Privacy policy
Rakuyomi respects your privacy. This page explains what data we collect and how we use it.
Last updated: July 26, 2026
Overview
This policy explains how Rakuyomi collects, uses, and protects your information — from reading passages and creating an account, to pasting text into the "Text analysis" page.
Rakuyomi is free for everyone learning Japanese. You can read passages and use the analysis page without an account; an account is only needed for features that save your own progress, like quiz results, likes, or comments.
If anything here is unclear, or you have questions about your own data, just email us — the contact address is at the bottom of this page.
Data we collect
When you create an account
You can sign in with a Google account, or with just an email address — you'll get a one-time login link, no password needed. Depending on which you choose:
- Signing in with Google: we receive the name, email address, and profile picture Google provides.
- Signing in with email: we receive the email address you enter, to send a one-time login link that expires after a few minutes.
Your activity once signed in
For features tied to your account, we store:
- Results of the quizzes you've taken.
- Passages you've liked, saved, or commented on.
- Passages you submit, if you take part as a contributor or editor.
Text you paste into "Text analysis"
This text is only processed temporarily, in server memory, to generate furigana and word lookups (up to 10,000 characters per request). We never store it, never write it to a database, and never send it to any third party.
Data collected automatically
A minimal amount of technical data, to run and protect the site:
- Aggregate usage numbers (page views, popular pages…) through analytics software we run ourselves — not tied to your identity, and not used to track you across other websites.
- Basic server logs (for example, an IP address when a login-link request is made), used only to prevent abuse and not kept long-term.
What we use data for
- Running the features you use: signing in, remembering your progress, likes, comments.
- Rendering furigana and word lookups for text you paste in, for that session.
- Protecting the site from abuse, such as limiting how often login links can be requested.
- Keeping the site free through advertising.
- Understanding what's useful and what needs improving, through anonymous aggregate numbers.
How long we keep data
- Account information (name, email, avatar): kept until you stop using the account and ask us to delete it.
- Email login links: expire after a few minutes, and can't be reused once used once.
- Text pasted into the analysis page: never stored.
- Comments, likes, and quiz results: kept for as long as your account exists, unless you delete them yourself or ask us to.
Your choices
You can always:
- Sign out at any time.
- Ask to see, correct, or delete your account data, by emailing us.
- Delete comments you wrote yourself, once commenting is available.
- Adjust Google's ad personalization in Google's own ad settings, or use an ad blocker — the reading features work the same either way.
Rakuyomi doesn't yet have a self-serve button to delete your account or export your data directly on the site. Until it does, email us and we'll take care of it by hand.
Security
No system is perfectly secure, but we apply some basic protections:
- The login cookie is encrypted and flagged httpOnly and secure — it can't be read by browser JavaScript.
- Email login links are stored only as a hash in the database, never in their original form.
- The database isn't exposed directly to the internet — only Rakuyomi's own application server can reach it.
- HTML shown on the site — passages, comments — is sanitized before rendering, to keep malicious markup out.
If this policy changes
If we make a significant change, we'll update the date at the top of this page. Check back here now and then if you'd like to stay current.
Contact
For any privacy question, or a request about your own data, reach us at: