Privacy Policy

1. Information we collect

Account information: your email address (only when you create an account).

Guest use: entering a room as a guest automatically creates an anonymous account. No email address is collected, but the usage information and interaction events below are recorded against that anonymous account. If you later register an email address, they carry over to the same account. Anonymous accounts that have gone unused for more than 90 days, have 20 minutes or less of reading in total, and hold no other usage records such as registered books or purchases may be deleted along with those records.

Profile information: your display name, and the avatar and book cover you choose.

Usage information: reading session time, your state in the room (reading, on a break, and so on), page-turn signals, and your room furnishing settings.

Registered books: if you register books on the Owner plan (including during the viewing period) — the title and the author (optional), which book you are reading now, and whether you finished it or stopped reading before finishing, the reading time that has gathered on it, and the review you write about it (only if you write one; only you can read it). We do not obtain the contents of a book.

Interaction events: to improve the Service, we record screen interaction events tied to your account in our own database. We may also show different versions of a screen to different accounts and compare them. On the website, we use Vercel Web Analytics, the web analytics service of Vercel Inc. (United States), to count how often pages are viewed and where visits come from. What is sent to Vercel is the URL of the page viewed, the referring site, the country or region, and the type of device, operating system and browser. It uses no cookies, is not linked to your account or IP address, and is used only for anonymous aggregate statistics, never for advertising (according to Vercel, visits are told apart by a value derived from the request that is discarded after 24 hours). We use no advertising trackers (for the diagnostic information that text and barcode reading send on Android, see Section 3).

Payment information: paid plans can be paid by credit card. Card details are handled by the payment processor (Stripe) and never reach the operator’s servers. Subscriptions are managed through RevenueCat, with which we share a purchase identifier (App User ID), your email address, and purchase and renewal information. The operator keeps your purchase status, purchase history, and the purchase/renewal notifications received from RevenueCat (transaction-related information).

Technical information: cookies for keeping your session. To learn where people start using mekuru and to improve the service, we record once in your account the entry point you started from (website, invite link or app) and, from your first visit to the website, the referring site (its domain only), any campaign tags on the link (utm_source, utm_medium, utm_campaign) and the kind of page you opened first. We do not record full URLs or search terms. From your visit until an account exists, this information is kept only in your browser, for up to 30 days. No advertising tracking is performed.

2. How we use it

We use it to provide the reading rooms (showing your presence to the others in the same room), to keep the record of your reading time, to manage the books you registered and the reading time attributed to each of them, to make your finished-reading cards, to reflect your paid-plan status, to send the newsletter (only to those who asked for it), and to improve the service. For a public room, the room’s appearance and who is present (its light) also appear in the list outside the room.

We never sell your information to third parties.

3. Storage and processors

Data is stored with Supabase, on Supabase’s infrastructure.

We use Stripe for payment processing, RevenueCat for subscription management, and Resend for email delivery. These include processors located outside Japan.

When a book’s title is filled in from its ISBN, only that ISBN is sent to bibliographic databases (openBD / Google Books / Open Library) to look it up. Nothing about your account is sent. To limit how often the lookup can be called, the IP address of that request is used only in the server’s temporary memory, and is not stored.

We apply safeguards such as encrypted connections and access controls, and limit access to personal data to what operations require.

We never send video or audio to our servers. When you read a book cover with the camera, the text is recognised on your own device only — the photograph is neither sent anywhere nor stored by us. There is no feature that obtains the contents of a book. From reading a cover, the only things we store are the title and author you confirm when you register a book. On Android, this text recognition and barcode reading use Google’s ML Kit on your device. ML Kit does not send the image or the recognised text, but for purposes such as maintaining and improving the feature it sends diagnostic information to Google, such as your device model and OS version, the app version, a per-installation identifier, and performance data like processing time. Review card images, including any photo you add to a card, are made on your device and are neither sent to our servers nor stored by us. We store the text of a review only when you keep it as a book’s review (when you write it on the book’s screen, or choose to save it to the book on the review card screen).

4. Disclosure, correction, and deletion requests

To request disclosure, correction, suspension of use, or deletion of your personal data, please contact us at the address below. After verifying your identity, we will respond without delay.

When deleting your account and data, we also request deletion of personal data held by our processors.

5. Deleting your account

You can ask us to delete your mekuru account and the data tied to it in any of the following ways.

In the app: open your profile and tap “Delete account” at the bottom.

On the web: log in at https://www.mekuru.app/en/profile and choose “Delete account” at the bottom.

By email: if you can no longer do either (for example, after uninstalling the app), write to info@8arms.io from the email address you registered with. We will confirm that the request comes from you and delete the account without undue delay.

Deleting your account removes your profile (display name and avatar), your reading-time records, the books you registered and your reviews of them, your notes, your own room and its furnishings, the saved images of your room, your reading companions, the status of your paid plan, and your email settings, and you can no longer log in. Deletion cannot be undone.

Records that are tied to other readers’ reading — such as the record that a room was open, invitations, and reading circles — and the activity records we use to improve the service are kept with anything that links them to you removed.

Cancelling a paid plan and deleting your account are separate steps. Before you delete your account, please cancel your subscription where you bought it (Google Play, the App Store, or the web). Transaction records that payment providers keep as required by law are handled under their own policies.

6. Operator and contact

Operator: 8arms LLC (合同会社8arms, trading as eight arms)

Representative: Yoshifumi Kondo

Corporate number: 4010403036710

Address: Mitsuhashi Building 3F, 1-3-3 Kita-Aoyama, Minato-ku, Tokyo

Email: info@8arms.io

Web: https://www.8arms.io