Privacy policy

Contents (13 sections)

1. About this policy 2. Information we collect 3. How we use your information 4. AI journal analysis 5. Who we share it with 6. Where your data is stored 7. How we protect it 8. How long we keep it 9. Your rights and choices 10. Children and teenagers 11. Cookies and similar technologies 12. Changes to this policy 13. Contact us

1. About this policy

This policy explains what personal data Sojiwa collects when you use the Sojiwa app (on Android and at app.sojiwa.com) and this website, why we collect it, who we share it with, and the choices you have. Sojiwa is run by the Sojiwa team in Malaysia. If you have questions, email [email protected].

We process your personal data in line with Malaysia's Personal Data Protection Act 2010 (PDPA). If you live elsewhere, you may have extra rights under your local law; see section 9.

2. Information we collect

Information you give us

Account details: your name, email address, username, password (stored only as a secure hash), profile photo, language settings, and how you sign in (email, Google or a passkey). If someone invited you, we also keep the referral code you used.
Your journal and check-ins: journal titles, text, the mood you choose and any photos you add; daily check-ins and the mood you pick.
Memories and small-wins jar: photos, titles, dates and places of the memory albums you create, and the text of the small wins you add to your jar. Like your journal, they are private to you, not shown in the community, and small-win text is never sent to AI. They are included in your data export.
Personal insights (optional): details you choose to add to help the AI understand you, such as your date of birth, gender, occupation, MBTI type, hobbies, relationship status and common sources of stress.
Community activity: posts, comments, reactions, photos, hashtags, the groups you join, who you follow and block, and any reports you make. Anonymous posts hide your name from other users, but they are still linked to your account on our side.
Pet and rewards: your pet, its items, coins, postcards, notes and gifts with friends, shared goals, tokens, missions, referral and redeem-code activity.
Feedback and support: feedback you send in the app (with any screenshot, plus your app version, device model, operating system and language), and messages you send through our website contact form or by email.
Purchases: what you bought, the price, currency and status, and the transaction references from Google Play or Stripe. We do not receive or store your full card details.

Information collected automatically

Device and technical data: your IP address, device model and name, operating system, app version, notification token and sign-in sessions (shown to you under Signed-in devices).
Approximate location: the app looks up your approximate location (city, region, country and time zone) from your IP address, using ipinfo.io. We use it to send reminders at a sensible local time, to show festivals and greetings for your country, and to understand where our users are.
Device location for community posts: to post in the community feed outside a group, the app asks for your device location. It is stored with the post and used for features such as posts near you. Other users don't see your location.
Usage and crash data: we use Google Analytics for Firebase to understand how the app is used (for example, which screens are opened and which features are used, such as checking in or writing an entry, together with the mood level chosen), and Firebase Crashlytics to fix crashes. On Android, the Meta SDK tells us when the app is opened and helps us measure our advertising, using your device's advertising ID.
How you found us: if you arrive through a campaign link or another website, we record that source and the page you landed on, and pass it to Google Play when you install the app, so we can see which channels work.

3. How we use your information

To run Sojiwa: your account, journal, check-ins, pet, community, groups, rewards and purchases.
To write your AI journal analysis, but only when you ask for one and have agreed to it (section 4).
To send notifications and emails: reminders and greetings, community and pet updates, account and security emails, and occasional news. You can turn off marketing emails and notification types at any time.
To keep the community safe: handling reports, preventing spam, fraud and abuse, and enforcing our Terms of Service.
To answer your messages and feedback, and to reward ideas we adopt.
To understand and improve the app and website, fix problems and measure our marketing.
To keep the service secure and to meet our legal obligations.

Journal entries and moods can reveal information about your mental health. We treat this as sensitive personal data. We process it to provide the features you use, with your explicit consent, which you give by using those features and by agreeing before your first AI analysis.

4. AI journal analysis

Nothing from your journal is sent to AI until you tap Analyse journals and agree to the AI consent notice. When you ask for an analysis, we send:

your journal entries from the last 7 days (the text, date and mood, but not the titles or photos);
the personal insights you've added, including your age if you added your date of birth, and the language you want the reply in;
short summaries of up to 3 of your previous analyses from the last 30 days.

We do not send your name, email address or location. The request goes through OpenRouter, Inc. (USA), which passes it to Anthropic's Claude models or, as a backup, OpenAI's models. These providers may run the models on their cloud partners' infrastructure, so your data is processed outside Malaysia. Our OpenRouter account is set so that providers may not use your entries to train their models. We store the analysis you receive so you can read it again later.

You can withdraw your consent at any time in Settings › Privacy & security › AI analysis consent. We'll ask again before your next analysis, and an analysis that hasn't started yet won't be sent. Analyses you already have stay in your account. We keep a record of when you gave and withdrew consent, and of when you accepted these policies. AI can make mistakes, and its replies are not medical or psychological advice.

Some features of our community also use AI. Community accounts operated by Sojiwa may use AI to write posts and replies, and to do so, posts shared publicly in the community may be processed by AI providers through OpenRouter. Your private journal is never used for this.

When you choose to translate a community post or comment, its text is sent to Google Cloud Translation to produce the translation. We store translations on our servers so the same text isn't sent again. Your journal and other private content are never sent for translation.

Our team also uses AI assistants from Anthropic (Claude) and OpenAI (ChatGPT) to help analyse service data for internal purposes: improving the app, handling support requests, moderating the community and running the service. Only authorised team members can do this, and the assistants see only the data they need. By default, that means totals, trends and limited information about individual accounts, such as display names, country and how the app is used, with email addresses masked and no IP addresses or notification tokens. When looking into a particular case, such as a support request or a report, a small number of authorised team members can also see an individual user's account details, such as their email address, and the feedback and support messages they sent us. Your journal entries and AI journal analyses are never shared with these assistants. This data is processed outside Malaysia.

We do not sell your personal data. We share it only as described here.

Service providers who help us run Sojiwa and process data on our behalf: hosting and storage (DigitalOcean and Cloudflare); email delivery (Brevo); AI processing (OpenRouter and the model providers in section 4, and Anthropic and OpenAI for the AI assistants our team uses); Google (sign-in, push notifications, analytics, crash reports, Google Play billing, reCAPTCHA and translation of community posts and comments); Stripe (web payments); Meta (app analytics and ad measurement on Android); ipinfo.io (approximate location); and the tools we use to back up, operate and monitor the service, including internal notifications to our team.
Other users: whatever you share in the community, your username, name and profile photo, and your pet when you visit friends or share a postcard link. Anonymous posts don't show your name.
For legal reasons: when the law requires it, or to protect the safety of our users or others.
If Sojiwa changes hands: if the service is transferred to a new operator, your data would move with it under this policy, and we would tell you first.

6. Where your data is stored

Our servers are in Singapore, run on DigitalOcean. Photos, journal images and data exports are stored with Cloudflare R2. Several of our service providers, including OpenRouter, the AI model providers, Google, Stripe, Meta and Brevo, process data in other countries, including the United States. By using Sojiwa, you consent to your data being transferred to these places. We only use providers we trust to protect it.

7. How we protect it

Data travels between the app and our servers over HTTPS.
Passwords are stored as one-way hashes, never as plain text.
Journal photos and data exports are kept in private storage and opened only through short-lived links.
Only the Sojiwa team can access our systems.
In the app, you can add a 6-digit passcode with fingerprint or face unlock; on Android, screenshots are blocked while it's on. You can see and sign out your devices in Settings › Privacy & security › Signed-in devices.

No system is completely secure. If a data breach is likely to affect you, we'll tell you and the relevant authorities as the law requires.

8. How long we keep it

While your account is open, we keep your data so the app works. When you delete a journal entry, post or comment, it is removed from the app straight away and permanently deleted from our live systems when your account is deleted.
When you delete your account, you have 30 days to change your mind. After that, we delete or anonymise your personal data, including your journals, AI analyses, personal insights, posts, comments, pet and profile.
What we keep after deletion: records of purchases and token transactions (which can include the IP address used at the time of purchase), kept for accounting, tax and payment disputes, and no longer linked to your name or email; and records of reports made by or about you, which can include a copy of the reported content, kept to protect the community.
Backups: copies of our database are kept in backups so we can recover from problems, and your data may remain in them for a period after it's deleted.
Data exports are deleted 30 days after they're ready. Sign-in sessions expire after 30 days without use.
Analytics and crash data are kept by Google and Meta under their own retention settings.

9. Your rights and choices

Get a copy of your data: Settings › Help & support › Request my data gives you a PDF and a JSON file of your profile, journals, memories, small-wins jar, AI analyses, tokens and purchases, community posts and pet. You can request one every 24 hours; the download link works for 10 minutes and the file is deleted after 30 days.
Correct your data: edit your profile in Settings › Account › Edit profile, and your personal insights in Profile › AI advice › Personal insights.
Delete your account: Settings › Account › Delete account. If you can't sign in, email [email protected] from your account's email address.
Withdraw AI consent: Settings › Privacy & security › AI analysis consent.
Emails and notifications: marketing emails are on unless you turn them off in Settings › Notifications or through the unsubscribe link in any marketing email. You can also turn off each type of push notification. Account and security emails are always sent.
Location: you can turn off location access in your device settings. You'll still be able to use Sojiwa, but you won't be able to post in the community feed outside a group.

Under the PDPA, you can ask to access or correct your personal data, or limit how we use it, by emailing [email protected]. We'll reply within 21 days. If you live in the European Union, the United Kingdom or another place with data protection laws, you also have the rights those laws give you, and you can complain to your local data protection authority.

10. Children and teenagers

Sojiwa is for people aged 13 and over. If you're between 13 and 17, please use Sojiwa only with the permission of a parent or guardian. If you believe a child under 13 has created an account, email [email protected] and we'll delete it.

11. Cookies and similar technologies

This website doesn't set advertising cookies. It stores a few small items in your browser:

Essential: your cookie choice, your language preference, and whether the page was opened inside the Sojiwa app (with its light or dark theme).
How you found us: the campaign or website that brought you here and the page you landed on. When you tap a Google Play link, this is added to it so we can see which channels lead to installs.
Analytics: we use Google Analytics. Until you choose "Allow analytics", it runs without cookies and only sends anonymous signals that help Google estimate visits. If you allow analytics, it sets its cookies (such as _ga) to measure visits. You can change your choice at any time through "Cookie settings" at the bottom of every page.
Other Google services: our pages use Google Fonts, which receives your IP address to deliver the font, and the contact form uses Google reCAPTCHA to stop spam.

The app stores similar data on your device, such as your sign-in session, settings, passcode (hashed) and an unsent journal draft.

12. Changes to this policy

We'll update this policy when Sojiwa changes. The date at the top shows when it was last updated. If a change materially affects how we use your data, we'll let you know in the app or by email before it takes effect.

13. Contact us

Sojiwa is run by the Sojiwa team in Malaysia. For privacy questions or requests, email [email protected]. For anything else, email [email protected].