Privacy policy

Kpnovel is operated by Rinik Tech Ltd, a company registered in England and Wales (company number 17452502) whose registered office is London WC2H 9JQ, United Kingdom. We are the data controller for the information described here and are registered with the Information Commissioner's Office under reference ZC246118.

This policy is written to be read, not to be survived. If anything in it is unclear, write to us through the contact form at kpnovel.com/contact, or at info@kpnovel.com, and we will explain it in plain words.

1. What we collect

When you read without an account. You can read free chapters on kpnovel.com without telling us anything. In the app you can start as a guest, which creates an account identified only by a random value generated on your device, so that your reading and your free stones survive closing the app. There is no email address on a guest account and we do not know who you are.

When you make an account. Your email address, and a display name you choose. That is all we ask for. You may add a profile picture and a short bio if you want to; most readers never do.

What you do on Kpnovel. Which books are in your library, which chapters you have unlocked, where you have reached in a book, your bookmarks, your votes, the comments and reviews you write, and anything you report to us. This is what makes the app work: a reading position you cannot see is not a feature.

Purchases. When you buy stones, Apple or Google takes the payment. We never see your card details — they do not reach our servers and we could not show them to you if you asked. What we receive and keep is the order identifier the store gives us, which pack you bought, the amount, and the date.

Adverts. Adverts on Kpnovel are never personalised. Whichever advertising network serves the advert is told, for every reader and without being asked, that it may not use personal data to choose which advert you see. You do not have to turn this on, there is no setting to find, and it does not depend on where you live. Each network still collects its own data through its own advertising business, and what it does with that is governed by its privacy policy rather than this one.

Google's own use of your data is governed by Google's privacy policy, not this one.

The website. If you allow it, kpnovel.com uses Google Analytics to count visits and see which pages people reach. It does not load at all until you say yes to analytics in the cookie banner, declining changes nothing about how the site works, and the app does not use it. The cookie policy sets out what it stores and for how long.

Signing in and staying signed in. Each sign-in creates a session that records the device description your app or browser sends and the IP address it connected from. This is how "you are signed in on 2 devices" works, and how you can sign out of a device you no longer have.

Notifications. If you allow them, the notification token your phone issues, so we can tell you a chapter you follow has been published.

Staff actions. If you work for Rinik Tech, everything you do in the admin dashboard is written to an audit log with your name, your IP address and what you changed. This is deliberate and it applies to the owner as well as to everybody else.

2. What we do not collect

We think this is worth saying explicitly, because most policies only tell you what is taken.

• We do not record who searched for what. We count how many times a term was searched on a given day, to see what readers are looking for. That count has no account attached to it and never has.
• We do not sell your data, to anybody, for anything.
• We do not track you across other apps or websites.
• We do not hold your payment details.

3. Why we use it, and on what legal basis

4. Adverts

Kpnovel shows one kind of advert: a rewarded advert, which you choose to watch in exchange for stones. There are no banners, nothing between chapters, and nothing that appears while you are reading. If you never tap "watch an advert", no advert is ever loaded and the advertising network receives nothing about you. There is a limit on how many you can watch in a day, shown in the app.

We cap what advertisers may show you. Kpnovel is registered with Unity as a 13+ app with its advert content filter set to General, so no advert rated 18+ is shown to a reader Unity serves. Where an advert comes from another network we ask for the same standard, and we check what is actually being shown; we cannot promise every network applies it identically. This is a limit on the adverts themselves rather than on who sees them. We do not ask your age and we do not tell any advertising network how old you are.

Adverts are supplied by Unity Ads, operated by Unity Technologies, or by Google AdMob, operated by Google. Which of them your app uses is a setting on our side rather than something you choose, and only one of them runs on your device: the other’s software is never started.

Where AdMob is used, it is also an auction. It may obtain the advert from other advertising networks it works with, including Unity, and those networks receive the request for an advert. We do not choose which of them wins, and for your particular advert we do not learn who it was.

Kpnovel does not build a profile of you and does not choose which advert you see. We do not tell either network your name, your email, what you read, or what you have bought. We do pass one thing: a reference to your account, so that the stones reach you rather than somebody else. It is an identifier internal to Kpnovel and means nothing to anyone outside it.

When you choose to watch an advert, the network selects it, and where an advert is personalised it is personalised from what that network already knows about your device through its own advertising business, not from anything Kpnovel provides. What it does with that is governed by its own privacy policy — Unity’s, and Google’s at policies.google.com/privacy — rather than by this one.

You can turn personalisation off, and it applies everywhere. The control is your device's rather than ours, which means it covers every app you use and not only this one. On Android, open Settings, find Google, then Ads, where you can reset or delete your advertising ID and turn personalisation off. On an iPhone, open Settings, then Privacy & Security, then Tracking.

Your choices, in order of how easy they are. Do not watch adverts — nothing in Kpnovel requires it, and every chapter an advert could earn you can also be bought or waited for. Or turn off advert personalisation on your device, as described above, which covers every app you use and not only this one.

4a. Books rated 18

Some books on Kpnovel are rated 18 and contain explicit content between adults. They are hidden until you confirm your age, and you can set your preference to hide them permanently. This rating is about the books, not the adverts, and confirming your age to read an 18-rated book does not change what adverts you are shown.

5. Who your information is shared with

We use a small number of companies to run Kpnovel. They process data on our instructions, may not use it for their own purposes, and are bound by contract to protect it.

• Amazon Web Services — hosting and encrypted nightly backups, both in London (eu-west-2).
• Apple and Google — payments for in-app purchases, as merchant of record, and distribution of the app.
• Unity Ads (Unity Technologies) and Google AdMob (Google) — rewarded adverts.
• Google Analytics (Google) — counting visits to kpnovel.com, and only where the reader has agreed to analytics.
• An email delivery provider — sending sign-in codes and notifications.

We name the categories rather than every supplier, which is what data protection law asks for. We keep an internal record of exactly who each one is, and if you want to know who handles a particular kind of your data, ask and we will tell you.

We also share information where the law requires it, or to protect somebody from harm.

6. How long we keep it

If you delete your account, it is deactivated at once and everything personal is erased within 30 days. That is not a form of words: a job runs and removes it. After it has run, nothing in our database says who the account belonged to — not your email, not your name, not your device, not your preferences, not anything you wrote.

What survives is the financial record: which purchases were made, for how much, and when. UK company law requires us to keep those for six years. They are kept attached to a number that no longer identifies anybody, because a payment that cannot be traced is worse for you than one that can — it cannot be refunded or put right if something goes wrong.

Unread notifications are removed after 30 days. Sessions expire on their own.

7. Your rights

You can ask us to give you a copy of your information, correct it, delete it, or stop using it in a particular way. You can ask for it in a portable form. You can withdraw consent for notifications or adverts at any time, in the app, without asking us.

Deleting your account is in the app and does not require you to write to anybody. If you no longer have the app, kpnovel.com/delete-account says how. If you would rather write, use the contact form at kpnovel.com/contact or info@kpnovel.com, and we will answer within one month.

If you think we have handled your information badly, please tell us first — we would rather fix it.

You also have the right to complain to the Information Commissioner's Office at ico.org.uk, or to your local supervisory authority if you are outside the UK.

8. Where your information is

Kpnovel's servers and its backups are both in London (AWS eu-west-2). Some of the companies listed in section 5 operate internationally, and where information leaves the UK it is protected by the safeguards UK data protection law requires.

9. Changes

If we change this policy in a way that matters, we will tell you rather than quietly replacing the page and the version you agreed to remains readable. Every published version keeps its number and its date.