Privacy policy

MangaDen (mangaden.com) is an independent, non-commercial website. It carries no advertising and is kept going by voluntary donations. For anything on this page, write to copyright@mangaden.com with “Privacy” in the subject. The same inbox handles copyright notices, so it is read and answered.

• Your account

  Your email address, your username and the date you joined. Your password is stored by our sign-in provider as a one-way hash: nobody at MangaDen can see it.

• Your profile, if you fill it in

  A display name, a short bio, a picture, a banner and links to your pages elsewhere. All optional.

• What you post

  Chapters and series you upload, with the rights information you give; comments; ratings; reactions to chapters; reading lists; reports and appeals; messages to groups; groups you start or join.

• Your library

  The series you follow and their reading status, and the groups you follow. If you bring a list from another site, only the series you choose are added: a MyAnimeList or Mihon file is read in your browser and never uploaded, and for AniList your browser asks AniList itself for your public list. We keep neither the file nor the username. Under a series, “Readers also like it” may draw on which series readers here keep together — counted only where at least three readers share a pair, and never naming anyone.

• Reading lists

  Lists you make: their title, description, the series in them, your notes and who can see each one (public, unlisted or private), and the lists you like. A public list is shown on your profile and in Lists; an unlisted one to anyone with its link; a private one only to you. Others see how many people liked a list, never who.

• Notifications, if you turn them on

  For each device where you turn on new-chapter notifications: the address your browser’s notification service gave it, the keys that notices to it are locked with, a name such as “Chrome on Android”, its time zone and its quiet hours (so nothing rings at night where you are). Which series ring is the bell on each one in your library.

• Reader counts

  When you read a series for 30 seconds, or open a series we list from its publisher’s site on that site, it counts toward the home page’s weekly chart. Signed in, we note the time of that visit (the latest one only). Without an account, we keep only a one-way code made from your IP address and browser with a secret that is replaced every day and then deleted, so it cannot be turned back into your address or followed from one day to the next; the codes are deleted after 8 days. Only totals are ever shown.

• Technical data

  When you load a page, our hosting providers see your IP address and browser, and keep short-lived logs to keep the site working and secure.

• Emails you send us

  What you write to us, and your address, so that we can answer.

• A check on new passwords

  When you choose a password, we check it against passwords known from data breaches (Have I Been Pwned). Only the first five characters of a scrambled form of it are sent, never the password.

We do not collect your real name, your address, your phone number or payment details. Donations go through Ko-fi, not through us.

Messages you send to a group are read by that group’s members. Our moderators see reports, uploads waiting for review and their own decisions; the tools they use never show your email address.

• To run your account and the features you use — signing in, your profile, uploads, comments, ratings, your library, groups and the Updates feed. This is the service you signed up for.
• To keep MangaDen safe and working — moderation, stopping abuse and spam, security logs and backups. These are our legitimate interests, and we keep them to what is needed.
• To meet legal duties — answering copyright notices and the requests the law requires us to answer.

We email you only about your account: confirming your address, password resets, and notices about your uploads, reports and appeals. No newsletters, no marketing. We never sell your data or use it for advertising. If you turn on notifications, they tell you about new chapters of the series in your library, and nothing else.

• Cookies

  One set keeps you signed in. While you confirm a new account, another holds the address you signed up with, for half an hour. Both are needed for the site to work.

• Your browser’s storage

  Your theme, reader settings, where you stopped reading, upload drafts (pages included), a copy of your own name and picture for the menu (removed when you sign out), and small notes such as messages you dismissed and your last visit to Updates. They stay on your device.

Nothing is used to track you or to show you adverts, which is why MangaDen has no cookie banner. Clearing your browser’s data for mangaden.com removes all of it (and signs you out).

On a series read on its publisher’s own site, the page also looks at your browser’s language settings and time zone, to open that site in your language and say whether it works in your country. That happens in your browser: neither is sent to us or kept.

A few companies do the work a small site cannot do alone. Each handles your data only to provide its service to us.

• Vercel Hosts the website.
• Supabase Our database and sign-in.
• Cloudflare Stores and delivers images, runs our domain, forwards our email.
• Resend Sends our emails.
• GitHub Keeps private backup copies of the database and the images.
• Google Hosts the inbox where email to us arrives.
• Have I Been Pwned The breached-password check, as described above.
• Notification services Only if you turn notifications on, your browser's own: Google (Chrome), Mozilla (Firefox), Apple (Safari) or Microsoft (Edge) carries each notice to your device, locked so that only your device can read it.
• Ko-fi Only if you donate: Ko-fi's own privacy policy applies there.

Some of them are based in the United States. Where your data leaves the EU, it is protected by the safeguards in their data-processing terms, such as the EU’s Standard Contractual Clauses.

• Your account — for as long as you have it.
• When you close it — after a 30-day wait (in case you change your mind), your name, picture, profile, library, reading lists, ratings, reactions and reader counts are deleted. Public chapters, comments and moderation records stay, with your account removed from them; credits to creators and groups remain.
• Backups — daily copies of the database are kept for 30 days; a weekly copy of the images is kept for six days.
• Visitor codes for reader counts — 8 days; the daily secret behind them, one day.
• A device with notifications on — until you turn them off, sign out on it, or its browser tells us it no longer takes them. The list of chapters already announced, 30 days.
• Technical logs — kept by our providers for a short time.
• Emails to us — for as long as they are needed to deal with what they are about.

Wherever you live, you can ask us to:

• Show you what we hold about you, and give you a copy
• Correct it — most of it you can change yourself in Edit profile and Settings
• Delete it — close your account in Settings, or ask us
• Stop or limit a use of it you object to

Write to copyright@mangaden.com. We answer within a month. If you think we have handled your data wrongly, you can also complain to the data protection authority where you live.

You need to be at least 12 to make an account on MangaDen. If you are under 16, ask a parent or guardian first. If you think a child under 12 has given us personal data, write to us and we will delete it.

When the way MangaDen handles data changes, this page changes with it and the date at the top moves. If a change matters to you, we will say so on the site before it takes effect.