What this site collects

This page says plainly what happens when you read something here. It is short, because not much happens.

The short version

There are no ads on this site, and nothing you do here is sold to anyone. You can read every story and every interview question without typing your name, your email, or anything else about yourself.

What is measured

Two things count visits: Cloudflare, which counts pages without using cookies, and Google Analytics, which does use cookies. Between them they tell us which stories people actually read, which language they read in, and roughly where in the world they are — never who they are.

We look at this for one reason: to know which stories are worth making next. A story that nobody finishes is a story we made wrong.

Both counts run in your browser, so an ad blocker, or a browser that blocks them, stops both, and the site works exactly the same. Blocking cookies alone is not enough for Google Analytics: it still counts the visit, it just cannot tell that you have been here before. The single line sent when you tap a shop link comes from this site's own page, so a script blocker stops that one too. It holds no IP address and nothing that says who you are, and we never see your IP address for any of these counts.

What stays on your device

Your browser remembers a few small things so that the site does not repeat itself: which stories you have finished (a list of names, used to decide when to ask about supporting the site once), whether we have already asked you about supporting the site, which story pages have already asked "did this help?", and whether you switched romaji or word spacing on in the storybook. None of it leaves your device, none of it reaches us, and clearing your browser data removes it.

The shop links

The shop is run by Fourthwall, on a different website. When you tap one of the shop links here, your browser goes straight there. Separately, it sends us one line saying what was tapped — which story and item, which page of this site it was tapped on (and so which language), which country, and when. That line does not include your IP address or anything about your browser.

Once you arrive at the shop, you are on Fourthwall's site and their own rules apply.

The videos

A story's video is not loaded until you tap it. When you tap it, the player comes from YouTube, using the address YouTube offers for fewer cookies. From that moment, YouTube's own rules apply to that player.

If you send us something

The feedback form at the bottom of the pages never asks for your email. The box for a name only appears when you tick the one to have your comment shown publicly, and a name is only kept if that box is ticked. Nothing is published until we have read it.

If you support the project, the payment is handled by Ko-fi, not by us. We never see your card. Your email address reaches us only so that we can send you the one link to the thank-you storybook page, and it is not used for anything else. Supporting does not sign you up for the newsletter below.

The newsletter

There is a free weekly email: one Japanese sentence and one folk tale. It is run on Substack, on a different website. Nothing is sent to Substack while you read here; the sign-up links are plain links, and only when you tap one and type your email address does Substack get it. Substack then sends you an email in English to confirm that it was really you. Until you press the button in it, nothing is sent.

Substack keeps the list and handles every unsubscribe; each email has a link at the bottom to stop it. We can see the email addresses on the list, and we use them for nothing but the newsletter. We do not add anyone to it ourselves, and we never add people who only supported the project or wrote to us.

Contact

Anything on this page can be asked about, or asked to be removed, at hello@nihongo-work.com.