PRIVACY POLICY

Last Updated on June, 2023

About Our Privacy Policy

At Langmate, we care about your privacy. We have written this Privacy Policy to be transparent in the way we process your data, and make as easy as possible for you to understand our privacy practice and services.

Langmate is a Japanese application for mobile and tablets aim to connect Japanese users and people all around the world, and provides a fun way to learn new languages, discover new cultures, and make international friends, directly with locals.
Langmate provides user profile search, matching, and messaging services.

When you use these services, you will share some information with us. We want to make it clear what information we collect, why we collect it, how we use it, who we share it with, and the controls we give you to access, update and delete your information.

That’s why we’ve written this Privacy Policy. We tried to write it in simple language with minimal legal jargon so that it’s easy for you to understand.
Please read carefully this Privacy Policy, and if you have any questions about anything in our Privacy Policy, please contact us.

1. Who We Are

Langmate inc.
Muranaka Building 5th Floor
2-23-1 Minato-ku,
105-0014 Tokyo
Japan

2. Information We Collect

There are three basic categories of information we collect:
– Information you choose to give us
– Information we get when you use our services
– Information we receive from others

Here’s how we collect your information:

3. How We Collect Information

3.1 Information You Choose To Give Us

When you use and interact with our services, we collect the information you choose to share with us.

To be able to use our services, you will be require to set up an account and your user profile. So we need to collect a basic important details about you, necessary for the service to work, such as: a unique username you choose, your date of birth,
your gender, your nationality and your profile picture (and optional additional images).

The purpose of Langmate is connect people in order to learn new languages and cultures with locals, so we will also ask you to provide us additional information that will be publicly visible on our services,
such as your nationality, the choice of languages that you speak and want to learn, and the place where you live.

Note about the place where you live:
You can decide to give us access to your device location services, or choose your place from a list.
Only your city and country will be displayed on your profile, and we will never know or share precisely where you live.

To make it easier for others to find you and improve your chances of matching, we will also ask you to provide us additional information that will be publicly visible on our services, such as a presentation text (“About me”) and the your tag (“My tags”).
The new Tag feature allows you to select topics that you like, passions, interest, hobbies, or activities that you enjoy, and to share it on your profile.

3.2 Information We Get When You Use Our Services

When you use our services, we collect information about which services you use and how you use them.
For example, we may know how many swipe you did, how many matches you have, how many friends you made.

Here’s a more detailed explanation of the information we collect when you use our services:

3.2.1 Usage Information

We collect information about your activity through our services. For example:
How you interact with our services, such as how many cards you liked or disliked (swipe right or left), the number of friends and matches you made (“New matches”, “My friends”), the users you blocked (“Unfriend”), if you use the boost function (“Boost my profile”).

3.2.2 Device Information

In order to protect you and Langmate from spammers, and being able to support you in case of bugs or crashes, we collect information from and about the devices you use. For example:

Information about your hardware and software, such as hardware model, operating system version, device memory, advertising identifiers, unique application identifiers, unique device identifiers, and language.

3.2.3 Usage and Log Data

Whenever you use our services, some data such as service-related, diagnostic, and performance information, are automatically collected (through third party products such as Google Firebase) and called “log data”. Those “log data” may include information such as your device Internet Protocol (“IP”), device name, operating system version, app version, the time and date of your use of the service, diagnostics and other statistics.

3.2.4 Camera, Photos, Voice Messages

Some of our services like setting up your main profile picture, adding optional profile pictures, sharing a photo, a video or a voice message require us to collect images and other information from your device’s camera, photos or microphone. For example, you won’t be able to upload images or videos from your camera roll unless we can access your camera or media library. Or you won’t be able to send a voice message within a chat unless we can access your microphone.
You can decide to opt-out those share access anytime from the app settings (“My Page” > Settings > System access) or from your device system and/or app settings.

Note about the messaging (“Messages”, or chat):
We do not retain, read or share, all the contents you decide to write, send or share within our messaging services.
The messages and shared media (images, photos, drawing, position, voice messages) are temporary stocked through third party products such as Google Firebase, until you read them, and will be then moved to your device.
When you open the app and read a message and/or shared media (images, photos, voice messages), the content will be then permanently deleted from the third party products such as Google Firebase, and will be stocked only on your device.

Link to the privacy policy of the third party product provider used by the app messaging services.
[Google Firebase] https://firebase.google.com/support/privacy/

4. Information we receive from others

In addition to the information you provide us directly, we may receive information about you from others, including:

4.1 Other Users

As they use our services, other users may provide information about you . For example: we may collect information about you from other users if they contact us about you and report your profile.

4.2 Social Media and other accounts

When you use your Apple, Google, Twitter or Facebook account to sign up or sign in to the app, we may receive information so you can create or access your Langmate account.
Note: We will never have a full access and we will never be allowed to post or read anything on your social media accounts.

4.3 In-app Advertisers

If you interact with one of our advertisers (for example: if you tap on a ad), they may share information with us to help target or measure ad performance.

5. How We Use Information

We use your information to provide you with the best services, experience and security.
Here’s how we use this information for:

– To develop, maintain, improve, deliver, and protect our products and services.
– Monitor and analyze performances and usages of our services.
– Communicate with you in case of support inquiries. For examples, in order to help to resolve a problem or fix an issue.
– Personalize our services by showing you better and more relevant content.
– To serve you relevant offers and ads within the app.
– Enhance and enforce the safety and security of our products and services.
– Verify your identity and prevent fraud, or other unauthorized and illegal activity.
– Enforce our Terms of Service, messaging rules, and other usage policies.
– To ensure legal compliance, or assist law enforcement.

6. How We Share Information

Since our goal is to help you to have meaningful connections, make friends, and learn new languages and cultures, the main sharing of users information is, of course, with other users.
We may also share some users information with service providers, and, in some cases, legal authorities.

We may share information about you in the following ways:

6.1 With all Langmate users

You share information with other users when you voluntarily disclose information on the service (in your “Card” public profile, messaging) including:
– Information you set about you on your public profile “Card”, such as your username, age, gender, nationality, where you live (approximately, not the precise location), your optional profile text (“About me”), your optional tags (“My tags”), and your profile pictures.
– Your public rating. The average number of stars and the quantity of votes your received from other users while using the service.
– Your last online session time. Visible on your public profile “Card”.

6.2 With your Langmate friends only (within messaging services)

Your messages and the content you decide to share with a friend within a chat such as text messages, image, photo and video uploads, voice messages, drawing, position, will be shared only between you and this specific friend.

6.3 With our service providers

We use third party service providers to help us operate and improve our services. These third parties assist us with various tasks, including data hosting and maintenance, analytics, customer care, advertising, payment processing and security operations.
We follow a strict verification process prior to engaging any service provider. All of our service providers must agree to our confidentiality obligations.

6.4 With third parties for legal reasons

We may share information about you if we reasonably believe that disclosing the information is necessary. Examples include:
– To comply with any valid legal process, governmental request, or applicable law, rule or regulation.
– To investigate, enforce, or remedy potential Terms of Service violations
– To protect the safety, rights of Langmate users, or others.
– To detect and resolve any fraud or security matters or concerns.

Note about the external links:
If a user share an external link while using our services (for example, in a user profile or during a chat session etc.), we are not responsible for the handling of personal information on the linked website, so we encourage you to be careful and read each privacy policy when using each linked site.

7. International operations

Langmate, as an international language exchange application, may transit data created using our services between different countries outside your home country.
You agree to our practices, including the collection, use, processing, and sharing of your information as described in this Privacy Policy, as well as the transfer and processing of your information to Japan, USA, and other countries globally where we have or use service providers, regardless of where you use our services. You acknowledge that the laws, regulations, and standards of the country in which your information is stored or processed may be different from those of your own country.

8. How We Protect Your Information

At Langmate we work hard to protect you from unauthorized access to or alteration, disclosure or destruction of your personal information. As with all technology companies and digital service providers, although we take action to secure your information, we do not promise, and you should not expect, that your personal information will always remain secure.

We, and our service providers, regularly monitor our systems for possible vulnerabilities and attacks and regularly review our information collection, storage and processing practices to update our physical, technical and organizational security measures.
We follow a strict verification process prior to engaging any service provider. All of our service providers must agree to our security and monitoring obligations.

We may suspend your use of all or part of the services without notice if we suspect or detect any breach of security. If you believe that your account or information is no longer secure, please contact us immediately.

9. How Long We Keep Your Information

We keep your personal information only as long as we need it for legitimate business purposes (as detailed on section “5. How We Use Information”) and as permitted by applicable law. For example:

– We store your basic account information, including your username, login credentials, approximate location, and all the profile information you decided to set up until you ask us to delete them at .

– We are constantly collecting and updating information about the number of likes or dislikes you received or have sent, the number of friends, matches you have, your rating and number of votes you received, the number of discussions you have, so we can provide you with more relevant data, and a better user experience.

– We store your account status and payment related status (paid or free account, subscription status, your number of coins left or bought, “boost” used or bought).

If you decide to stop using Langmate, you can ask us to delete your account and information at .
Please note that the data of users who remain inactive for a period of 6 months or more, will be automatically deleted.

There may be legal requirements to store your data and we may need to suspend those deletion practices if we receive a valid legal process or request asking us to preserve that content, or if we receive reports of abuse or other Terms of Service Violations. We may also need to retain certain information in backup for a limited period of time, or as required by law.

10. Your Rights and Control over Your Information

At Langmate, the respect of your privacy is very important to us. We want you to have control over the information you give us, the information we use, and the information we keep. These are the tools we provide you to control your information:

10.1 Access / Update tools in the service

You can use visit you account settings page (in “My Page”) that help you to access, rectify or delete information that you provided to us and that’s associated with your account. If you have any question on those tools and settings, please contact our customer support team for help.

10.2 Removing Device Permissions

Mobile platforms have permission systems for specific types of device data and notifications, such as photo album, camera, microphone, location services or push notifications.
If you agreed to let us access to those services, you can change your mind at any time by changing the settings on your device. Of course, if you remove permission, certain services may be impacted and may lose functionality.

10.3 Deletion of your account

We hope you remain a happy Langmate user for long time, but if you want to delete your account, you can use the corresponding functionality directly on the service (in “My Page”), or contact our customer support team.

10.4 Reviewing your information

Applicable privacy laws may give you the right to review the personal information we keep about you (depending on the jurisdiction, this may be called right of access, right of portability or variations of those terms). You can request a copy of your personal information by putting in such a request at .

If you believe that some of the information we hold about you is inaccurate or that we are no longer entitled to use it and want to request its rectification, deletion or object to its processing, please contact our customer support team for help.

For your protection and the protection of all of our users, we may ask you to provide proof of identity before we can answer the above requests.

Keep in mind, we may reject requests for certain reasons, including if the request is unlawful or if it may infringe on trade secrets or intellectual property or the privacy of another user. If you wish to receive information relating to another user, the other user will have to contact us to provide their written consent before the information is released.

Also, we may not be able to accommodate certain requests to object to the processing of personal information, notably where such requests would not allow us to provide our service to you anymore. For instance, we cannot provide our service if we do not have your date of birth.

10.5 If you uninstall the application

You can stop all information collection by an app by uninstalling it using the standard uninstall process for your device. If you uninstall the app from your mobile device, the unique identifier associated with your device will continue to be stored. If you re-install the application on the same mobile device, we will be able to re-associate this identifier to your previous transactions and activities.

11. Children’s Privacy

Our services are restricted to users who are 18 years of age or older. We do not permit users under the age of 18 on our platform and we do not knowingly collect personally identifiable information from children under the age of 18. In the case we discover that a child under 18 has provided us with personal information, we immediately delete this from our servers. If you are a parent or guardian and you are aware that your child has provided us with personal information, please contact us so that we will be able to do necessary actions. If you suspect that a user is under the age of 18, please use the reporting mechanism available through the service.

12. Revisions and Changes to the Privacy Policy

We may change this Privacy Policy from time to time. When we do, we will notify you before any material changes take effect so that you have time to review the changes (For example, providing you with an in-app message in “My Page” > “News”).

13. How to Contact Us

If you have questions about this Privacy Policy, please refer to the contact information below: by post at Langmate inc. – Customer Support, Minato-ku Shiba 2 chome, Muranaka Building 23-1, Tokyo, Japan, and by email at