This Privacy Notice for JapaneseVocab ('we', 'us', or 'our') describes how and why we might access, collect, store, use, and/or share ('process') your personal information when you use our services ('Services'), including when you:
- Visit our website at www.japanesevocab.com or any website of ours that links to this Privacy Notice.
- Use JapaneseVocab, our online Japanese vocabulary learning platform that uses spaced repetition (SRS) to help users memorise vocabulary across JLPT levels N5 through N1.
- Engage with us in other related ways, including any marketing or events.
Reading this Privacy Notice will help you understand your privacy rights and choices. If you do not agree with our policies and practices, please do not use our Services. If you still have any questions or concerns, please contact us.
Summary of key points
This summary highlights the key points from our Privacy Notice. You can find more detail on any topic by clicking the link following each point or by using the table of contents below.
What personal information do we process? When you visit, use, or navigate our Services, we may process personal information depending on how you interact with us, the choices you make, and the features you use. Learn more about what information we collect.
Do we process any sensitive personal information? No. We do not process sensitive personal information such as racial or ethnic origins, sexual orientation, or religious beliefs.
Do we collect any information from third parties? No. We do not collect any information from third parties.
How do we process your information? We process your information to provide, improve, and administer our Services, communicate with you, for security and fraud prevention, and to comply with the law. Learn more about how we process your information.
With whom do we share personal information? We share information only in specific situations and with specific categories of third parties. Learn more about when and with whom we share your personal information.
How do we keep your information safe? We have organisational and technical measures in place to protect your personal information. However, no system is 100% secure, so we cannot guarantee that unauthorised parties will never defeat our security. Learn more about how we keep your information safe.
What are your rights? Depending on where you live, applicable privacy law may give you certain rights regarding your personal information. Learn more about your privacy rights.
How do you exercise your rights? The easiest way is to contact us. We will consider and act upon any request in accordance with applicable data protection laws.
Table of contents
- What information do we collect?
- How do we process your information?
- What legal bases do we rely on?
- When and with whom do we share information?
- Do we use cookies and tracking technologies?
- Is your information transferred internationally?
- How long do we keep your information?
- How do we keep your information safe?
- Do we collect information from minors?
- What are your privacy rights?
- Controls for Do-Not-Track features
- Do US residents have specific privacy rights?
- Do we make updates to this notice?
- How can you contact us about this notice?
- How can you review, update, or delete your data?
1. What information do we collect?
Personal information you disclose to us
We collect personal information that you voluntarily provide to us when you register on the Services, express an interest in obtaining information about us or our products and Services, participate in activities on the Services, or otherwise contact us.
Personal information provided by you. The information we collect depends on the context of your interactions with us, the choices you make, and the features you use. It may include:
- Email addresses
- Usernames
- Passwords
Sensitive information. We do not process sensitive information.
Payment data. If you choose to make purchases, we may collect data necessary to process your payment, such as your payment instrument number and security code. All payment data is handled and stored by Stripe. You can find their privacy notice at stripe.com/privacy.
All personal information that you provide to us must be true, complete, and accurate, and you must notify us of any changes.
Information automatically collected
We automatically collect certain information when you visit, use, or navigate the Services. This information does not reveal your specific identity but may include device and usage information, such as your IP address, browser and device characteristics, operating system, language preferences, referring URLs, device name, country, location, information about how and when you use our Services, and other technical information. This information is primarily needed to maintain the security and operation of our Services and for our internal analytics and reporting purposes.
Like many businesses, we also collect information through cookies and similar technologies. The information we collect includes:
- Log and usage data. Service-related, diagnostic, usage, and performance information our servers automatically collect when you access or use our Services. This may include your IP address, device information, browser type and settings, information about your activity in the Services (such as date/time stamps, pages and files viewed, searches, and other actions you take), and device event information (such as system activity, error reports, and hardware settings).
- Device data. Information about the computer, mobile device, tablet, or other device you use to access the Services. This may include your IP address (or proxy server), device and application identification numbers, location, browser type, hardware model, Internet service provider and/or mobile carrier, operating system, and system configuration information.
2. How do we process your information?
We process your personal information for a variety of reasons, including:
- To facilitate account creation and authentication and otherwise manage user accounts. So you can create and log in to your account, and to keep your account in working order.
- To deliver and facilitate delivery of services to the user. To provide you with the requested service.
- To respond to user inquiries and offer support. To respond to your inquiries and resolve any issues you might have.
- To send administrative information. Details about our products and services, changes to our terms and policies, and similar information.
- To fulfil and manage your orders. Including payments, returns, and exchanges made through the Services.
- To protect our Services. Including fraud monitoring and prevention.
- To identify usage trends. So we can better understand how our Services are being used and improve them.
- To save or protect an individual's vital interest. Such as to prevent harm.
3. What legal bases do we rely on to process your information?
If you are located in the EU or UK
The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and UK GDPR require us to explain the valid legal bases we rely on to process your personal information. We may rely on the following:
- Consent. We may process your information if you have given us permission to use your personal information for a specific purpose. You can withdraw your consent at any time.
- Performance of a contract. When necessary to fulfil our contractual obligations to you, including providing our Services.
- Legitimate interests. When reasonably necessary to achieve our legitimate business interests, provided those interests do not outweigh your rights. For example, we may process your personal information to:
- Analyse how our Services are used so we can improve them.
- Diagnose problems and prevent fraudulent activities.
- Legal obligations. When necessary for compliance with our legal obligations, such as cooperating with law enforcement, exercising or defending legal rights, or disclosing information as evidence in litigation.
- Vital interests. When necessary to protect your vital interests or those of another person — for example in situations involving potential threats to safety.
If you are located in Canada
We may process your information if you have given us specific permission (express consent) or in situations where your permission can be inferred (implied consent). You can withdraw your consent at any time.
In some exceptional cases, we may be legally permitted under applicable law to process your information without your consent, including:
- If collection is clearly in the interests of an individual and consent cannot be obtained in a timely way.
- For investigations and fraud detection and prevention.
- For business transactions, provided certain conditions are met.
- If contained in a witness statement and collection is necessary to assess, process, or settle an insurance claim.
- For identifying injured, ill, or deceased persons and communicating with next of kin.
- If we have reasonable grounds to believe an individual has been or may be a victim of financial abuse.
- If it is reasonable to expect that collection and use with consent would compromise the availability or accuracy of the information, and the collection is reasonable for purposes related to investigating a breach of an agreement or contravention of the laws of Canada or a province.
- If disclosure is required to comply with a subpoena, warrant, court order, or rules of court relating to the production of records.
- If produced by an individual in the course of their employment, business, or profession, and collection is consistent with the purposes for which the information was produced.
- If the collection is solely for journalistic, artistic, or literary purposes.
- If the information is publicly available and is specified by the regulations.
- To disclose de-identified information for approved research or statistics projects, subject to ethics oversight and confidentiality commitments.
4. When and with whom do we share your personal information?
Vendors, consultants, and other third-party service providers. We may share your data with third-party vendors, service providers, contractors, or agents ('third parties') who perform services for us or on our behalf and require access to such information to do that work. We have contracts in place with these third parties that are designed to safeguard your personal information. They cannot do anything with your personal information unless we have instructed them to, and they cannot share it with any other organisation.
The categories of third parties we may share personal information with are:
- Cloud computing services
- Data analytics services
- Data storage service providers
- Payment processors
- User account registration and authentication services
- Website hosting service providers
We also may need to share your personal information in the following situations:
- Business transfers. We may share or transfer your information in connection with, or during negotiations of, any merger, sale of company assets, financing, or acquisition of all or a portion of our business to another company.
5. Do we use cookies and other tracking technologies?
We use a small number of strictly necessary cookies that are essential for our Services to function. These cookies keep you signed in to your account, keep your session secure, and facilitate payment through our payment processor. Without these cookies, our Services cannot operate.
We do not use third-party advertising cookies, retargeting pixels, social media tracking pixels, or behavioural advertising technologies. We do not allow third parties to track your activity on our Services for advertising purposes.
For analytics, we use a privacy-respecting analytics provider that does not use cookies or collect personal information. The analytics data we receive is aggregated and does not identify individual users.
Most web browsers are set to accept cookies by default. You can usually choose to set your browser to remove or reject cookies. If you reject our strictly necessary cookies, this will affect core features of our Services, including your ability to log in.
6. Is your information transferred internationally?
Our servers are located in Germany and the United States. Regardless of your location, your information may be transferred to, stored by, and processed by us in our facilities and in the facilities of the third parties with whom we may share your personal information, including facilities in Germany, the United States, and other countries.
If you are a resident in the European Economic Area (EEA), United Kingdom (UK), or Switzerland, these countries may not have data protection laws as comprehensive as those in your country. However, we will take all necessary measures to protect your personal information in accordance with this Privacy Notice and applicable law.
European Commission's Standard Contractual Clauses. We have implemented measures to protect your personal information, including by using the European Commission's Standard Contractual Clauses for transfers between us and our third-party providers. These clauses require all recipients to protect personal information originating from the EEA or UK in accordance with European data protection laws. Our Standard Contractual Clauses can be provided upon request.
7. How long do we keep your information?
We will only keep your personal information for as long as it is necessary for the purposes set out in this Privacy Notice, unless a longer retention period is required or permitted by law (such as tax, accounting, or other legal requirements). No purpose in this notice will require us to keep your personal information for longer than the period during which you have an account with us.
When we have no ongoing legitimate business need to process your personal information, we will either delete or anonymise it. If this is not possible (for example, because your personal information has been stored in backup archives), then we will securely store your information and isolate it from any further processing until deletion is possible.
8. How do we keep your information safe?
We have implemented appropriate and reasonable technical and organisational security measures designed to protect any personal information we process. However, despite our safeguards, no electronic transmission over the Internet or information storage technology can be guaranteed to be 100% secure, so we cannot promise that unauthorised parties will never defeat our security and improperly access, steal, or modify your information. Although we will do our best to protect your personal information, transmission of personal information to and from our Services is at your own risk. You should only access the Services within a secure environment.
9. Do we collect information from minors?
We do not knowingly collect, solicit data from, or market to children under 13 years of age, or the equivalent age as specified by law in your jurisdiction, nor do we knowingly sell such personal information. By using the Services, you represent that you are at least 13 (or the equivalent age in your jurisdiction), or that you are the parent or guardian of such a minor and consent to that minor's use of the Services. If we learn that personal information from users under 13 has been collected, we will deactivate the account and take reasonable measures to promptly delete the data from our records. If you become aware of any data we may have collected from children under 13, please contact us.
10. What are your privacy rights?
In some regions (such as the EEA, UK, Switzerland, and Canada), you have certain rights under applicable data protection laws. These may include the right to:
- Request access to and obtain a copy of your personal information.
- Request rectification or erasure.
- Restrict the processing of your personal information.
- Data portability, where applicable.
- Not be subject to automated decision-making.
If a decision that produces legal or similarly significant effects is made solely by automated means, we will inform you, explain the main factors, and offer a simple way to request human review. In certain circumstances, you may also have the right to object to the processing of your personal information. You can make any such request by contacting us.
If you are located in the EEA or UK and you believe we are unlawfully processing your personal information, you also have the right to complain to your Member State data protection authority or UK data protection authority.
If you are located in Switzerland, you may contact the Federal Data Protection and Information Commissioner.
Withdrawing your consent. If we are relying on your consent to process your personal information, you have the right to withdraw your consent at any time by contacting us. Please note that this will not affect the lawfulness of processing before its withdrawal, nor will it affect processing conducted in reliance on lawful grounds other than consent.
Account information
If you would like to review or change information in your account, or terminate your account, you can log in to your account settings and update your user account.
Upon your request to terminate your account, we will deactivate or delete your account and information from our active databases. We may retain some information in our files to prevent fraud, troubleshoot problems, assist with investigations, enforce our legal terms, or comply with applicable legal requirements.
Cookies and similar technologies. Most web browsers accept cookies by default. You can usually set your browser to remove or reject cookies. If you reject cookies, this could affect certain features of our Services.
If you have questions or comments about your privacy rights, please contact us.
11. Controls for Do-Not-Track features
Most web browsers and some mobile operating systems and applications include a Do-Not-Track ('DNT') feature you can activate to signal your preference not to have data about your online browsing activities monitored and collected. At this stage, no uniform technology standard for recognising and implementing DNT signals has been finalised. As such, we do not currently respond to DNT browser signals or any other mechanism that automatically communicates your choice not to be tracked online. If a standard for online tracking is adopted that we must follow in the future, we will inform you in a revised version of this Privacy Notice.
California law requires us to let you know how we respond to web browser DNT signals. Because there is currently no industry or legal standard for recognising or honouring DNT signals, we do not respond to them at this time.
12. Do United States residents have specific privacy rights?
Categories of personal information we collect
The table below shows the categories of personal information we have collected in the past twelve (12) months. The table includes illustrative examples of each category and does not necessarily reflect the personal information we collect from you. For a comprehensive inventory of all personal information we process, please refer to Section 1: What information do we collect?
| Category | Examples | Collected |
|---|---|---|
| A. Identifiers | Real name, alias, postal address, IP address, email address, account name | Yes |
| B. Personal information (California Customer Records statute) | Name, contact information, education, employment history, financial information | No |
| C. Protected classification characteristics | Gender, age, date of birth, race and ethnicity, national origin, marital status | No |
| D. Commercial information | Transaction information, purchase history, financial details, payment information | Yes |
| E. Biometric information | Fingerprints and voiceprints | No |
| F. Internet or similar network activity | Browsing history, search history, online behaviour, interest data, and interactions with our and other websites, applications, and systems | Yes |
| G. Geolocation data | Device location | No |
| H. Audio, electronic, sensory, or similar information | Images and audio or video recordings | No |
| I. Professional or employment-related information | Business contact details, job title, work history, professional qualifications | No |
| J. Education information | Student records and directory information | No |
| K. Inferences drawn from collected information | Profile or summary about an individual's preferences and characteristics | No |
| L. Sensitive personal information | — | No |
We may also collect other personal information outside of these categories through instances where you interact with us online in the context of:
- Receiving help through our customer support channels.
- Participation in customer surveys or contests.
- Facilitation in the delivery of our Services and to respond to your inquiries.
We will use and retain the collected personal information as needed to provide the Services, for as long as the user has an account with us (categories A, D, and F).
Sources of personal information
Learn more about the sources of personal information we collect in Section 1: What information do we collect?
How we use and share personal information
Learn more about how we use your personal information in Section 2: How do we process your information?
Will your information be shared with anyone else? We may disclose your personal information with our service providers pursuant to a written contract between us and each service provider. Learn more in Section 4: When and with whom do we share your personal information?
We may use your personal information for our own business purposes, such as undertaking internal research for technological development and demonstration. This is not considered to be 'selling' of your personal information.
We have not sold or shared any personal information to third parties for a business or commercial purpose in the preceding twelve (12) months. We have disclosed the following categories of personal information to third parties for a business or commercial purpose:
- Category A. Identifiers
- Category D. Commercial information
- Category F. Internet or other electronic network activity information
Your rights
You have rights under certain US state data protection laws. However, these rights are not absolute, and in certain cases, we may decline your request as permitted by law. These rights include:
- Right to know whether we are processing your personal data.
- Right to access your personal data.
- Right to correct inaccuracies in your personal data.
- Right to request the deletion of your personal data.
- Right to obtain a copy of the personal data you previously shared with us.
- Right to non-discrimination for exercising your rights.
- Right to opt out of the processing of your personal data if it is used for targeted advertising, the sale of personal data, or profiling in furtherance of decisions that produce legal or similarly significant effects.
Depending on the state where you live, you may also have the following rights:
- Right to access the categories of personal data being processed (Minnesota).
- Right to obtain a list of the categories of third parties to which we have disclosed personal data (California, Delaware, Maryland).
- Right to obtain a list of specific third parties to which we have disclosed personal data (Minnesota, Oregon).
- Right to obtain a list of third parties to which we have sold personal data (Connecticut).
- Right to review, understand, question, and (depending on where you live) correct how personal data has been profiled (Connecticut, Minnesota).
- Right to limit use and disclosure of sensitive personal data (California).
- Right to opt out of the collection of sensitive data and personal data collected through voice or facial recognition (Florida).
How to exercise your rights
To exercise these rights, please contact us or refer to the contact details at the bottom of this document.
Under certain US state data protection laws, you can designate an authorised agent to make a request on your behalf. We may deny a request from an authorised agent that does not submit proof that they have been validly authorised to act on your behalf in accordance with applicable laws.
Request verification
Upon receiving your request, we will need to verify your identity to determine you are the same person about whom we have information in our system. We will only use personal information provided in your request to verify your identity or authority to make the request. If we cannot verify your identity from the information already maintained by us, we may request additional information for the purposes of verifying your identity and for security or fraud-prevention purposes.
If you submit a request through an authorised agent, we may need to collect additional information to verify your identity, and the agent will need to provide written and signed permission from you to submit the request on your behalf.
Appeals
Under certain US state data protection laws, if we decline to take action on your request, you may appeal our decision by contacting us. We will inform you in writing of any action taken or not taken in response to the appeal, including a written explanation of the reasons for the decision. If your appeal is denied, you may submit a complaint to your state attorney general.
California 'Shine The Light' law
California Civil Code Section 1798.83, also known as the 'Shine The Light' law, permits our users who are California residents to request and obtain from us, once a year and free of charge, information about categories of personal information (if any) we disclosed to third parties for direct marketing purposes, and the names and addresses of all third parties with which we shared personal information in the immediately preceding calendar year. If you are a California resident and would like to make such a request, please submit your request in writing to us using the details in Section 14.
13. Do we make updates to this notice?
We may update this Privacy Notice from time to time. The updated version will be indicated by an updated 'Last updated' date at the top of this notice. If we make material changes, we may notify you either by prominently posting a notice or by sending you a direct notification. We encourage you to review this Privacy Notice frequently to stay informed of how we are protecting your information.
14. How can you contact us about this notice?
If you have questions or comments about this notice, the easiest way to reach us is via our contact page. You can also write to us at:
JapaneseVocab
2 Rutland Avenue
Newark-on-Trent, England NG24 4DL
United Kingdom
15. How can you review, update, or delete the data we collect from you?
You have the right to request access to the personal information we collect from you, details about how we have processed it, correct inaccuracies, or delete your personal information. You may also have the right to withdraw your consent to our processing. These rights may be limited in some circumstances by applicable law. To request to review, update, or delete your personal information, please visit our contact page.