Privacy Policy

Ascrivia (“we”, “us”) is a writing studio and community at ascrivia.com, run by an independent developer. We are responsible for the personal information described here. You can reach us about anything in this policy at hello@ascrivia.com.

This policy covers ascrivia.com. It should be read with our Terms of Service and Cookie Policy.

What you give us

• Account details: your email address and password. Your password is stored only in a scrambled (hashed) form by our sign-in provider. We never see it.
• Profile: your pen name, handle, and anything else you choose to add, such as pronouns, a bio, genres, links, favorite books and lines, an avatar, a banner and moodboard images.
• Your writing: projects, chapters, notes, plans, covers, and the settings and goals you keep with them.
• What you do in the community: posts, threads, comments, critiques, votes, saved items, friend requests, blocks, group memberships, challenges, event replies, messages to group moderators or Ascrivia’s team, and reports you make.
• Reading preferences: the genres you like to read, which help Discover suggest books. Only you see them.

What Ascrivia records as you use it

• Writing activity: word counts, the days and sittings you wrote, and how much was typed rather than pasted. This powers your goals, streaks and keepsakes. It never includes the text itself.
• Reading activity: when a friend shares a manuscript with you, how far you’ve read and what you react to. The writer can see this, and Ascrivia tells you so the first time you open it.
• Live co-writing: while you write together, your co-writers see that you’re in the project and where your cursor is.
• Moderation records: reports about you or your content, decisions moderators make, notes they keep, and any suspension.
• Technical information: like nearly every website, the services that run Ascrivia record your IP address, browser and device type, and the time of each request, to deliver pages, keep you signed in, and protect against abuse. Sign-in records include when and from where you signed in.

What we don’t collect

We don’t use advertising, analytics or tracking tools, and we don’t buy information about you from anyone. We don’t ask for your real name, birthday, address or payment details.

• to run Ascrivia: save your work, sync it between your devices, and show it to the people you choose;
• to create and secure your account, and send the emails it needs, such as confirming your address or resetting your password;
• to run the community: friends, groups, posts, critiques, challenges, keepsakes and Discover;
• to keep people safe: deal with reports, enforce the Terms and group rules, and stop spam and abuse;
• to fix problems and improve Ascrivia; and
• to follow the law and respond to valid legal requests.

We never sell your information, never show you ads, and never use your writing to train AI models or let anyone else do so.

We don’t read your private writing. The only times someone running Ascrivia may look at it are when you ask us to help with a problem in it, when something has been reported to us and we need to check it, or when the law requires us to. We look at as little as we can.

• Your writing is private until you share it. Friends you share a manuscript with can read it. Co-writers you invite can read and change it. A book or excerpt you publish can be read by anyone.
• Your profile is public unless you make it friends-only, in which case everyone else sees just your pen name and avatar. You choose whether to show your writing stats.
• Posts and comments can be seen by whoever can see the group they’re in. Public groups can be read by anyone.
• Group moderators can see reports, held posts, and messages sent to their group’s moderators. They never see your email address.
• Ascrivia’s team can see what’s needed to moderate the site, such as reports and messages sent to the team.
• Other writers never see your email address.

We use a small number of companies to run Ascrivia. They handle your information only on our behalf and under contracts that protect it:

• Supabase stores your account, writing and community data, signs you in, and sends account emails.
• Cloudflare hosts the site, delivers it quickly and safely, protects it from attacks, and runs the rooms for live co-writing.

The “Support the project” link goes to Buy Me a Coffee. If you use it, what you share there is covered by their privacy policy, not ours. We don’t load anything from them on our pages.

We may also share information when the law requires it, to protect someone’s safety, to defend our legal rights, or as part of handing Ascrivia to a new owner, who would have to honor this policy.

Our providers store and process information in the United States and other countries, which may have different data protection laws from where you live. When information from the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom or Switzerland is transferred, our providers rely on recognized safeguards such as the European Commission’s Standard Contractual Clauses.

We keep your information for as long as you have an account. When you delete something, such as a project, post or image, it’s removed from Ascrivia. When you ask us to delete your account, we delete your account and content within 30 days.

Some things last a little longer:

• copies in backups, until the backups are overwritten in the normal course of things;
• server and security logs, which our providers keep for a limited time;
• records we need to deal with abuse, such as why an account was banned, for as long as they’re needed to keep people safe; and
• anything we must keep by law, or to settle a dispute.

You can do much of this yourself in Ascrivia:

• edit your profile, make it friends-only, or hide your writing stats;
• download any project as a backup;
• delete projects, posts and images, and unpublish books; and
• block people, leave groups, and stop sharing with anyone at any time.

Wherever you live, you can also email hello@ascrivia.com to ask for a copy of your information, to correct it, to delete your account, or to object to how we use it. Write from the email address on your account so we know it’s you. We’ll answer within 30 days. We won’t treat you differently for asking.

If you’re in the EEA, the UK or Switzerland: we use your information to provide the service you asked for (our contract with you), for our legitimate interests in keeping Ascrivia safe and working, to meet legal obligations, and, where we ask for it, with your consent, which you can withdraw. You also have the right to restrict our use of your information, to receive it in a portable format, and to complain to your local data protection authority.

If you’re in California or another US state with a privacy law: you have the right to know what we collect, to delete it, to correct it, and to opt out of its sale or sharing for advertising. We don’t sell or share personal information in that sense, and we don’t use sensitive information to infer things about you.

Ascrivia isn’t for children under 13, and we don’t knowingly collect information from them. If you believe a child under 13 has made an account, email hello@ascrivia.com and we’ll delete it. Writers aged 13 to 17 need a parent or guardian’s permission to use Ascrivia, and can’t join groups marked mature.

Everything travels between your browser and Ascrivia over an encrypted connection. Access to our systems is limited to the people who run Ascrivia, and passwords are stored only in hashed form. No system is perfectly secure, so please use a strong password you don’t use anywhere else. If a breach affects your information, we’ll tell you as the law requires.

If we change this policy in a way that matters, we’ll tell you in the app or by email before the change takes effect. The date at the top shows the latest version.