Privacy Policy

Nihongo Circle is a free Japanese-study website operated by an individual. For privacy questions, email techspacewizard@gmail.com. For this data, we act as the data controller; the providers listed below act as our processors.

• Account information — handled by our authentication provider, Clerk: your email address, name, profile image, and any social-login identifiers you choose to connect.
• Profile — a public handle, display name, optional bio, and avatar.
• Learning data — your review schedule and history, challenge scores, daily activity and XP, streaks, badges, quests, and study preferences (such as your target exam date and chosen JLPT level).
• Preferences — theme, skin, audio voice and speed, and similar settings, stored in your browser’s local storage and/or your account.
• Content you submit — bug reports, suggestions, and friend requests.
• Audio text — when audio is generated, the Japanese text to be spoken is sent to our text-to-speech provider (Microsoft Azure) and the resulting audio file is cached. We don’t send your personal information for this.
• Technical & usage data — standard server logs (including IP address and browser/device info, processed by our hosting providers) and aggregate, page-level analytics. We also keep a per-account daily count of audio generations to prevent abuse.

• Provide the Service and your account, and schedule your reviews.
• Show your progress, streaks, badges, and — if you take part — leaderboards.
• Generate and cache pronunciation audio.
• Respond to your reports and improve the Service.
• Keep the Service secure, prevent abuse, and enforce rate limits.

We rely on your consent and our legitimate interest in running the Service, and on performing our agreement with you (these are the legal bases where laws such as the GDPR apply).

We don’t sell your personal data. We share it only with service providers who process it on our behalf to run the Service:

• Clerk — authentication and account management.
• Supabase — database and storage for your account and learning data.
• Vercel — application hosting and aggregate, privacy-friendly analytics.
• Microsoft Azure — text-to-speech generation.
• Cloudflare R2 — storage of generated audio files.

We may also disclose data if required by law or to protect the Service’s and users’ rights and safety.

Your handle, profile, and progress can appear on your public profile page and on leaderboards. You can hide yourself from the global leaderboard in Settings. Friend connections are visible to the people involved.

We use cookies that are necessary to keep you signed in (set by Clerk) and your browser’s local storage to remember preferences like theme and audio settings. We don’t use advertising or cross-site tracking cookies.

We keep your account and learning data for as long as your account is active. If you delete your account, we delete the associated data, except where we need to keep limited records to comply with law or resolve disputes. Cached audio is keyed to the text spoken, not to you.

Depending on where you live, you may have the right to access, correct, export, or delete your personal data, and to object to or restrict certain processing. You can edit much of your profile and preferences in-app, and you can request the rest by emailing techspacewizard@gmail.com.

The Service isn’t directed to children under 13, and we don’t knowingly collect their data. If you believe a child has given us personal data, contact us and we’ll remove it.

Our providers may process data in countries other than yours, including the United States. Where required, we rely on appropriate safeguards for those transfers.

We take reasonable measures to protect your data — see our Security Policy. If we change this policy, we’ll update the “Last updated” date above and note material changes in-app where practical.