send the News from Ascon notices above; the server keeps the notices it sent, not who received them. It also shows what Google Play reports to developers: crash and ANR rates and review stars, which Google collects itself.

The AI provider

AI detection and cloud translation use OpenAI's GPT-6 Luna through Amazon Bedrock, run by Amazon Web Services. AWS doesn't keep requests or use them for training. The exception is requests its automated abuse filter flags, which AWS keeps for up to 30 days. They stay inside AWS, are not shared with OpenAI, and are not reviewed by a person. [Region.]

Other companies your phone talks to

• The sites you read. Ascon's browser loads them like any browser. Their privacy policies apply.
• Filter list sources. Every 4 days, on an unmetered network, your phone downloads the ad-blocking lists EasyList and EasyPrivacy from easylist.to. That site sees your IP address and which list you asked for, and Ascon sends nothing else. You can turn lists off in Settings > Filter lists.
• Search. Typing words, not an address, into Ascon's address box opens a search on DuckDuckGo, whose privacy policy applies.
• Secure DNS. By default, Ascon's browser looks up site addresses through Cloudflare's DNS. In Settings you can choose Google, Quad9, or Off, which uses your network's DNS.
• Google for sign-in, Google Play for purchases, Firebase Cloud Messaging for News from Ascon and, if you turn them on, faster alerts, and ML Kit for on-device text recognition and translation, which downloads language packs from Google.
• ML Kit's usage reports. When you translate a page, Google's ML Kit sends Google diagnostics and usage statistics: device and app details, how fast it ran, its settings, the size of what it read, error codes, and for translation the two languages. It never sends the page's image or text. Google says it uses this for diagnostics and usage analytics, encrypts it in transit, and doesn't share it with others. Ascon can't turn this off. It happens only when you use translation.
• AniList and MangaUpdates, for series covers and details, and when you import a list from your account there. Covers load on your phone from the host that holds them, such as AniList's image server, and your Google profile picture loads from Google's.

Ascon has no ads, and no analytics or crash-reporting service of its own.

Where data is kept

Ascon's server runs in Singapore, on a virtual server from Sumopod that runs on Tencent Cloud. Backups go to Cloudflare. This website, readascon.com, is hosted on Cloudflare Pages; Cloudflare handles visitors' IP addresses to serve it, and Ascon runs no analytics on it. [Which country holds the backups, and whether they are encrypted.] The AI provider's region is above.

How long data is kept

• Signed-in phones: until they sign out, or after 90 days without use.
• Translation counts: one week.
• Daily counts of rule lookups and rule health, per phone: one day. After a day ends, the server keeps one number for it, how many phones did a rule lookup, with no phone named, so it can see how many people use Ascon. The server's total count of AI detections: one week.
• News notices Ascon sent: kept, with no link to anyone.
• Synced library and account data: until you delete your account.
• Device records, rule health and reports: [retention].
• Backups of the server's database are kept for 30 days, so deleted data is fully gone after 30 days.

Your choices

• Use Ascon without an account. Everything that runs on your phone works without one.
• Sign out on one phone, or on every phone from Settings.
• Turn News from Ascon off in Settings > New chapters.
• Delete your account in Settings, in the account sheet, or without the app at https://api.readascon.com/delete-account, by signing in with Google. This deletes your synced library, sign-ins, usage counts and purchase records from the server. It doesn't cancel Ascon Pro; cancel it in Google Play.
• Uninstalling Ascon deletes everything on your phone.
• Depending on where you live, you may have the right to see, correct, export or delete your data. Write to [email protected].

Children

Ascon is not meant for children under 13 and doesn't knowingly collect data from them.

Changes

If this policy changes, the new version will be posted here with a new effective date. Ascon will show a notice in the app for important changes.