Privacy
This page summarises how Kimochi handles your data. The privacy policy is the full, authoritative version.
Kimochi has no analytics, telemetry, crash reporting or advertising, and accounts are optional. Most of what it does happens on your computer.
What stays on your computer
Section titled “What stays on your computer”- Captures are held in memory while Kimochi reads them, and are not saved to disk or uploaded, except to an online OCR engine you chose.
- The Log, sessions, stats and Notebook are in Kimochi’s data folder.
- Dictionaries are stored locally, and lookups run locally.
- Settings, including API keys such as your DeepL key.
What each online feature sends
Section titled “What each online feature sends”| Feature | What is sent | Where |
|---|---|---|
| Google Lens (the default OCR engine) | The captured region | Straight to Google’s Lens service; not through Kimochi’s servers. |
| Kimochi cloud OCR (signed in) | The captured region | Kimochi’s server, then Google Cloud Vision. Not stored; counted towards your month. |
| Read aloud (Kimochi Cloud) | The line’s text and voice | Kimochi’s server, then ElevenLabs. The audio is cached by a fingerprint of voice and text, not by who asked. |
| Translation and explanations (Kimochi Cloud) | The line, and the lines before it for explanations | Kimochi’s server, then DeepL or an AI provider (Anthropic or OpenAI) through Cloudflare AI Gateway, which keeps request logs tagged with your account id. |
| Translation with your DeepL key | The line | DeepL, with your key. |
| Explain with Codex CLI or Claude CLI | The prompt | Whatever that tool on your computer sends. |
| Model downloads (MeikiOCR, Manga OCR) | A download request | Hugging Face and GitHub, the first time you choose the engine. |
| Dictionary engine and dictionary downloads | A download request | The publisher’s host, such as GitHub or data.10ten.life. Importing a file uses no network. |
| VNDB import | Your search | VNDB’s API. |
| Anki | Cards | AnkiConnect on this computer. |
| Clipboard and WebSocket | — | Stay on your computer or network. |
To keep everything on your computer, choose an on-device OCR engine (Apple Live Text, MeikiOCR, Manga OCR or OneOCR) and don’t sign in.
With an account
Section titled “With an account”An account stores your email, display name and sign-in method, your linked apps, monthly usage counts, and, with Sync, your preferences (never your API keys or other secrets), presets, reading totals and your sessions with their lines, Notebook and captured images. You can download or delete your synced data, or delete the account, from kimochiapp.com/account.