Your photos are yours

Last updated 1 November 2026. This covers the Pictoglot website, the web app at app.pictoglot.com and the Pictoglot iPhone app.

What we keep

Your account: your email address and the way you sign in (a password, which we store only as a salted hash, or a Google sign-in).
Your photos: the pictures you upload, stored privately so that only your account can open them. Before upload the app shrinks each photo and, in doing so, removes camera details (EXIF) such as the exact location, device and time stored inside the file.
What we make from them: the Chinese text read from the photo, translations, word lists, lessons, quiz results, role play conversations, your review progress and the settings you choose.
Where a photo was taken, only if you allow it. The setting is in Settings and can be switched off. When it is on we keep the coordinates with the photo and name the nearest city. The coordinates are never sent to an AI provider; only the city name may be, to help the lesson fit the place.
Usage: how many AI uses you have spent today and which plan you are on.

We do not run advertising, we do not sell or rent your data, and the website and app contain no third-party analytics or tracking.

Who handles it

We use a few service providers to run Pictoglot, and they process your data for us:

Supabase hosts the database, sign-in and photo storage, in Singapore.
OpenAI reads photos, writes translations and lessons, runs role plays and creates spoken audio. When you use one of those features, the photo or text involved is sent to OpenAI's API to produce the answer. Under OpenAI's published API terms, data sent through the API is not used to train its models by default. We ask for your agreement to this the first time you use the app, and keep a record of when you agreed.
Cloudflare delivers the website and app, and sees technical details such as your IP address in the course of doing so.
Apple (and RevenueCat, which tells us whether a subscription is active) handle payments, once paid plans are offered. We never see your card or Apple ID details.

Keeping it and deleting it

We keep your data while your account exists. You can delete your account at any time in the app: Settings, then Delete my account. This erases your photos and everything made from them, your lessons, words and progress, and your sign-in, straight away. Copies in the provider's routine backups are removed as those backups expire. We keep an anonymous record of how many AI calls we make and what they cost, which is not linked to you after deletion.

You can also ask us for a copy of your data, or for it to be corrected or deleted, by writing to support@pictoglot.com.

Security

Your account's data is separated from everyone else's by the database itself, photos are private, and connections are encrypted. No service is perfectly secure, so please use a strong password.

Children

Pictoglot is not aimed at children under 13 and we do not knowingly collect their data. If you think a child has made an account, write to us and we will delete it.

Changes and contact

If we change this policy in a way that matters, we will say so in the app. Questions: support@pictoglot.com.