Last Updated May 25, 2026
tl;dr I have no interest in collecting your personal information, and will absolutely never sell your information to a third-party. I collect a small amount of anonymized usage information to help with the development of the app, but nothing that could personally identify you. If you sign up for the newsletter from within the app, I may also send you a follow-up if you cancel your app subscription, but will not associate your email address with any analytics information collected by the app.
Here are the details:
I use a service called Firebase, made by Google, to collect crash reports, errors, and analytics. The basic information they collect can be found here, under the heading “Google Analytics for Firebase data collection”.
I do not link to the AdSupport framework, and so Firebase does not have access to the Advertising Identifier to identify your device. Instead, it uses the Vender Identifier, an identifier that cannot be correlated with the other apps on your device.
When the app crashes, I collect a small amount of information about the state of the app when it crashed, including things like app settings, to help determine what might have caused the crash. I collect the same information when an error occurs in the app (for example, when your data fails to update properly on upgrade).
I also collect usage information throughout the app to tell me how much various features are being used. For example, I collect how many times clippings are created, flashcard decks are studied, etc. This is only used to determine what parts of the app are being used the most, so I can know where to focus my future development.
If you choose to sign up for my newsletter on this website, in Nihongo, or in Nihongo Lessons, I collect the email address you submit, the app associated with your signup, and your newsletter language when available so I can send you my personal monthly newsletter about my work and the tools I make for people learning Japanese in that language. I use the signup app to show the matching app icon in your confirmation email. Website signups use the language of the page you sign up from.
If you sign up for the newsletter from within an app, I may also use your email address to send you a follow-up if you cancel your app subscription. I will not use your email address for anything other than this newsletter and, for in-app signups, these subscription follow-ups.
These signups are processed through MailerLite. I use MailerLite to send a confirmation email and manage the mailing list. You will need to confirm your email address before you are fully subscribed.
This signup is optional. It is not required to use the website or the app, and you can unsubscribe at any time using the unsubscribe link in any newsletter. If you unsubscribe from these emails, I will stop sending both the newsletter and any subscription follow-ups.
I do not sell this information, and I do not send your email address to app analytics providers.
When you use the text recognition feature in Nihongo, your photo is transmitted to a 3rd party OCR service to perform the text recognition. You can control which service is used, Google Google’s Cloud Vision API, or OCR.space, from the Settings tab in Nihongo.
You can view Google’s data usage policy here, but the crux of it is that “Google does not use any of your content (such as images and labels) for any purpose except to provide you with the Vision API service.”
OCR.space’s data usage policy can be viewed here. Note that Nihongo uses the “Cloud OCR” solution, not on-premise. Their privacy policy states “We only collect the minimum data we need to provide the OCR service, and only keep the data as long as we need to.”
If you have any questions or concerns, please reach out to me at chris@serpentisei.com.