Privacy

What we hold

Five things, and each of them is here because the product does not work without it.

• Your email address. It is the whole of your account: there is no password, so signing in is a code mailed to you. It is also how we can reach you if we ever have to, and how we tell you, now and then, about something new in LangTurbo. Every one of those emails has an unsubscribe link, and unsubscribing does not stop sign-in codes.
• The language you are learning. One code, so that opening the app takes you to it.
• The words you have looked up. Each one with what it meant, how many times you have stopped on it, and whether you have since marked it known. This is the vocabulary the app shows you back.
• How many seconds of audio you played, per day. A number a day and nothing about which episode. It is what the progress screen is made of.
• Your subscription, as the store that sold it describes it. A status, a renewal date, and the identifier Apple or Google uses for it, beside a random identifier for your account that we give the store so it can tell us whose purchase it is.

What we do not hold

No name. No card number — Apple or Google takes the payment and we are told only whether it worked. No postal address. No phone number. No contacts, no location, no photos, no microphone.

There is no analytics service, no advertising identifier and no third-party tracker in the app or on this site. Nothing here is sold, rented or shared with anybody for advertising, and nothing is used to build a profile of you across other companies’ apps and websites.

The audio, which is unusual

Episodes are downloaded by your own device, straight from whoever publishes the podcast — so the publisher counts the listen, exactly as they would in any other podcast app. To produce a transcript, your device sends us the audio it is about to play.

What comes back is stored under a fingerprint of the audio itself rather than under your account, which means everybody who plays the same minutes of the same episode reads the same transcript, and nobody — including us — can work out from it who listened to what. It is also why the second person to open an episode waits for nothing.

No recording is ever made from your device’s microphone. The app never asks for it.

Who else sees anything

• Groq transcribes the audio your device sends. They are sent the audio and nothing about you.
• Anthropic produces the translations and the definition you get when you tap a word. They are sent the sentence and the word, and nothing about you.
• Amazon SES delivers the sign-in code and the occasional product news, so they handle your address in order to send them. For the news they also keep your address on our mailing list, with whether you have unsubscribed, so that the choice is honoured.
• Apple and Google take the payment: Apple when you subscribe on an iPhone or iPad, Google Play when you subscribe on Android. We give the store a random identifier for your account, so that a purchase can be matched to it, and nothing else; the store tells us that a subscription exists and until when. Your card details go to the store and never to us.
• Sentry receives a report when the app crashes or freezes, or when a request fails on our server: what the code was doing and, from the app, the kind of device and which versions of the system and the app it was running. Nothing in either says who you are, where you are, or what you were listening to.

Each of them is a supplier doing one job on our behalf. None of them is given your vocabulary or what you have listened to.

Addresses, and the one place an IP appears

Sending a sign-in code, and signing up for our emails on this site, are capped per address and per caller, so that nobody can use either to mail somebody else. Doing that means briefly counting requests against the network address they came from. The count expires; nothing is kept about who asked for what.

If you had an account on the old site

Before this app, langturbo.com had accounts of its own. When that site closed we kept the email addresses from it, and when each account was made, so that we could tell the people who had one about the new app, and nothing else from it. We will delete that list once it has served that purpose.

If you signed up for emails on this site

You can leave your address on this site without an account, to get the App Store link or to hear when LangTurbo is out for Android or Mac. We send one email with a link to confirm, and your address is only added to our mailing list if you follow it. With it we keep the device you chose and the language of the page you signed up on, so that we can write to the right people when a version comes out. Every email has an unsubscribe link.

How long, and getting rid of it

Your words and your daily seconds are kept for as long as the account is, and are deleted with it. Sign-in codes are kept for ten minutes, and any still live for your address go when the account does.

The mailing list is the exception. Deleting the account does not take your address off it, because a record that you unsubscribed is what keeps the next email from reaching you. Write to us and we will remove it.

You can delete the account yourself, and you do not have to ask us: it is on the Account screen in the LangTurbo app, under “Sign out”. It asks you to type your address, and then your account, your words, your daily seconds and what we hold about your subscription are gone. It cannot be undone.

Your subscription is not cancelled with the account, because only the store that sold it can cancel it. Do that first — in Settings → your name → Subscriptions on an iPhone or iPad, or in Google Play → Payments & subscriptions → Subscriptions on Android — or you will go on paying for an account that is not there.

Children

This is not built for children and we do not knowingly hold anything about anybody under 13. The catalogue is podcasts published by other people and is not curated for age.

Changes, and asking

If what we hold changes, this page changes with it and the date at the top moves. Anything you want to ask, or a copy of what is held about you, goes to our email address: Show email.