Privacy Policy

Last updated: August 27, 2026

KIKUGO helps English-speaking learners turn Japanese Netflix subtitles into Anki-ready study cards. This policy explains what we collect, why, and the choices you have. We collect the minimum needed to run the product.

Who we are

KIKUGO is operated by Bruce Rosier, 60 rue François 1er, 75008 Paris, France, who is the data controller for the personal data described in this policy.

What we collect and why

• Account identity (email). When you sign in, we store your email address and a user ID so we can save your cards to your account and enforce plan limits.
• Subtitle text you click. When you ask for an explanation, the Japanese sentence is sent to our backend to generate it. The explanation is stored anonymously, without any link to your identity, so it can be reused if another user clicks the same sentence.
• Saved cards. Cards you choose to save (sentence, translation, reading, vocabulary, grammar notes, source title, timestamp) are stored against your account so you can review and export them.
• Usage counts. We keep counters (explanations, saved cards, CSV exports) to enforce plan limits.
• Platform launch offer email. With your explicit consent, we store the normalized email address, campaign, source article, reserved offer, consent time, and eligibility time needed to reserve the YouTube/Crunchyroll launch offer and contact you about its availability. Your email address is never sent to product analytics.
• IP address (no account only). If you ask for explanations without signing in, we use your IP address to enforce the daily free-use limit and prevent abuse. It's kept for at most 24 hours and is never linked to an account.
• Product analytics & experiments. On the website, dashboard, and in the Chrome extension, we track product events (pages viewed, clicks, signup/checkout funnel steps) to understand how the product is used, and we occasionally run A/B tests on things like page copy. If you're signed in, these events are linked to your account (email, plan, trial status) using the same sign-in session that already keeps you logged in — no separate tracking identifier is created. If you're not signed in, events are linked only by an identifier that lives in your browser tab for the current visit and is discarded when you close the tab; we never set a cookie or persistent storage entry purely to track an anonymous visitor across future visits.
• Referral link attribution. If you arrive via a referral/affiliate link (a URL containing ?ref=...), we set a cookie recording which referral code to credit, for up to 90 days, so we can pay the right affiliate if you later subscribe. This is the only cookie we set for a not-yet-signed-in visitor, and it exists solely to honor that commercial arrangement — see /affiliate-terms.

Processors we share data with

• DeepSeek — our AI provider. The Japanese sentence is sent to DeepSeek to generate the explanation. No account identity is sent.
• Supabase — authentication and database hosting. Stores your account, cards, and usage data. The browser extension uses this to keep you signed into the same account as the dashboard.
• Stripe — payment processing for paid plans. Stripe handles your card details directly; we never see or store full payment card numbers.
• PostHog — product analytics (pages viewed, clicks, funnel steps), hosted on EU servers (Germany), used on the website and in the Chrome extension. We never load PostHog's own script in your browser — events go through our backend, so nothing is stored on your device beyond the session-scoped identifier described above.
• GrowthBook — A/B testing for page copy and onboarding flows, used on the website. Which variant you see is decided using the same session/visit identifier as product analytics, kept stable through our backend so it doesn't change mid-experiment if you sign up.
• GlitchTip — error monitoring on our website, backend, and extension. Receives technical error reports (stack traces, page context) to help us fix bugs; it isn't used to collect the content of your sentences or cards.
• Resend — sends account-related emails (sign-up confirmation, password reset). Receives your email address and the message content.

DeepSeek is based in China, but the sentence we send it is subtitle dialogue, not personal data — it isn't linked to your identity, so this isn't a transfer of your personal data outside the EU. PostHog's EU Cloud is hosted in Frankfurt, Germany. Some of our other processors (Stripe, Resend, GlitchTip, GrowthBook, Supabase) may handle data outside the EU/EEA; where that happens, we rely on their standard contractual safeguards (e.g. Standard Contractual Clauses) for the transfer.

Data retention & deletion

You can delete your account and all associated cards and usage data at any time by contacting us at the address below; we will remove your personal data within 30 days. You can also withdraw the platform launch offer consent or request deletion of its lead record at any time. Anonymous explanations are not tied to your identity and are kept to keep the product fast for everyone.

Legal basis for processing

We process account, card, and usage data because it's necessary to provide the product you signed up for (performance of a contract). We process platform launch offer leads on the explicit consent given beside that form; consent can be withdrawn at any time. We process the IP address of signed-out users on the basis of our legitimate interest in preventing abuse of the free tier. Product analytics and experiments don't require a consent banner: for signed-in users, we reuse the sign-in session that's already necessary to run the service, instead of setting a new tracking identifier; for signed-out visitors, we use an identifier confined to your current browser tab, which is the kind of short-lived technical storage that ePrivacy rules treat as exempt from consent because it doesn't build a profile of you across visits. The one exception is the referral cookie described above, which we set on the basis of our legitimate interest in fairly crediting the affiliate who referred you.

Your choices

Explanations work without an account (rate-limited); an account is only required to save cards. You control which sentences you click and which cards you save. We don't show a cookie banner, because our product analytics don't use cookies or any tracking identifier that survives closing the tab (see "Legal basis" above) — there's nothing to opt in or out of. If you'd rather we not use a referral link's attribution cookie, avoid following links that contain a "?ref=" parameter, or clear cookies for this site afterwards. Analytics is for our own product decisions and never required for a feature to function.

Your rights

Under GDPR, you have the right to access, correct, delete, or export your personal data, and to object to or restrict certain processing. Contact us using the address below to exercise any of these rights. If you're not satisfied with our response, you can lodge a complaint with the French data protection authority (CNIL) or your local supervisory authority.

Contact

Questions or deletion requests: kikugo87@gmail.com.

KIKUGO is not affiliated with Netflix or AnkiWeb.