Privacy Policy

Effective: 25 September 2026 · Last updated: 29 October 2026

That promise is tested, not just written. If somebody adds an analytics script to this site, the build fails.

Who is responsible for your data

zombie.cat is made by FOP Cat LLC, a North Carolina (USA) limited liability company. We are the data controller for everything described here.

For anything in this policy — a question, an export, a deletion, a complaint — write to thegoodpeople@zombie.cat.

We do not have a data protection officer. One is only required for large-scale monitoring or large-scale special-category data as a core activity, and we do neither. We would rather say so plainly than leave the question hanging.

What we collect, and why

If you are just learning kana: nothing

The free kana course runs with no account. Your progress is stored on your device, in the browser’s own storage, and is not sent to us. You can finish the whole of it without ever telling us who you are.

If you make an account

• Your email address and a password. The password is handled by our authentication provider and stored hashed; we never see it.
• The name you give us, so the app can say hello. It is kept with your settings, used for that greeting, and deleted with your account.
• Your study data — which cards you have seen, how you answered, and when each is next due. This is the thing an account exists to carry between your devices.
• Your settings — theme, motion preference, and similar choices.
• If you take the N5 test: each attempt, its questions and your answers, and your score, so the test can be graded on our server and a pass recorded. If you pass and claim the N5 Rookie gift, we also record which gift code you were given and when, and use your email address once to send it to you. You enter your shipping address at our merch store, not with us. If you delete your account, your attempts and pass go with it; a code you claimed stays marked as used, with nothing that links it to you.

What you have agreed to be emailed about

At signup we ask three separate questions, all unticked, and we store your answer with the date and the exact words you were shown. Those words are:

• “Email me a reminder when I have cards due.”
• “Email me news and offers about zombie.cat.”
• “Email me up to three reminders if I don’t finish checking out.”

We store the wording rather than a yes/no flag on purpose: a box ticked years ago is only meaningful if we can still show what it said. The second one also needs you to confirm by clicking a link in an email before we send you anything at all.

Checkout reminders

If you tick the third box, you start checkout, and you do not finish, we email you at most three times: one, three and seven days after you started. Each email says something useful about learning Japanese and mentions the full course, and its price, once. Nothing is sent to anyone who did not tick the box. The emails stop as soon as you buy, and every one carries a one-click link to stop them. To keep this working we store one date for you, the day you last started checkout, and one record of each reminder we sent, so none is sent twice. Neither leaves our own database. The emails carry no tracking pixel, no tracked links and no open or click measurement, which is switched off for the address they are sent from. You can change your mind at any time in More, under email settings.

If you sign up for the newsletter

Your email address, kept with our email provider, and only after you confirm it: we send one link, and an address nobody confirmed is not kept. Where a form also asks for your first name, we use it only to address the email and the newsletter. It travels inside the confirmation link and is stored with your address at our email provider once you confirm. A name nobody confirmed is stored nowhere. The free starter ebook is a PDF that the confirmation email links to. The link is signed and expires, and you can ask for a new one by signing up again. The sentence beside that field, which is what you agreed to:

• “Email me the zombie.cat newsletter. We send one link to confirm first, and you can stop it in one click.”

Every newsletter carries a one-click unsubscribe, which removes you from the list at once.

If you joined the waitlist (now closed)

Your email address, and nothing else, kept with our email provider. The sentence beside that field is stored with it, the same way and for the same reason:

• “Email me once, when zombie.cat opens. No other mail, and no sharing your address.”

If you buy the full course

Payment is handled by Stripe. We never see your card number. What reaches us is that a payment succeeded, so we know to unlock your account.

If you refer friends

A referral works by code and nothing else. There is no referral cookie, no click tracking, no device fingerprint and no IP matching: a friend enters your code at checkout, and that is the whole attribution. What we store is the little the reward needs:

• Your referral code, and the promotion id it belongs to.
• The purchases that count toward your reward, and when each one clears its 14-day window.
• The reward itself, once earned: the grant, or the sticker-bundle gift link we sent you.

That is the same list the terms describe. Nothing is inferred about who you know, and nobody who used your code is profiled.

If you join the affiliate program

Signing up stores nothing until you open the link we email you. When you do, we keep your name, email address, country, where you said you would share your link, your code, and the purchases and payouts that belong to it. Your payout, identity and tax details go to Stripe, which pays you; we never see them. We keep these records while you are an affiliate and afterwards for as long as tax law requires, then delete them.

When the app breaks

The app (not this site) reports its own errors to us so we can fix them. A report says what went wrong and where in the code, which screen you were on, your browser and device type, and how long the page took to load. When an error happens, it also carries a short replay of the moments before it: every word on the screen and everything you typed is blanked out, and no image, audio or video is recorded, so what we see is the layout and the taps, not what was on it. Without an error, nothing is recorded.

A report carries no email address, no name, no IP address and no account id. It is used only to find and fix problems — never for marketing, never to measure you, never sold. It is kept for up to 30 days and then deleted. It is processed by Functional Software, Inc., an error-reporting service, which stores it in the EU (Germany).

If a program probes this site for WordPress or secret files

This is not a WordPress site, and our robots.txt lists WordPress, .env and .git paths as off limits. A program that requests one of them anyway is refused, and its IP address and the path it asked for are added to a block list at Cloudflare so it cannot return. The list is kept until we clear it. Nothing else about the request is kept, and no one who only visits the pages is added: an address is added only for requesting one of those paths directly.

Where your data is processed

• Cloudflare — serves this site and the app. It processes requests because it answers them. When you sign in, create an account or ask for a sign-in email, Cloudflare Turnstile checks that a person is asking rather than a script. Turnstile also runs on the careers and contact forms to tell a person from a bot before a message is sent. Its check runs in your browser, and our server verifies the result. It runs in its own frame, sets no cookie on zombie.cat, and we use it for that check and nothing else.
• Supabase — the database and sign-in. Production data is stored in Frankfurt, in the EU. We keep a separate staging database in the United States which holds test data only, never real accounts.
• Stripe — payments.
• Resend — the emails you asked for, the newsletter, and the waitlist.
• Functional Software, Inc. (error reporting) — the app’s error reports (above), stored in the EU (Germany). Troubleshooting only.

ElevenLabs generated the recordings, and receives nothing about you. Every recording in the course was made ahead of time from course material — kana, words, example sentences — and is then served as an ordinary audio file. Nothing you do is sent there, and no recording is made in response to anything you type.

Our team is in the United States. When we need to look at data stored in the EU to run or support the service, that access is covered by Standard Contractual Clauses, which is the standard safeguard for exactly this situation. Your data itself stays where it is.

How long we keep it

• If you ask us to delete your account, we delete it at once. Our backups roll over within 30 days, after which no copy remains. There is no grace period — if you ask, it goes, so please be sure.
• If you stop using zombie.cat for two years, we delete your account. We email you first, so a long break is not a trap. Holding somebody’s data forever because they went quiet is not something we want to do.
• Error reports from the app are deleted after 30 days.
• Records we are required to keep — a receipt for a payment, for example — are kept for as long as the law requires and no longer.

Your rights

You can delete your account yourself, and it is immediate. Open the app, go to Account, choose Delete my account and type the word it asks for. It removes your progress, your settings and name, your email choices and their history, your place on our mailing list and your sign-in, and clears the copy on that device. It cannot be undone. A payment record that Stripe and tax law require stays with Stripe.

You can ask us to show you what we hold, give you a copy, correct it, or delete it. You can withdraw either consent at any time, and withdrawing one does not affect the other or your account. Write to thegoodpeople@zombie.cat and we will answer.

These rights are yours wherever you live, whether or not the law where you live requires them. If you are in the EU or the UK and think we have got something wrong, you may also complain to your local data protection authority — but we would much rather you told us first and gave us a chance to fix it.

Security

Everything travels over HTTPS. Passwords are hashed by our authentication provider and never stored by us. Access to production data is limited to people who need it to run the service. No system is perfect, and we will not pretend otherwise — if something goes wrong that affects you, we will tell you.

Children

zombie.cat is not for children under 13. We do not knowingly collect data from anyone under that age. If you believe a child under 13 has an account, write to thegoodpeople@zombie.cat and we will remove it.

Changes to this policy

If we change this policy we will change the date at the top. If a change actually affects what we do with your data — rather than fixing a typo — we will tell the people it affects, by email, before it takes effect.

Contact

thegoodpeople@zombie.cat