Privacy Policy

This is an English translation provided for convenience. The Japanese version is the legally binding text.

Pote Baby Log ("the app") lets an invited family share a diary, photo album, plans, tasks, a wish list and childcare records among themselves. This policy sets out what information the operator of the app and its API (api.potebiyori.com) ("we") handle and how we use it, under Japan's Act on the Protection of Personal Information and other applicable law.

1. Information we collect

Account information: email address, display name, password (stored hashed with PBKDF2-SHA256; never in plain text)
What your family enters: childcare records (feeds, sleep, nappies, temperature, growth and so on), diary entries, comments, reactions, the wish list, calendar plans, chores and tasks
Photos and videos: those uploaded to attach to your family's album, diary entries or records
Device tokens: the Apple Push Notification service (APNs) tokens needed to deliver push notifications, and the display language of that device (so notifications arrive in the right language)
Activity logs: audit logs kept for detecting unauthorised access and for safety (creation, editing, deletion, invitations, permission changes and the like). We do not log tokens or other secrets.

2. How we use it

We use the information we collect to provide the app: sharing records, photos and plans within a family, sending notifications, managing accounts and preventing misuse. We never sell data to third parties. Photos and videos are encrypted on your family's devices before they are stored, so we cannot view them. Text you enter — diary titles and entries, comments, plans, childcare records and so on — is not end-to-end encrypted: it is sent over TLS and stored on our servers. We do not look at this content except where required by law, when you ask us to as part of a support request, or when it is necessary to investigate abuse or a service fault.

3. Storage and third parties

Data is stored on Cloudflare, Inc. infrastructure (D1 / R2 / Workers). Photos and videos live in a private bucket; viewing and uploading go through short-lived signed URLs issued only after authorisation is verified
We use Apple Inc. (APNs) to deliver push notifications. Notification text may include the beginning of a diary entry or comment (up to 80 characters)
Apart from these processors, we do not provide information to third parties except where required by law

Processors located outside Japan

Cloudflare, Inc. and Apple Inc. are both headquartered in the United States. For information about the protection of personal information under the US regime, please see the material published by Japan's Personal Information Protection Commission. We work to ensure our processors handle personal data appropriately through our contracts with them and through technical measures such as access control and encryption.

4. Advertising

To keep the app free to use, we show banner ads from Google AdMob (Google LLC). Ads appear only at the bottom of the Settings and Calendar screens — never while you are viewing diary entries, photos or records.

We do not ask for tracking permission (ATT) and do not use the advertising identifier (IDFA); all ads are non-personalized. When an ad is served, technical information such as your IP address and device/OS type is sent to Google, and your approximate region (derived from the IP address) may be used to select ads. See the Google Privacy Policy and Google's advertising explanation for details.

Photos and videos are encrypted on your device, so we cannot view them. We never use anything your family enters or saves — including diary entries and other text — as material for advertising.

5. Location data in photos (EXIF)

For uploaded JPEG photos, EXIF data (including GPS location) is removed both by re-encoding on the device and again on the server. It is kept only if you explicitly choose to keep it.

6. Children's information

Information about children recorded in the app (name, birthday, childcare records, photos and so on) can be entered and viewed only by a parent or by family members they have invited. Joining a family group requires an invite code, and nothing is made public outside the family group.

7. Managing and deleting data

You can review, export and delete your data on your Pote ID account page (account.potebiyori.com — also reachable from Settings → Delete account and data in the app). Because one family's data is shared across several services (Pote Baby Log, Pote Picture Books, Kazoku Nikki), before anything is deleted we show the list of services linked to that family so you can delete them one service at a time
Deleted data (diary entries, comments, records, plans, photos, videos and so on) cannot be restored. Right after deletion — within minutes at most — its content and any photo or video files are erased from our servers; deleting a family or an account erases everything immediately. To let other devices know something was deleted, we keep a content-free marker (just an ID and a timestamp) for up to 30 days before erasing that too. Before deleting, we recommend exporting your data and saving photos and videos to your device
After erasure, it may still remain in our disaster-recovery backups for up to 30 more days before being removed automatically. We do not restore individual data from these backups
When you delete your account, your own data — sign-in details, devices, notification settings, your personal space, your conversations with Chaco and so on — is erased immediately. Posts you shared with a family stay as that family's data until the family deletes them (if nobody else is left in the family, the whole family is erased)
For requests or questions, please contact us at the address below

8. Security

To prevent leakage, loss or damage to the personal data we handle, we take the following measures.

All communication is encrypted with TLS
Access tokens are short-lived. Refresh tokens, invite codes and verification codes are stored only as hashes. Passwords are hashed with PBKDF2-SHA256 and never stored in plain text
Photos and videos are protected by end-to-end encryption — encrypted inside your family's devices before being stored — and no decryption key is kept on our servers
Every API enforces access control at the family-group level, verified continuously by automated tests
We keep audit logs of creation, editing, deletion, invitations and permission changes, and use them to detect unauthorised access

9. Disclosure, correction and suspension of use

Under Japan's Act on the Protection of Personal Information, you may ask us to disclose your retained personal data, to correct, add to or delete its contents, to suspend its use or erase it, or to stop providing it to third parties. Please contact us from your registered email address at the address below. After verifying your identity we will respond within a reasonable period, as required by law. Note that much of this information can be checked, corrected and deleted directly by you through the app itself — viewing and editing records and photos, exporting your data, and deleting your account.

About the picture-book app "Pote Picture Books"

Shirokikaku's picture-book app "Pote Picture Books" (iOS) has no account sign-up and does not collect children's names, birthdays, voice, photos or location. It uses no advertising SDKs or tracking. Reading position and branch history are stored only on the device and never sent to our servers. Purchases and restores go through Apple's App Store; we do not receive the buyer's name, address or card details. No network requests are made while reading (page turns, choices, TV display). Contact: our contact form.

About the monitor app "Pote Camera"

Shirokikaku's baby-monitor app "Pote Camera" (iOS) has no account sign-up. Camera video, microphone audio, crying detection and the notification history stay on your home Wi-Fi between the monitor and parents' phones (encrypted device to device) and are never sent to our servers. The notification history on the monitor is excluded from iCloud backup and deleted after 14 days.

To tell parents when monitoring stops or when there is a notification such as crying, our server (api.potebiyori.com) receives only: a household ID, per-device tokens (we store only their hashes), each parent phone's push token, device name and language, the monitor's status (whether video and sound are running, its thermal state, iOS and app version), and the type and time of notifications. There is no mechanism for us to receive video, audio, photos or thumbnails. Notifications are delivered through the Apple Push Notification service. Removing the monitor deletes this information. Pote Camera is not a medical device.

10. Changes to this policy

If we change this policy we will announce it on this page. For significant changes we will also notify you in the app. Where the law requires your consent for a change, we will obtain it again.

11. Operator and contact

This app is operated by Shirokikaku (https://shirokikaku.com). Questions about how personal information is handled, and the requests described in section 9, are received at the address below. We will notify the operator's name and address without delay, as required by law, to anyone who requests them.

Contact: our contact form

Established: 24 July 2026
Last revised: 27 September 2026 (removed Pote Memory Calendar, which is no longer offered, from the list of services that share a family's data)