How wakomi handles your data
Pilot version · last updated 2026-08-27
wakomi helps international residents of Japan understand official documents and administrative questions. The documents you photograph are some of the most personal paper you own — so this policy is written the way wakomi answers questions: plainly, and only saying what we can stand behind.
Who is responsible
wakomi is operated by always late technologies bv, a company registered in Belgium. For anything in this policy, write to hello@wakomi.app.
What stays on your device
wakomi reads your documents on your device. The photos you take, the text read from them, and the extracted amounts and dates are processed on the phone itself and stored only on the phone. Your saved readings stay there, with their deadlines, until you delete them.
Text read from a document (the full OCR and recognised text) is kept on the device for up to 90 days and then automatically removed. You can clear it sooner from within the app.
What wakomi does not do
- No account. The app works fully without one. There is nothing to sign up for, and no personal profile to delete later.
- No upload of your documents. No image, no OCR text, and no extracted value is ever sent to our servers.
- No usage tracking. This version sends no scan telemetry — no analytics SDK, no third-party trackers, and no crash-reporting service. There are no ads.
- wakomi does not collect your contacts, your location, or anything from your photo library beyond the images you explicitly choose to open.
The one thing our servers do
The app downloads a shared knowledge base — the catalogue of document types and the official sources wakomi links to. That delivery is the only contact the app makes with our servers, it needs no account, and it carries none of your document data. The servers run in Tokyo, Japan. A plain, live statement of what the servers hold is published at the /data page.
How your data is used
| Photos & text you capture | Read the document and produce your answer, on the device. Nothing else is done with them. |
|---|---|
| Your saved readings | Keep a document you read available to you, with its deadline, until you delete it. Stored on the device. |
| Language & region settings | Answer in the right language and point at the right local sources. Stored on the device. |
The pilot programme
During the pilot, you may choose to share a document with wakomi to help improve how it reads real paper. That only happens when you deliberately send it, with your consent. A shared document is used only to improve wakomi’s understanding — never published, never sold, and deleted on request. Please do not share documents that belong to someone else.
Your rights
Wherever you live, you can ask what wakomi holds about you, ask for a copy, correct it, or have it deleted. EU law (GDPR) applies because the operator is Belgian; Japanese law (APPI) is respected because you and your data are in Japan. Because your documents live on your device, deleting them in the app removes them. For anything held by the pilot, email hello@wakomi.app and it will be honoured.
What wakomi is not
wakomi explains official information and links its source. It is a utility, not an authority: it is not legal advice, and it does not replace a lawyer, a gyōseishoshi, or your ward office.
Changes
If this policy changes in a way that matters, the app will say so before the change applies. The current version always lives at wakomi.app/privacy.