What is AppoBot

AppoBot is the program Appo uses to read a website when someone names it to create an app.

What is read, and when

A read starts when someone enters a site address to create an app with Appo, or when the address of an existing app is checked. AppoBot opens the home page at that address and, where robots.txt allows it, up to 4 other pages of the same site. Its user agent contains AppoBot/1.0 and the address of this page.

Limits

• Only ports 80 and 443 are used.
• At most 5 redirects are followed.
• Each page is limited to 2 MB. Pages are requested one at a time, with a pause between requests.
• A stored result is reused for up to 15 minutes, so repeated requests for one address do not all reach the site.
• AppoBot does not sign in, submit forms or work around bot protection. If a site refuses the read, the read ends there.
• Some sites build their pages in the visitor's browser. For those sites AppoBot opens the page in a browser session run for Appo by a rendering provider, with the same user agent, and reads what the browser shows. What a browser session reads is subject to the same limits, and no page is stored in full.
• Technical facts of the read are kept (HTTP status, redirects, certificate, timing), together with the site's name, icon and theme colour and its links to other pages of the same site. Short quoted fragments of a page, of at most 160 characters, and the addresses of insecure resources, without query, are kept as evidence of a finding, together with counts and measures, for 90 days. Pages are not stored in full.
• When a person names a site in order to create an app, the visible text of its home page, with e-mail addresses, telephone numbers, Italian tax identifiers (codice fiscale and partita IVA) and, where recognised, personal names and postal addresses masked, and cut to 8,000 characters, may be sent to a language-model provider so that the site can be described. The provider does not use it to train its models by default, and deletes it within 30 days.

robots.txt

The token for linked pages is AppoBot. The group for AppoBot, or else the group for all robots, applies to the other pages of a site:

User-agent: AppoBot
Disallow: /private/

The home page at the address entered is always read, because the person creating the app asked for it.

Privacy

The controller of this processing is Ferrario Alberto Giancarlo, Via Paolo Borsellino 28, 47832 San Clemente (RN), Italy, VAT IT04656260405. The purpose is to verify that a site named for an app works before the app is built on it. The legal basis is the controller's legitimate interest (Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR). The content of a site can incidentally contain personal data, such as a name or an address; in the fragments and in the title that are kept, e-mail addresses, telephone numbers, Italian tax identifiers (codice fiscale and partita IVA) and, where recognised, personal names and postal addresses are masked. Fragments and the addresses of insecure resources are deleted 90 days after the read. You can object to this processing, ask for a host to be excluded or for kept text to be removed by writing to the address below, and lodge a complaint with the Garante per la protezione dei dati personali. The privacy policy of the Appo service applies to its users and is linked from the service.

Contact

To ask a question, to have a host excluded from reads, or to request the removal of kept text, write to the address below and name the host.

[email protected]