Privacy Policy

Ikou is a Japanese learning app. It stores the account you sign in with and the progress you make, so your reviews are waiting for you on your next visit. There are no advertising trackers and no third-party analytics, and your data is never sold or shared for marketing.

Account details. Your email address, and a display name if you set one. Sign-in is handled by Supabase Auth. If you sign in with Google, Google shares your name, email address and profile picture with us; we keep the name and email. We never receive your Google password.

Learning progress. Which characters, words and phrases you have studied, your answers and whether they were correct, review scheduling, streaks, XP, achievements and time spent studying. This is the substance of the app — without it there is nothing to come back to.

Preferences. Your study goal, chosen avatar and stated experience level. Your theme choice and silent-mode setting are stored only in your own browser, not on our servers.

We do not collect your location, contacts, or any advertising identifier, and Ikou contains no third-party analytics or tracking SDKs.

The speaking drills ask for microphone access. Ikou never records, stores or transmits your audio — we only receive the text your browser produces.

That transcription is done by your browser's built-in speech recognition, not by us. Some browsers, including Google Chrome, perform it by sending the audio to the browser vendor's servers. That processing is governed by your browser vendor's privacy policy rather than this one. If you would rather it did not happen, decline the microphone permission — the speaking drills fall back to grading yourself, and the rest of the app is unaffected.

Accounts and progress are stored in a Postgres database hosted by Supabase in the United States. The app itself is hosted on Vercel. Both act as processors on our behalf. If you are in the UK, EU or elsewhere outside the United States, using Ikou means your data is transferred there.

Your account and progress are kept for as long as your account exists. If you ask us to delete it, we remove your profile and everything attached to it — reviews, lessons, achievements and statistics — from our database.

You can ask for a copy of your data, ask us to correct it, or ask us to delete your account entirely. Email ikou.info@gmail.com and we will action it. Depending on where you live, you may also have the right to complain to your local data protection authority.

Ikou is not directed at children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect their data. If you believe a child has created an account, email us and we will remove it.

If this policy changes in a way that materially affects you, we will update the date at the top of this page and, where appropriate, tell you in the app.

Questions about this policy or your data: ikou.info@gmail.com