Book Dragon Privacy Policy

A list of the books someone owns can say more about them than it first appears to. A shelf can contain hobbies, politics, religion, health questions, guilty pleasures, things somebody studied twenty years ago, books bought for children, books inherited from someone else, and books that have been sitting unread long enough that drawing any conclusion from them would be a mistake. Whatever those books mean, Archive Nine does not need a central copy of the list in order for Book Dragon to work, and Book Dragon was designed around that idea from the beginning. There is no Book Dragon account, no Archive Nine account required to use the app, and no central Archive Nine database where everyone's collections are gathered together. Your collection is stored and synchronized using Apple's systems, and when you share a collection with another person, that sharing also happens through the Apple ecosystem rather than through an Archive Nine account service.

That does not mean Book Dragon never communicates with anything outside your device. Book lookups require outside information, and Apple can provide Archive Nine with privacy-protected analytics about how the app is being used when users have chosen to share that information. This page explains those boundaries, what stays with Apple, what can leave the device, and what Archive Nine does with the information available to us.

Your collection

The books, editions, copies, collections, and related information you enter into Book Dragon remain within the Apple services used by the app for storage and synchronization. Archive Nine does not operate a separate central server that receives and stores a permanent copy of your library, and there is no Archive Nine username attached to your shelves or profile tying the collection back to you. Apple handles the storage and synchronization Book Dragon depends on through the Apple ecosystem, which means your ability to store, synchronize, recover, or share information may also depend on your Apple account, your devices, your settings, network availability, and Apple services that Archive Nine does not control.

That architecture is intentional. Book Dragon does not need to know who you are in order to remember what books you own, and building another account system whose main purpose would be keeping a copy of information you already have would create complexity and privacy risk without making the app meaningfully better. Your use of Apple's services is also subject to Apple's own privacy practices, account settings, and service terms. Book Dragon depends on those systems, but Archive Nine does not control them.

Shared collections

Books move around in families even when nobody planned for them to. A book that belongs to one person spends six months in somebody else's room, a shared favorite migrates from shelf to shelf, and eventually the question of who technically owns a particular copy becomes less useful than knowing whether the family already has it somewhere. Book Dragon supports shared collections so the app can reflect that reality. When you choose to share a collection, information in that collection becomes available through Apple's sharing systems to the people you have chosen to share it with, and those people may be able to see the books, editions, copies, and other information contained in the shared collection. Supported changes made through shared access may also affect that collection.

Archive Nine does not decide who belongs in your shared library. You do. Only share a collection with people you intend to give access to it.

Looking up a book requires asking somebody about it

Book Dragon would become considerably less useful if every ISBN, author, title, publisher, cover, and edition detail had to be entered by hand, so the app uses outside book-information services to help identify books and fill in metadata. When Book Dragon performs one of these lookups, the information necessary to make the request, such as an ISBN, title, author, or other search term, may be sent to an outside book-information provider. Like most internet services, that provider may also receive technical information normally associated with a network request, such as an IP address, according to its own systems and privacy practices.

A lookup is a request for information about a book, not a transfer of your entire Book Dragon collection. Archive Nine does not maintain a central user profile to attach to those requests, and the outside provider is not sent the contents of your library simply because you searched for one title. The Book Data Sources page identifies the outside book-information services Book Dragon currently uses and provides additional information about them.

Analytics without building another tracking system

We do want to know whether Book Dragon works, whether people continue using it, and whether the parts we build are useful outside the development environment. We do not need another advertising tracker following people around the internet to answer those questions, so Book Dragon uses analytics information made available through Apple's own developer systems. Apple can provide Archive Nine with privacy-protected information about app usage, installations, sessions, crashes, device or operating-system versions, and similar performance or engagement information from users who have chosen to share diagnostics and usage information with Apple and app developers.

Apple applies privacy protections to these reports, including aggregation and minimum reporting thresholds, and some reports use additional techniques intended to prevent activity from being traced back to an individual person. If too few people contribute data for a particular measurement, Apple may simply not report it. Archive Nine uses the information that is available for Book Dragon development and operation, such as determining whether a release introduced a crash, whether an operating-system version is causing trouble, whether people continue opening the app, or whether a feature is being used enough to justify the time spent maintaining it.

At launch, Book Dragon does not include a separate Archive Nine analytics service, advertising analytics platform, or third-party behavioral analytics SDK. We are not using analytics to build advertising profiles, follow people across unrelated apps or websites, or sell information about how Book Dragon is used. Apple controls the user's choice to share this category of diagnostics and usage information through Apple's own settings and services.

Archive Nine does not currently collect your library for analytics

The analytics described above are about the use and performance of the app. Archive Nine does not currently collect an anonymized or identifiable copy of your Book Dragon collection for analytics, marketing, advertising, profiling, or product-development analysis. We are interested in whether Book Dragon is useful, but we do not need to know that a particular reader owns a particular book to answer that question.

Building better book information

The free book-information services available today are useful, but their metadata can be inconsistent in exactly the places where a collection app needs precision. Editions can get mixed together, covers can belong to the wrong version, fields can be incomplete, and series information can range from excellent to almost useless. One service may know something another does not, and sometimes none of them have a clean answer. Archive Nine intends to build its own book-information layer to improve those results, not as a replacement for the public services Book Dragon already uses, but as another source that can sit above them. Book Dragon could ask Archive Nine first, use the clean record when one exists, and fall back to the existing providers when it does not.

That system may eventually improve its metadata using anonymized bibliographic information contributed from Book Dragon collections, but that collection does not happen in the current version of Book Dragon. Before such a feature is enabled, we will decide exactly what information is needed, how it is separated from identifying information, how long it is retained, and what control users have over contributing it. This policy will be updated before that collection begins, and the App Store privacy disclosures will be updated to match the app's actual behavior.

The useful thing we want is information about the book, such as the relationship between an ISBN and an edition, a cleaner publisher record, or better series information. We do not need a history of which individual reader owned it. The goal is to build a better catalog of books, not a catalog of readers.

We do not sell your information

Archive Nine does not sell Book Dragon collection information or personal information to advertisers, data brokers, publishers, retailers, or other companies. Book Dragon does not use your collection for targeted advertising, and Archive Nine does not use Book Dragon to track you across unrelated apps, websites, or services.

Archive Nine may eventually earn money around Book Dragon through optional services such as affiliate links to retailers. If you choose to follow one of those links, you will be leaving Book Dragon for an outside service whose own privacy practices apply. Whether you use those links has no effect on Book Dragon's core library functionality.

Data we never collect is data we never have to protect

One reason Book Dragon avoids an Archive Nine account and central collection database is that collecting less information removes entire categories of problems. A database that does not contain everyone's personal libraries cannot leak everyone's personal libraries. That does not make Book Dragon magically private, because Apple operates systems Book Dragon depends on, outside lookup providers have their own practices, network requests leave information in systems Archive Nine does not control, and future versions of Book Dragon may eventually need capabilities that version 1.0 does not.

What we can control is our side of that boundary. We can avoid collecting information merely because it might someday be interesting, explain why something is needed before we add it, and design new systems around the smallest amount of information required to accomplish the job. That is the standard Archive Nine intends to follow with Book Dragon.

Changes to this policy

Book Dragon will change, and its privacy practices may eventually change with it. If we add new Archive Nine analytics, enable bibliographic contributions to the Archive Nine book-information system, add outside services, or introduce another feature that changes what information leaves your device or what Archive Nine receives, this policy will be updated to describe that change. The effective date at the top of this page will change when the policy changes, and Archive Nine will also keep Book Dragon's App Store privacy disclosures consistent with the app's actual data practices.

Contact

Questions about Book Dragon privacy can be sent through the Book Dragon support page. Book Dragon is currently developed and provided by Brandon Yaniz under the Archive Nine name. If Archive Nine later becomes operated by Archive Nine Publishing LLC or another legal entity, this page will be updated to identify the responsible provider.