Privacy Policy

Xiaodong Li, the developer of Lingoreel, is responsible for your personal information (the “controller” under the GDPR and the business handling personal information under Japan's Act on the Protection of Personal Information). Contact: support@lingoreel.com.

You can use Lingoreel as a podcast player without signing up (guest mode). In guest mode:

• The shows you follow, your listening progress and your recent episodes are stored only on your iPhone.
• Requests from the app to our server include your IP address, which we use for rate limiting to keep the service from being abused.
• To build your Most Recent list, the app sends us the IDs of the shows you follow. Because you have no account, these requests aren't tied to one.

When you create an account, we store the following on our servers:

• Account details: your email address and a hashed version of your password, or, if you use Sign in with Apple, the user identifier Apple gives us and the email address Apple shares (your real address or a private relay address). Also your display name.
• Learning settings: the language you're learning, your own language, your level, daily goal, reminder time and interests.
• Learning records: listening progress, the shows you follow and whether new-episode alerts are on for each, the questions you asked and the answers, your wordbook, and your review and shadowing scores. We also keep which episodes you asked subtitles for, so we can notify you when they're ready.
• Podcast feeds you import: the feed addresses of shows you add by link or from another app's subscription file (OPML). For a paid show this can be a private link that works like a password: we use it only to fetch new episodes, never show it to anyone or list that show in search or recommendations, and delete the show from our servers once nobody follows it.
• Push notification tokens: device tokens that let us send the new-episode alerts you turned on.
• Subscription status and purchases: whether you have Pro and until when and, if you buy subtitle credits, each purchase's App Store transaction ID, product, date and any refund, all taken from the signed transaction data Apple provides. We never see your card or other payment details.
• Subtitle credits and requests: your credit balance and a record of how your credits and monthly subtitle requests were used (for which episodes), so that each purchase is added only once, credits come back when subtitles can't be made and refunds are handled.

• The microphone only listens after you start asking (by squeezing your headphones or tapping Ask).
• Your speech is converted to text by Apple's speech recognition, on your device whenever possible. When it can't run on the device, Apple processes the audio under Apple's own privacy policy.
• Only the text of your question is sent to us. We don't store recordings.
• Shadowing recordings are scored on your iPhone and are never uploaded.

• Your sign-in credentials, kept in the iOS Keychain.
• Theme and playback settings.
• Offline downloads. They are excluded from iCloud backups.
• In guest mode, your followed shows, listening progress and recent episodes (see above).

We use the information above only to:

• provide Lingoreel: transcripts, translations, answers, explanations, your wordbook and reviews;
• sync your learning across your devices;
• personalize your daily plan to your level and interests;
• send the notifications you turned on;
• prevent abuse and keep the service secure, for example with rate limits;
• verify your purchases with Apple and keep track of your subtitle credits and monthly requests.

If you're in the European Economic Area or the UK, our legal bases are: performing our contract with you (providing the features you use), our legitimate interests (security, preventing abuse and troubleshooting) and your consent (notifications, which you can turn off at any time in iOS Settings).

• No advertising.
• No tracking across other companies' apps or websites.
• No selling your personal information, and no sharing it for advertising.
• No third-party analytics or advertising SDKs in the app. The only third-party SDK is Sentry's crash reporter (see below).

We use a small number of service providers, each only for the purpose below:

• Cloudflare (USA, global network): delivers traffic between the app and our servers, and hosts this website.
• Google (USA), through the Gemini API: generates answers, explanations and translations, and reads text aloud with a natural voice. For answers and explanations it receives the text of your question, a short excerpt of the transcript around it and the episode title; to translate, transcript sentences; to read aloud, the text being read (an answer, a word or example sentence from your wordbook, a transcript sentence or a placement-test passage) and its language. It does not receive your name, email address or account ID. We ask Google not to store these requests; under Google's terms for paid use of the API, it doesn't use them to improve its products and keeps them only for a limited time to detect abuse. Generated audio is cached on our servers and on your device, not linked to your account, so the same text isn't sent again.
• Apple: Sign in with Apple, App Store purchases, push notifications and speech recognition.
• Sentry (Functional Software, Inc., USA): crash and error reports. When the app crashes, freezes or hits an error, it sends a technical report: the stack trace, app version, device model, OS version and language, and a random ID for this installation. It doesn't include your account, email address, IP address, screenshots or what you're listening to. When something fails on our servers, the error report may include your account's internal ID, but not your email address or what you wrote.
• An email delivery provider: only to send verification and password-reset emails, so it receives your email address and that message.

Podcast audio and artwork are fetched by your device directly from the publishers' servers. Like with any podcast app, those servers see your IP address, and the publishers' own privacy policies apply.

Transcription runs on our own servers using the publicly available episode audio. It doesn't involve your personal information.

We don't sell personal information or share it for advertising. We disclose it to authorities only when the law requires us to.

Our servers are located in Japan. Some processing happens in other countries:

• United States: Cloudflare, Apple, Google (AI features and read-aloud) and Sentry (crash and error reports). The US has no single comprehensive federal privacy law; privacy is covered by sector-specific federal laws and state laws such as California's CCPA.
• Cloudflare's network operates in many countries, so traffic may pass through data centers near you.

We provide this information as required by Japan's Act on the Protection of Personal Information (APPI) and similar laws elsewhere. Japan is recognized by the European Commission as providing an adequate level of data protection. Transfers to the United States happen only to provide the features you use, and we don't send account identifiers to Google.

• Account data and learning records are kept until you delete your account.
• Deleting your account in the app (Me › Privacy & data › Delete account) permanently deletes the account and all learning records from our servers, including your subtitle credits and the record of how they were used. We keep only the App Store transaction records of credit purchases, no longer linked to any account, so that the same purchase can't be redeemed twice.
• Server logs, which can include IP addresses, are kept for up to 14 days for security and troubleshooting and then deleted.
• Information stored only on your device stays there until you delete it or the app.
• A Pro subscription is not cancelled by deleting your account. Cancel it separately in your Apple Account settings.

You can ask us to give you a copy of your information, correct it, delete it, export it in a portable format, or stop or restrict a particular use of it. Email support@lingoreel.com, ideally from the address on your account so we can confirm it's you. We answer within 30 days. You can also delete your account yourself at any time in the app. To get a copy without writing to us, use Me › Privacy & data › Export my data in the app: you get a single machine-readable file (JSON) with everything we store about your account, except security credentials such as password hashes and sign-in tokens.

European Economic Area and UK (GDPR)

You have the rights of access, rectification, erasure, restriction, data portability and objection, and you can withdraw consent at any time. You also have the right to complain to your local data protection authority.

California (CCPA)

In the last 12 months we collected the categories described above: identifiers (such as email address, Apple user identifier, IP address and push tokens), commercial information (subscription status and subtitle credit purchases) and the content and activity you create in the app. We use them only for the purposes in this policy. We don't sell or share personal information as those terms are defined in the CCPA, and we don't use sensitive personal information to infer characteristics about you. You have the right to know, delete and correct your information, and we won't treat you differently for using these rights.

Japan (APPI)

You can request disclosure, correction, addition or deletion, suspension of use and records of third-party provision of your retained personal data. Send requests to support@lingoreel.com.

Lingoreel is not directed to children under 13 (under 16 in the European Economic Area), and we don't knowingly collect their personal information. If you believe a child has given us personal information, contact us and we will delete it.

Connections between the app and our servers use HTTPS. Passwords are stored only as hashes, and sign-in credentials on your iPhone are kept in the iOS Keychain. No system is perfectly secure, but we work to protect your information and keep what we store to a minimum.

lingoreel.com is an information site. It has no accounts, no analytics, no advertising and no tracking. Fonts are served from our own domain, and the site doesn't load scripts from other companies.

• One cookie: if you pick a language with the language switcher, we save your choice in a cookie called NEXT_LOCALE for one year so the site opens in that language next time. That's the only cookie we set.
• Hosting: Cloudflare hosts the site. To deliver pages and protect the site from attacks, it processes your IP address and request details, and it may set strictly necessary security cookies.
• Email: if you email us, we use your address and message only to reply and help you, and we keep the conversation only as long as needed for that.

When we change this policy, we post the new version here with a new effective date. If the changes are material, we'll also announce them in the app.

Xiaodong Li, developer of Lingoreel. Email: support@lingoreel.com.