Privacy Policy

1. Scope, and who is responsible

This policy covers the Langulect mobile application for Android and iOS (com.langulectapp, the “app”) and the website at langulect.com (the “site”). Together we call these the “Service”. Where the two platforms differ — and on microphone, camera and AI they genuinely do — we say which is which rather than describing one and hoping it covers both.

Langulect is an independent project. For the purposes of the UK and EU General Data Protection Regulation, the developer of Langulect is the data controller for the information described here, and can be reached at langulect@gmail.com.

This policy does not cover services operated by others, even where Langulect relies on them. Google Sign-In, Google Play, and the speech recognition and text-to-speech built into an Android device are Google’s services, governed by Google’s Privacy Policy. Sign in with Apple, the App Store, Apple Intelligence and iOS dictation are Apple’s, governed by Apple’s Privacy Policy. Section 8 sets out exactly where the boundary falls.

2. Terms used in this policy

Four words carry specific meanings, and using them loosely is how privacy policies become unreadable:

• Personal information means information that identifies you or could reasonably be linked to you, such as your email address or your account identifier.
• Account means the Langulect account created when you sign in with Google or with Apple. It is separate from the Google or Apple account you signed in with, which we do not control.
• On your device means processed on your phone, with no copy sent to us. Where we say this, we mean it literally.
• Friend means another learner you have deliberately connected with by exchanging friend codes. It never happens automatically.

3. Information we collect

We collect three kinds of information: what you give us when you sign in, what your learning generates, and the minimum technical information needed to answer a network request.

3.1 Account information from your sign-in provider

An account is required to use Langulect. You create one by signing in with an identity provider, which means you do not have to invent and remember another password, and we never handle one.

Google Sign-In, available on Android and iOS, gives us a limited profile:

• your Google account identifier, the stable key your progress is stored under;
• your email address, used to identify your account and to answer you if you contact us;
• your display name, shown to friends you add;
• a link to your Google profile picture, shown alongside your name.

We never receive your Google password, and we have no access to your Gmail, contacts, files, or anything else in your Google account. If you change your name or picture in Google, what Langulect shows changes with it, because we store the link rather than a copy of the image.

Sign in with Apple, available on iOS, gives us less, by design:

• the account identifier Apple issues for Langulect specifically. It identifies you to us and to no one else, because Apple gives a different one to every developer.
• your email address — and if you choose Hide My Email, what we receive is a relay address Apple forwards from, not your real one. That works for us: we only ever need to reach you, not to know it.
• your name, but only the first time you authorise the app. Apple deliberately never sends it again, so if you sign in on a second device we reuse the name we already hold rather than blanking it.

Apple does not give us a profile picture, so on iOS you may choose one yourself. See section 3.7.

Email-and-password accounts. Creating a new account this way is not currently available. Accounts created before the option was withdrawn still work; for those we store the email address supplied and a salted cryptographic hash of the password — never the password itself. We therefore cannot tell you your password, and neither could anyone who obtained our files.

There is no guest mode. On the rare device where sign-in cannot run at all — one with no working Google Play services, for instance — the app falls back to a device-only profile so that you are not locked out. You cannot choose it, it is not an account, and no personal information is collected or transmitted at all: everything stays in the app’s private storage, and uninstalling the app removes it.

3.2 Information generated by your learning

This is the substance of the Service, and the reason an account is worth having. We store, associated with your account:

• the language course you chose;
• which lessons and units you have completed;
• your HO total, your daily streak, and the date you were last active;
• your preferences, such as whether AI assist and learning tips are switched on;
• the date the app was first installed, used to keep your streak honest across devices;
• timestamps recording that you accepted this policy and our Terms, and — on Android, where it applies — Google’s Gemma model licence.

We do not store the individual answers you give during a lesson on our servers. Which words you find difficult is worked out on your device to decide what to review next, and stays there.

3.3 Friends and group sessions

Every account has a short friend code derived from your account identifier. Sharing it, or scanning another learner’s QR code, connects the two accounts.

Once connected, a friend can see:

• your display name;
• your profile picture;
• your HO total, so the leaderboard can rank you.

They cannot see your email address, your lesson history, your streak details, your other friends, or anything else. You can remove a friend at any time, which stops the exchange immediately. Group session codes are short-lived and exist only to place two people in the same practice run; they carry no personal information beyond what is described here.

3.4 Device and technical information

When the app communicates with our server, the server necessarily observes the request in order to answer it, including your IP address and the time of the request. This is used to operate the Service, to keep it secure, and to diagnose faults. It is not used to build a profile of you, and it is not combined with your learning data for any analytical purpose.

On Android, the app also checks that the copy on your device was installed from Google Play rather than sideloaded from somewhere that could have repackaged it with malware, using the installer information Android reports and Google’s Play Integrity API. The result is a verdict about the app and the device — not about you — and we do not store it. iOS enforces the equivalent itself, so the app performs no such check there.

3.5 Your microphone

Speaking exercises need the microphone, and your device asks your permission before the first recording. Two distinct things happen to that audio, and the distinction matters enough that we will not blur it:

• Pronunciation and melody scoring happens on your device, on both platforms. The audio is measured as it is captured — loudness, pitch movement, timing — and discarded immediately afterwards. No file is written and nothing is uploaded.
• Speech recognition is performed by your device’s own speech service, not by Langulect. On iOS we require Apple’s on-device recognition specifically: if the language you are learning has no offline dictation model installed, the app refuses to recognise rather than send your voice to Apple, and the exercise falls back to self-assessment. On Android recognition is handed to the system speech service, which on most phones is Google’s; depending on your device and its settings that service may process the audio on Google’s servers under Google’s Privacy Policy. We neither control nor receive that processing; the app only gets the text that comes back. We would rather state that plainly than imply a guarantee the platform does not give us.

On iOS, recognition also needs its own permission, separate from the microphone, and iOS asks for both.

In every case Langulect never listens in the background, never records outside an exercise you started, never writes an audio file, and never sends audio to our servers. If you decline microphone permission, speaking prompts fall back to self-assessment and lessons still complete normally.

3.6 Your camera

Adding a friend in person can be done by scanning their QR code. How that happens differs by platform, and so does what the app can see:

• Android: the scan takes place entirely inside Google Play Services, which is why the Android app requests no camera permission at all and never receives an image.
• iOS: there is no equivalent system scanner, so the app opens the camera itself and iOS asks your permission. Frames are examined for a QR code as they arrive and are never saved, never uploaded and never sent anywhere.

Either way, all we end up with is the decoded friend code. Scanning is optional on both platforms: you can always type a friend code by hand instead.

3.7 Your photo library (iOS only)

Apple does not provide a profile picture with Sign in with Apple, so the iOS app lets you pick one. It uses Apple’s system photo picker, which runs outside the app — the practical consequence being that Langulect is never granted access to your photo library and cannot see anything except the single image you chose.

That image is re-encoded into a small square and saved inside the app’s own private storage on your device. Re-encoding discards the metadata the original carried, including any location the photo was taken at. The picture itself is never uploaded to our servers; only the fact that you have a local avatar is kept, and you can replace or remove it at any time in Settings.

3.8 Cookies and the website

This site sets no cookies, runs no analytics, and embeds no tracking pixels or social widgets. It loads a web font from Google Fonts, which means Google receives the request for the font file. Everything else is served from langulect.com.

4. Information we deliberately do not collect

Stating this plainly is more useful than leaving it to be inferred. Langulect does not collect, and has never collected:

• your precise or approximate location;
• your contacts, call logs or messages;
• a list of the other apps on your device;
• any advertising identifier, and we do not use one to profile you;
• payment information — Langulect is free and we operate no payment system;
• biometric data. Your voice is measured for pronunciation and discarded; no voiceprint is created, stored or used to identify you;
• any special category data such as health, religion, ethnicity or political opinions.

5. How we use information

We use the information described in section 3 to:

• provide the Service — save your progress, restore it on a new device, and keep your streak accurate;
• run features you asked for — friends, leaderboards and group sessions;
• adapt the teaching — decide which words to review based on the mistakes you make;
• keep accounts secure — authenticate you, detect abuse, and verify the app has not been tampered with;
• fix and improve the app — diagnose faults reported to us;
• communicate with you — reply when you write to us;
• comply with the law — where we are legally required to act.

We do not use your data to train artificial intelligence models, ours or anyone else’s. The AI tutor is a pre-trained model supplied by Google that runs on your device; it does not learn from you and it does not report back.

We do not use your information for automated decision-making that has a legal or similarly significant effect on you. Choosing which vocabulary to revise is the extent of it.

6. Our legal bases (EEA and UK)

If you are in the European Economic Area or the United Kingdom, we rely on the following legal bases under Article 6 of the GDPR:

• Performance of a contract — for account information and learning progress. Without these we cannot provide the Service you asked for.
• Consent — for microphone, speech recognition and camera access, and for downloading the Gemma model on Android. Each is optional, each is asked for explicitly, and you can withdraw any of them at any time in Settings or in your device’s own permission settings.
• Legitimate interests — for security, abuse prevention and fault diagnosis. We have considered your interests and limited this to what is needed to keep the Service working safely.
• Legal obligation — where the law requires us to retain or disclose information.

7. On-device AI

Langulect’s AI tutor runs entirely on your phone on both platforms. This is an architectural decision with a direct privacy consequence: the sentences you attempt, the text you write and the words you say are processed locally and are never transmitted to us or to anyone else for AI processing. There is no server doing the thinking, so there is no server-side record of what you asked. We could not show you a transcript of your conversations with the tutor if you demanded one, because we do not have it.

On Android the tutor is Google’s Gemma model. Because it is several gigabytes it is not included in the app: when you switch AI assist on, and after you have accepted Google’s Gemma Terms of Use, the app downloads it once from our server over Wi-Fi. From our side that is an ordinary static file request: nothing identifying you is attached to it, and we do not log which account downloaded the model. You can delete it from Settings at any time, which frees the storage.

On iOS the tutor uses Apple Intelligence, the model built into the operating system, on devices that support it. Nothing is downloaded, nothing occupies your storage, and no licence has to be accepted. The prompt never leaves the device, so it reaches neither us nor Apple’s servers. Apple applies its own safety filtering locally, which means a request it declines simply produces no explanation.

Where the on-device model cannot run — a lower-memory Android phone, or an iPhone without Apple Intelligence — the app falls back to its built-in offline tutor, and every feature continues to work. That fallback is local too.

8. How we share information

We do not sell your personal information, and we do not share it for advertising or cross-context behavioural advertising. The complete list of parties involved in running Langulect is short, and each has a specific and limited role.

8.1 Service providers and infrastructure

• Our hosting provider. Your progress is stored on a server we rent from an infrastructure provider. They supply the machine and the network; they do not access your data for any purpose of their own and act only on our instructions.
• Google. For sign-in, distribution through Google Play, app integrity verification, QR scanning through Play Services, and — on most Android devices — speech recognition and text-to-speech. Google’s handling of that data is governed by its own policy, not this one.
• Apple, for the iOS app. For Sign in with Apple, distribution through the App Store, and the system speech, dictation and photo-picker services. Two points worth making: Apple issues us an identifier specific to Langulect rather than one that follows you between apps, and when you delete your account we call Apple’s API to revoke the link between your Apple ID and Langulect. Apple’s own policy governs its side of all of this.

8.2 Other learners

Only the friends you have deliberately added, and only the limited profile set out in section 3.3.

8.3 Legal and safety

We may disclose information where we are legally required to do so, or where it is necessary to investigate a violation of our Terms, to prevent fraud or abuse, or to protect the rights, safety or property of our users, the public, or us. We will resist requests that appear overbroad or improperly made.

8.4 Business transfers

If Langulect is ever sold, merged or otherwise transferred, your information may transfer as part of that transaction. This policy would continue to apply to the transferred information until you were given notice of a replacement.

9. Where your information is held

Our servers are located in Europe. If you use Langulect from elsewhere, your information is transferred to and stored there, and may be accessed by us from other countries in order to operate and support the Service.

Where we transfer personal data out of the EEA or the UK, we rely on appropriate safeguards, including the European Commission’s standard contractual clauses and the UK international data transfer addendum, as applicable.

10. How long we keep information

• Account and learning data: kept for as long as your account exists. That is the purpose of having one.
• After you delete your account: the account record, your progress document and your entry in our friend-code index are removed from our active systems immediately.
• Backups: the server is backed up daily and backups are retained for up to 30 days before expiring. A deleted account may therefore persist in a backup for that window. We do not restore individual accounts from backups, and backups are not used to re-create deleted data.
• Correspondence: if you email us, we keep the exchange for as long as needed to resolve the matter and to have a record of it.
• Server logs: operational logs rotate on a short cycle and are not retained for analysis.

A friend’s device may hold a stale copy of your friend code until their app next refreshes, at which point the code no longer resolves to anything.

11. Deleting your account and data

You can delete everything yourself, from inside the app:

1. Open Langulect and go to the Settings tab.
2. Under Account, tap Delete account.
3. Confirm twice. The second prompt is the point of no return.

This permanently and immediately removes:

• your account record, and the link between Langulect and your Google or Apple account;
• your email address, display name and profile picture link as held by us;
• all of your learning data: completed lessons, HOs, streak and chosen course;
• your friends list and your friend code, so friends stop resolving it;
• the copy of your progress stored on the device you are using, and any avatar saved locally on it.

If you signed in with Apple, we additionally call Apple’s Sign in with Apple API to revoke the tokens tying your Apple ID to Langulect, so the connection is severed on Apple’s side as well as ours. That happens before your record is destroyed. If Apple’s service is unreachable at that moment, the deletion still goes ahead — we will not hold your data hostage to someone else’s outage — and you can remove the app under Settings → your name → Sign in with Apple on your device.

It cannot be undone, and we cannot recover it for you afterwards. Signing in again later creates a new and empty account.

If you cannot reach the app — a lost or broken phone, for example — email langulect@gmail.com from the address attached to your account and ask us to delete it. We will verify that the request comes from the account holder, complete it within 30 days, and confirm when it is done.

Deleting your Langulect account does not delete your Google or Apple account. If you used Google, it does not by itself withdraw Langulect’s access to Google Sign-In; you can review and remove that at myaccount.google.com/connections.

12. Your rights and choices

12.1 Everyone

Much of this needs no request. Your learning data is visible in the app; a name and picture that came from Google change when you change them there; microphone, speech and camera permissions are revocable in your device’s own settings at any time; the Gemma model can be deleted from Settings on Android; and account deletion is a button, not a form.

12.2 European Economic Area and United Kingdom

Under the GDPR you have the right to:

• access the personal data we hold about you, and receive a copy;
• rectify data that is inaccurate or incomplete;
• erase your data (“the right to be forgotten”);
• restrict or object to our processing;
• data portability — receive your data in a structured, machine-readable format;
• withdraw consent at any time, where we rely on it;
• lodge a complaint with your national supervisory authority.

We would rather you raised it with us first, because most issues are quicker to fix than to adjudicate.

12.3 California

Under the CCPA as amended by the CPRA you have the right to know what personal information we collect and how we use it, to request access to it or its deletion, to correct inaccuracies, and to not be discriminated against for exercising those rights.

We do not sell personal information and we do not share it for cross-context behavioural advertising, so there is nothing for a “Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information” link to switch off. We do not offer financial incentives in exchange for personal information, and we do not use or disclose sensitive personal information for purposes requiring a right to limit.

12.4 Other jurisdictions

Residents of other US states with comprehensive privacy laws, and of other countries with equivalent regimes, have comparable rights. We apply the same process to every request regardless of where you live: it is simpler, and it is fairer.

12.5 How to make a request

Email langulect@gmail.com from the address attached to your account, and tell us what you want. We will respond within 30 days, or tell you if we need longer and why. There is no charge. If we cannot verify that a request comes from the account holder we will decline it, which protects you from someone else deleting or exporting your data.

13. How we protect information

• All traffic between the app and our servers is encrypted with HTTPS, and release builds of the app refuse unencrypted connections outright.
• Passwords, where they exist, are stored only as salted hashes, never in a form that can be reversed.
• Session credentials are held in the platform’s hardware-backed secure store — the Android keystore, the iOS keychain — not in ordinary app storage.
• Each account’s data is stored in a separate record, and the Service runs as an unprivileged user confined to its own files, so a fault in one part of the system cannot read another’s data.
• The data directory is not readable by other applications on the server, and backups are kept outside the web root.

No system is perfectly secure and we will not claim otherwise. If you believe you have found a vulnerability, please report it to langulect@gmail.com before disclosing it publicly, and allow us a reasonable opportunity to fix it. We will not pursue good-faith security research.

14. Children and teenagers

Langulect is not directed at children. You must be at least 13 years old to use it, at least 16 if you are in the European Economic Area or the United Kingdom, or older where your country sets a higher age for consenting to online services.

We do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone below those ages, and we do not knowingly serve them. If you are a parent or guardian who believes a child has created an account, email langulect@gmail.com and we will delete the account and its data.

15. Changes to this policy

We will update this page as the app changes, and the date at the top will change with it. Older versions are superseded on the effective date shown.

If a change materially affects how we handle your information, we will not rely on you noticing a new date on a web page: the app will ask you to review and accept the updated policy before you continue. Where the law requires your consent for a change, we will ask for it.

16. How to contact us

One address handles everything — support, privacy questions, data access and deletion requests, and security reports: langulect@gmail.com.

It is a real inbox that a person reads. To help us find your account, please write from the email address your Langulect account uses, and say what you would like us to do.

See also our Terms of Service, which govern your use of the Service.