Privacy Policy

Junji Fukumoto, MIEUX Shibuya Bldg. 8F, 5-3 Maruyamacho, Shibuya-ku, Tokyo 150-0044, Japan, is the controller of personal information collected through My Japanese Penpal.

• Account: your email address.
• Introduction: your preferred first name, country, interests, what you'd like your penpal to know, topics you enjoy or prefer to avoid, your Japanese level and preferred letter language.
• Postal address: so we can mail your letters.
• Correspondence: the replies you write through the Service, and operational records about each letter (status, mailing date, weight).
• Payments: handled by PayPal. We receive a customer and subscription reference, never your full card number.
• Usage: pages viewed and marketing attribution (utm parameters).

We deliberately do not collect your gender, sexual orientation, religion or employer. We ask only for what is needed to write and mail your letters.

Your full name, postal address, letter contents, reply contents, safety report contents, and identity documents are never sent to our analytics provider. Analytics events carry only non-identifying properties such as which page was viewed and which plan was chosen.

• Your writer sees your preferred first name, your introduction, and your replies. They never see your address, email, or full name.
• You see your writer's first name and public profile. You never see their surname, home address or contact details.
• Our operations team sees what is necessary to prepare, review, translate and mail letters, and to handle safety reports and payments.

• Supabase — database, authentication and file storage
• PayPal — payments and subscription billing
• Resend — transactional email
• DeepL — optional translation assistance for correspondence
• PostHog — product analytics (no personal correspondence or address data)
• Vercel — application hosting

Some of these providers are located outside Japan, so your data may be transferred internationally. Your letters themselves are physically posted from Japan to your country.

We keep account and correspondence records for as long as your account is active and for a reasonable period afterwards to handle billing disputes, safety matters and legal obligations. Postal addresses are replaced when you update them; historical entries are retained so we can account for letters already mailed.

You can request access to, correction of, or deletion of your personal information through our contact form. Depending on where you live, you may have additional rights under the GDPR, UK GDPR, Japan's APPI, or US state privacy laws.

Access to personal data is restricted by database-level row security. Writer private details and customer addresses are stored separately from public profile data and are accessible only to authorised operations staff.