Privacy Policy — TinCan Translator™

Effective August 1, 2026

TinCan Translator™ ("the app") is built so that your conversations stay yours. This policy explains what the app does with your information.

No accounts, no tracking

The app has no sign-up or login. We do not collect names, email addresses, locations, advertising identifiers, or analytics. We show no ads and use no third-party tracking of any kind.

Conversations are not stored

Messages between paired phones are relayed in real time over an encrypted channel (Supabase Realtime) and are never written to a database or server-side log. When a message leaves your screen, it is gone. Your profile (name, language) and your list of paired partners are stored only on your own device.

Speech, translation, and voice processing

To provide its core features, the app processes the words you speak or type:

• Speech recognition happens on your device using Apple's speech recognizer for most languages. For languages your phone cannot recognize (such as Khmer), audio of your turn is sent securely to OpenAI for transcription.
• Translation and spoken voice may be provided by OpenAI's API. Text you speak or type is sent securely for translation and speech generation.

This processing happens only when you actively use the microphone or send a message. OpenAI processes this data as a service provider and may retain API data briefly for abuse monitoring per its API data usage policies; it is not used to train their models. We never see, store, or share this content ourselves.

Permissions

Microphone — to hear you when you tap the mic. Speech recognition — to turn your speech into text. Camera — only to scan a partner's pairing QR code. Each permission is used solely for the feature it names.

Children

The app is suitable for all ages and collects no personal information from anyone, including children.

Changes and contact

If this policy changes, the updated version will be posted at this address. Questions: help@in-query.org.