Privacy policy

Effective October 15, 2026

Kanamichi is a Japanese learning app for iPhone and iPad (iOS), Android and the web. It is made by Kanamichi, LLC, 45980 Center Oak Plaza, Ste 155, Sterling, VA 20166, USA (“Kanamichi”, “we”), which is responsible for your information. Questions about this policy go to support@kanamichi.org.

What we collect and why

Your account

Every learner has an account, on the free plan too. We store your email address and a password hash (never the password itself). We use the email to sign you in, to sync your progress between devices, and to send account emails such as sign-up confirmations and password resets. We do not send marketing email.

Your name (optional)

If you tell the app your first name, it works out how your name is written in Japanese katakana so the passages and Sensei can use it. We store the name and its kana spelling with your account. If the name is not in the app’s own list, it is sent to Anthropic’s AI service to find the spelling. You can change it, or go back to the default traveler, in Settings.

Learning progress and settings

Your progress is saved to your account so it is never lost and follows you between devices: lessons finished, passages read and their scores, vocabulary and review schedule, words you added yourself, streaks, spirits and their names, quests, and your settings. If you choose real weather for your spirit’s scene, the city you typed and its approximate coordinates (rounded to about 10 km) are saved with your settings too.

Subscription status

If you subscribe, we store which plan you have, when it renews or ends, and whether it was bought on the web, in Google Play or in the App Store. On the web we also store your Stripe customer and subscription IDs and the country you chose at checkout. Payments are handled by Stripe (web), Google Play (Android) and Apple through the App Store (iPhone and iPad, using Apple In-App Purchase); for the two app stores, RevenueCat tells us the subscription status. Kanamichi never sees or stores your card number or other payment details.

Voice recordings

When you press a microphone button, the app records what you say so it can be turned into text and graded. Depending on the feature, the recording goes to:

• Microsoft Azure Speech, to recognize your Japanese and score your pronunciation in passages and conversations;
• OpenAI, to transcribe what you said in a conversation with Sensei;
• our kana grader, a speech model we run on Modal, which checks each kana of the line you were asked to say;
• or, on the free plan or if you choose it, your device’s own speech recognizer (provided by your browser or phone maker, for example Google or Apple, under their own terms).

Recordings are processed in memory to produce the result and are not stored by Kanamichi. Our providers process them under their own API terms, which may allow short-term retention for abuse monitoring. You can always type instead of speaking.

Conversations with Sensei

In Sensei and the station conversations, each turn sends the text of what you said or typed, the last few lines of the conversation, the scene’s script, a list of words you know, and your first name and its kana (if you gave them) to an AI service (OpenAI, or Anthropic’s Claude) to produce the reply. We do not keep the content of your conversations. Our server logs record only numbers and flags for each turn (timings, scores, error codes), never what you said. We record what each turn costs, to apply the plan’s monthly allowance.

The one exception is when you flag a reply with the ⚑ Report button: we then store the AI reply you reported, your previous line (for context), the reason you picked, any note you wrote, and the app version, so we can review it.

Teacher voice

Sensei’s lines are spoken by an Azure neural voice. To avoid paying to synthesize the same sentence twice, the audio of each line is cached on our storage, filed under a code computed from the sentence text. A line may contain your first name if Sensei addressed you by it, so we record which account each cached line was made or played for, together with the line’s text (so we can tell which lines contain your name). When you delete your account, voice lines that contain your name and that only you have used are deleted; other cached lines are not personal and stay.

Feedback

If you send feedback from Settings → More, we store your message, the kind you picked (bug, idea…), the app version, your level in the app, and your browser or app version (the “user agent”), linked to your account so we can reply. If you are offline it waits on your device until it can be sent.

Sign-up check (captcha)

The sign-in and create-account forms use Cloudflare Turnstile to keep bots out. Turnstile runs a check in your browser and may collect signals about your device and browser (and set a cookie or similar storage) for that purpose only, under Cloudflare’s privacy policy. It is not used for advertising.

Stored on your device

The app keeps a copy of your progress and settings in your browser’s local storage, or in the iOS or Android app’s own storage, so it works offline. It also keeps your sign-in session, a copy of your plan so a paid plan works offline, and any feedback or reports waiting to be sent. Signing out leaves your progress on the device; deleting your account removes it.

Technical logs

Our hosting providers keep ordinary request logs (time, IP address, request type, errors) for a limited period, to keep the service running and to investigate faults and abuse. Our own server functions log account IDs, plan changes and error codes, not the content of what you say, type or record.

Who receives your information

We use the following service providers. Each processes data on our behalf, only to provide its part of the service, under its own privacy terms:

• Supabase — accounts and sign-in, the database that holds your progress, our server functions, and the teacher-voice cache.
• Resend — sends account emails (sign-up confirmation, password reset) on Supabase’s behalf.
• Cloudflare — hosts this website and the web app, and runs the Turnstile sign-up check.
• Microsoft Azure Speech — speech recognition and pronunciation scoring of recordings; the teacher and character voices.
• OpenAI — transcribing Sensei recordings; writing Sensei’s replies from the conversation text and your first name.
• Anthropic — the katakana spelling of your first name; station conversations, and Sensei’s replies when we run Sensei on Claude.
• Modal — hosts our kana grader, which receives recordings for per-kana grading.
• Stripe — web subscriptions and payments. In the US Kanamichi is the seller; elsewhere Stripe is the merchant of record (Stripe Managed Payments) and receives your billing details as the seller. Stripe receives your email and an account ID to link the payment to your account.
• Google Play — subscriptions bought in the Android app. Google handles the payment under its own terms.
• Apple (App Store) — subscriptions and purchases made in the iPhone and iPad app, through Apple In-App Purchase. Apple handles the payment under its own terms, and the subscription is tied to your Apple ID.
• RevenueCat — for purchases in the Android and iOS apps, receives the purchase receipt from Google Play or the App Store and an anonymous account ID (not your email), and tells us which plan is active.
• Google Fonts — the app loads its typefaces from Google, which receives your IP address with the request.
• Open-Meteo — only if you turn on real weather: the city name you typed, then its coordinates, to look up the current sky. The app never reads your device’s location.

We may also disclose information if the law requires it, to protect people’s safety, or to a successor if Kanamichi, LLC is ever sold or merged (in which case this policy keeps applying to your data).

What we do not do

We do not show advertising, use advertising or analytics trackers, track you across other apps or websites, or sell, rent or “share” (in the advertising sense) your personal information. We do not use your voice, conversations or progress to train AI models, and our AI providers’ API terms do not allow them to train on it either.

How long we keep it

• Account, name, progress, settings and plan status — until you delete your account.
• Recordings and conversation text — not kept by us; processed only while the reply or grade is produced.
• Reports and feedback — until we have reviewed and dealt with them, and in any case deleted with your account.
• Usage records (what each AI Speech activity cost, per day and month) — until you delete your account.
• Cached teacher voice lines — voice lines that contain your name and that only you have used are deleted with your account; other cached lines are not personal and stay. The record of which lines you played (and their text) goes with your account.
• Billing records — Stripe, Google Play, Apple and RevenueCat keep transaction records for as long as tax and accounting law requires, even after you delete your account. We keep the IDs of payment events we received, without your name or email, for the same reason.
• Technical logs — for the limited period our hosting providers keep them.

Deleting your account

In the app: open Settings → General → Account, open “Reset progress · delete my account”, type DELETE in the box and tap Delete account. It takes effect at once.

Without the app: email support@kanamichi.org from the address you signed up with and ask us to delete your account. We will do it, and confirm, within 30 days.

Deleting removes your account and email, name and kana, all synced progress and settings, your plan record, usage counters, and any reports and feedback you sent. An active web subscription is canceled as part of deleting. A Google Play subscription is not: cancel it in Google Play → Subscriptions, or it keeps renewing. An App Store subscription is not canceled either: it keeps billing until you cancel it in the Settings app → your name → Subscriptions, and it stays with your Apple ID after your Kanamichi account is deleted. Billing records kept by Stripe, Google, Apple and RevenueCat stay as the law requires. More detail is on the Delete your Kanamichi account page.

Your choices and rights

You can use the keyboard instead of the microphone, leave your name out, keep the weather random, and cancel a subscription at any time. You can ask us for a copy of your data (we send it in a common machine-readable format), to correct it, or to delete it: email support@kanamichi.org from your account’s address. We answer within 30 days and do not charge for it.

EU and UK. We process your data to provide the service you signed up for (contract), to keep it secure and fix faults (legitimate interests), and, for optional features such as the weather, because you turned them on (consent, which you can withdraw in Settings). You may also object to processing, restrict it, and complain to your local data protection authority. Our providers are mostly in the United States; transfers rely on their standard contractual clauses or equivalent safeguards.

California and other US states. You have the right to know, correct and delete the personal information we hold, and not to be treated differently for using these rights. We do not sell or share personal information for cross-context behavioral advertising.

Children

Kanamichi is not directed at children under 13, and you must be at least 13 to create an account. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 13. If you believe a child under 13 has created an account, email us and we will delete it.

Security

All traffic between the app, our servers and our providers is encrypted (HTTPS). The database enforces row-level security, so a signed-in account can read only its own rows; plan status and usage counters can be changed only by our server. API keys for our providers live on the server, never in the app. No system is perfectly secure; if a breach affects your data we will tell you as the law requires.

Changes to this policy

If we change this policy in a way that matters, we will say so in the app and update the date above before the change takes effect.

Contact

Kanamichi, LLC · 45980 Center Oak Plaza, Ste 155, Sterling, VA 20166, USA · support@kanamichi.org