Privacy Policy

The short version

karta exists to make people discoverable using personal signals, on their own terms, using data you provide about yourself.

Your questionnaire answers and the answers to your generated questions are never shown to anyone individually. They are used to compute matches. Your CV file is never stored.

Who we are

karta is operated from Japan and is the data controller for the information described here. For anything in this policy, write to [email protected].

What we collect

• Account details you give us when you register, and whether you are a job seeker or a recruiter. We do not use social sign-in, so we never receive credentials or profile data from Google, LinkedIn, or anyone else.
• What you put on your profile - your name, your employer, a summary of your work history, an optional public contact link, and your visibility setting. You pick your employer from our company registry and can add it if it is not there yet. The summary is text you write yourself or generate with our summarization feature, and review before submitting.
• Your answers to our work-style questionnaire and to the follow-up questions generated from your CV. These are private: never displayed against your name, to recruiters or to anyone else, and present in the product only inside aggregates.
• Professional details you opt into sharing with recruiters, such as your availability and seniority. These are disclosed only when you switch that sharing on, are never used to compute matches, and can be switched off again.
• What you do on the platform- pokes sent and answered, and ordinary product usage. Each hiring organization also keeps an audit log of its own members’ actions, so its owner can see what their recruiters did; it holds no questionnaire data.
• A numeric representation of your work, computed from the above, which powers search, the culture map and company similarity.
• Ordinary server logs, retained for operations and abuse investigation.

Your CV file is not stored

When and if you decide to upload a CV, the file is read once and never written to disk or to our database. The text is stripped of PII (email addresses, phone numbers and URLs) on a best-effort basis before being forwarded for AI summarization. Only that approved summary is stored. The original document is discarded when the request ends.

How we use it

To build your profile and compute your matches, to show you where you sit relative to companies, to let recruiters find you within the limits you set, and to keep the service running and secure.

Matching is automated: it decides how high you rank in a recruiter’s search and where your position is on the culture map. karta is a discovery tool. It does not produce a score of competence or employability, makes no hiring decisions, and no legal or similarly significant decision about you is made by automated means here.

Who can see what

You are hidden by default. A hidden candidate appears to recruiters as an anonymous match and on the culture map as an unlabelled dot, with name, employer and contact link withheld. A recruiter can poke you; nothing is disclosed unless you accept, and then only to the recruiter who poked you.

If you make yourself visible, your name, employer and public contact link are shown to recruiters, who may contact you directly via the link you provide. Your questionnaire and generated answers stay private either way.

Company pages show distributions rather than individuals, and those statistics are suppressed entirely for any company with fewer than five profiles. Map positions are stripped of identifying fields for viewers who have not built a profile themselves.

Third parties we send data to

• Google.We send your CV text, bio and answers to Google’s Gemini models to compute your match data, generate your questions and summarize your CV. Google processes this as our service provider, and the processing may occur outside Japan and outside the EEA.
• Google Analytics, on our public website only, for aggregate traffic measurement.
• Cloudflare, which carries traffic between you and our server and can see requests as they pass through. It does not hold your profile or your answers.

We do not sell your personal information, and we do not share it for cross-context behavioural advertising. Otherwise we disclose information only where the law requires it, where it is necessary to protect people or the service, or where you have asked us to.

Cookies and browser storage

We use a session token, held in your browser and mirrored into a cookie so that pages can be rendered for you while signed in. It expires after an hour, is cleared when you sign out, and is strictly necessary for the service to work. Google Analytics cookies are set on our public website only. We use no advertising or cross-site tracking cookies.

Retention and deletion

We keep your account and profile for as long as your account exists. Uploaded CV files are never retained.

You can delete your account yourself from your account page, or email [email protected]from the address on the account and we will do it for you. Either way we remove your profile, your answers, your match data, your pokes and your account record. We keep anonymous activity counts and a record that an account was deleted (with the week it signed up), none of which identify you; an organization’s trust log may retain the record that one of its recruiters took an action, without your profile data.

Your rights

Regardless of where you live, you have the right to access the personal data we hold about you, to correct it, to have it deleted, to receive a copy in portable form, to object to or restrict certain processing, and to withdraw consent you have given.

Exercise any of these by writing to [email protected]. We may keep information the law requires us to keep, and we may decline a request that is repetitive or manifestly unfounded.

Security

Traffic to karta-ai.com is encrypted in transit. Passwords are stored hashed and sessions are short-lived. Uploaded documents are parsed in an isolated, time-limited subprocess and redacted before any further processing.

You are responsible for keeping your password to yourself, and we will notify affected users about a security incident that puts their data at risk, using the email they provide at registration.

Children

karta is a platform for working professionals and is not intended for anyone under 18. We do not knowingly collect data from children.

Changes to this policy

We may update this policy. If a change materially affects how your information is handled, we will say so in the product or by email before it takes effect. Continuing to use karta after a change means you accept the updated policy.

Contact

[email protected]