Privacy
What happens to the documents you send us
The short version
You send us a document to translate. We use it for that and nothing else. We delete your source file 14 days after delivery and the finished translation 30 days after that. We never sell your information, never use your documents to train anything, and never share them except with a person who is working on your order under a confidentiality obligation.
The sections below say the same thing precisely, because a summary is not a policy.
Who is responsible
Polyfetti, the trading name of Sawai Nolly Auxilio, is the business responsible for handling your personal information. Contact: hello@polyfetti.com. Our registered address and telephone number are disclosed on request, as set out in our commercial disclosure.
What we collect
| Category | What it is, and why we need it |
|---|---|
| Your documents | The files you upload. These often contain sensitive personal information — names, dates of birth, addresses, family relationships, nationality, employment and income. We need them because they are the thing being translated. |
| Order details | Language pair, document type, where the translation is going, intended use, deadline, and the spelling you want used for names. These determine how the document is prepared. |
| Contact details | Your email address, so we can send the quote, the delivery link, and any question about your order. |
| Payment record | Amount, date and the reference on the transfer. Payment is by bank transfer, so there is no card and no card number for us to receive or store. |
| Technical records | Access and download logs against your order, kept so we can prove who accessed a document and when. |
What we use it for
Under the APPI we must state our purposes of use specifically. They are:
- Preparing, checking and delivering the translation you ordered.
- Checking your file is readable and complete before you are asked to pay.
- Answering your questions about your order, and handling corrections and complaints.
- Confirming payment against our bank record, and paying refunds back to the account the money came from.
- Keeping the records we are legally required to keep, including tax records.
- Investigating a security incident, if one occurs.
We will not use your information for anything else without asking you first. In particular we do not use your documents for marketing, we do not sell or rent your information to anyone, and we do not use your documents to develop, train or improve any product.
How long we keep it
Retention is short by design. The less we hold, the less there is to lose.
| What | Kept for |
|---|---|
| Your uploaded source files | 14 days after delivery, then deleted. |
| The finished translation | 30 days after delivery, then deleted. Download and keep your own copy. |
| Order record | 365 days. What was ordered, when, and what was delivered — no document content. |
| Audit record | 5 years. Who accessed, approved, released or deleted a file, and when. Required to investigate any dispute or incident. |
Deletion is verified, not assumed, and the deletion itself is recorded in the audit log. If tax or legal obligations require us to keep a record longer, we keep only the minimum that obligation requires.
Who else sees it
Your documents are seen by the smallest possible number of people.
- The translator and reviewer working on your order. Bound by confidentiality. For certified work, a named person takes responsibility for the translation and their name appears on the certificate.
- Your own bank, and ours. Payment is by bank transfer, so your bank sees what any transfer shows — the amount, the date and the account name. No payment company sits between us, and no bank ever sees your documents.
- Nobody else, unless you ask us to send it somewhere, or unless we are legally compelled by a court or an authority acting under law. If we are compelled, we will tell you unless the law forbids it.
We do not transfer your personal information to a third party for their own purposes. Where we entrust processing to a subcontractor, we remain responsible for it, and we bind them by contract.
Who we use, and where they are
Named in full, because two of them are outside Japan and the Act requires us to say so rather than describe them in general terms.
| Who | Where | What they handle |
|---|---|---|
| Oracle Cloud | Japan — Tokyo or Osaka | The server. Your documents and your order record live here and do not leave the country. |
| Resend | United States | Sends our email to you. Your address and the text of the message pass through it. A delivery email carries the translated file as an attachment, so that file passes through it too. |
| Cloudflare | United States | Our domain name and the routing of mail you send to us. It sees the address and routing of an email, and anything you attach to one. |
Both US companies are used under their standard terms, which commit them to handling personal data only on our instructions. If you would rather not have your document travel by email at all, say so and we will deliver it another way — the same address, no extra charge.
How we protect it
What follows is what we actually do, described so you can check it rather than trust it.
- Your connection is encrypted. Everything between your browser and us travels over HTTPS. Files are not separately encrypted once they are on our server — the protection there is that almost nothing can reach them.
- The screen we work from is not on the internet. Our review console refuses any request that did not arrive on the machine itself, and the web server in front of it is configured to refuse those addresses outright. Reaching it requires an encrypted tunnel into the server.
- Every access, download, release and deletion is recorded against the order, and that record cannot be edited or erased. The database itself refuses any attempt — not by policy, by construction.
- Deletion happens on a clock, not on request. Source files are deleted 14 days after delivery and the translation 30 days after that, by a scheduled sweep rather than by somebody remembering.
- Your documents stay in Japan. The server is in Tokyo or Osaka. The only thing that leaves the country is email — see the section above.
Being honest about the limits. We do not keep backups of your documents. That is a deliberate trade — a backup is another copy of your 戸籍 somewhere, and it would outlive the deletion clock above — but it means that if our server were lost, work in progress would be lost with it. We would tell you and refund you.
And we cannot make a document impossible to screenshot, copy or print once it is on your screen, and we do not claim to. No online service can promise perfect security, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.
If something goes wrong
If personal information is leaked, lost or damaged, the Act requires us to report it to the Personal Information Protection Commission and to tell the people affected. What we would do:
- Tell you. By email, to the address on your order, as soon as we know what happened and which documents were involved — not after an investigation concludes.
- Report it to the Personal Information Protection Commission within the time the Act allows.
- Tell you what we do not know, as well as what we do. A first message that says "we do not yet know whether your file was among them" is more use to you than silence.
Your rights
Under the APPI you may ask us to:
- tell you what personal information we hold about you;
- correct it if it is wrong;
- delete it, or stop using it, where the law allows;
- tell you who we have provided it to, and who we received it from.
Email hello@polyfetti.com. We respond within 10 business days, and we do not charge for a reasonable request. We will need to confirm you are the person the information is about before we act — usually by replying from the email address on the order.
Documents about other people
Family registers, school records and employment documents frequently contain information about people other than you — a spouse, a child, a parent. When you upload a document you confirm that you are entitled to submit it and to have it translated. We rely on that confirmation. If you are not sure whether you are entitled, ask us before uploading rather than after.
If you asked us for something we do not offer
There is a box on the counter for telling us what you were looking for — a language or a document we do not handle yet. It is the only way we find out what to add next, and what you type there is kept so we can count it.
It takes no file. We do not want your document for a service we have just told you we cannot provide. It records the words you typed and nothing else.
Your email address is optional, and it is only kept if you tick a box. If you type an address and tick nothing, we do not store it at all. There are two separate boxes, and they mean two different things:
- Write to me if this becomes possible. One message, about the thing you asked for.
- Send me occasional news. Separate, never ticked for you, and you can agree to one without the other.
We cannot promise we will ever offer what you asked for. We only promise to tell you if we do.
You can have your address removed at any time using the link in the same box, or by writing to us. What you asked for stays — once the address is gone there is nothing in it that identifies you, and it is the only record of what people need.
The free tools
The tools at polyfetti.com/tools are separate from ordering a translation, and most of them never send us anything at all. The photo tool, the PDF tools and the signature tool run entirely inside your own browser: your file is opened, changed and saved by your device, and those pages have no way to transmit it. That is a property of how they are built, not a policy we are asking you to trust.
One tool is different, and it says so on its own page. The reader at /tools/read.html sends your picture to our machine, because getting text out of a Japanese document needs software that cannot practically run in a browser. That file is written, read and deleted within the same request — including when the reading fails. No order is created, no account is needed, and nothing about the file or what it said is kept. The 14-day clock described above does not apply because there is nothing left for it to apply to.
The converters and the glossary send us only the word or the date you typed, in order to answer, and keep nothing.
Cookies and analytics
We use no third-party analytics. There is no tracking cookie, no advertising pixel and no identifier that follows you between pages.
What we keep is a count: how many times a thing happened on a given day. Nothing more. One person doing something twice and two people doing it once each are the same number to us, and there is no way for us to tell them apart afterwards.
These are the only 13 things counted:
page_view- A public page was opened.
quote_started- Somebody sent a document to the counter for a price.
quote_shown- A price was shown.
quote_refused- The build declined to give a price, and why.
order_created- An order was started.
order_priced- An order was given a price by a person.
payment_confirmed- A payment settled.
order_delivered- Finished work was handed over.
basket_started- Several documents were sent at once.
account_opened- Somebody opened their own order history.
tool_used- One of the free document tools was used.
preview_seen- Somebody looked at the sample of their translation before paying.
verification_checked- A certificate reference was looked up.
Counts are deleted after 180 days.
Changes and complaints
If we change this policy we will post the new version here with a new date, and where the change is significant we will tell customers with an open order directly.
If you are unhappy with how we have handled your information, tell us first at hello@polyfetti.com — we would rather fix it. You may also complain to the Personal Information Protection Commission at ppc.go.jp.