Glosseme — Privacy Policy

Effective date: 27 October 2026 · Version: 1.0

Who we are

Glosseme is operated by Glosseme Ltd, a company registered in England and Wales under company number 17294647, with its registered office at 66 Paul Street, London EC2A 4NA, United Kingdom.

In this policy, "we", "us" and "our" mean Glosseme Ltd, and "you" and "your" mean you, the person using Glosseme.

We are the data controller for the personal data described in this policy: we determine the purposes and means of the processing — what it is used for, and how it is handled.

Write to support@glosseme.app with any privacy question, request or complaint.

We are registered with the Information Commissioner's Office, registration number ZC250024.

What we collect

Your account. Your email address, the date your account was created and the date you last used it. We also keep a record of each version of the Terms you have accepted, and of each time we showed you a changed version of the Terms or of this policy, with the version and the date. We do not ask for your name. You sign in with a link sent to your email address, and that address identifies your account.

What you are learning. The words and expressions you have added to your collection, your language pairs, which word sets you study and your settings for each, the words in them you did not keep, your review schedule, how often you have reviewed each card and when you last reviewed it, your progress and statistics, and your vocabulary-test results — for each test you take, the date, the language, the level and sub-level it gave you, how many questions you answered and how many were correct, and how long it took. Your answers to the individual questions are not part of that record; where they are kept is described in the section "The vocabulary test".

The cards themselves — the meanings, usage examples, translations and transcriptions Glosseme produces — are our content rather than information about you. Section 22 of the Terms explains what that means when you ask for a copy of your data.

What you type when you ask for a card. What you enter — a word, a fixed expression or free text of up to 500 characters — and when you entered it. We keep a note of each card you add from a word set in the same place; the section "How your credits were spent" explains why.

Your settings. Including whether sensitive content is turned on, the country we detected or you set yourself, your review preferences and vacation mode, the accent you chose for cards read aloud — British or American English, for example — and the language you dictate in, your choice about usage and crash data sharing, and your answer to whether you want to receive announcements. Your notification settings are not among them: they stay on the device they were set on and are never sent to us. The announcements answer is the exception, because it is the record of your consent.

Your subscription. Whether you have a trial or a subscription, which plan, when your trial started and ended, when the subscription renews, how many credits it includes and how many of them you have used, and tutor status where we have granted it.

Invitations you create or redeem. The codes you have issued, any note you added to one, whether they were taken up and by whom, any code you redeemed yourself, who invited you, and the discount that resulted. Invitation records concern two people. A code you created carries the identifier of whoever redeemed that code, and a code you redeemed appears in the record of whoever created it.

How many requests you have made. The number of requests made from your account, and when they were made.

Confirmation that you are 18 or over. That you confirmed it, when you confirmed it, and whether you gave it as a self-declaration or through your device's own age check. We do not ask for your date of birth.

Your device. Model, manufacturer, operating system and version, app version and build, screen size, language and country, and when we first saw it.

These further sets of records have sections of their own.

Records that can be connected to your account:

the technical records our servers keep of each request — see the section "Your country and records from our servers";

what you send us when you report a problem with a card — see the section "Reporting a problem with a card".

Records that cannot be connected to your account:

how the app is used, and when it fails — see the section "Usage analytics and crash reporting";

what changed when you correct a card, and which cards you did not keep — see the section "Card corrections and cards you did not keep";

a separate record of each test you take — its outcome and the answer given to every question — see the section "The vocabulary test".

How and why we use it

Everything we do with data connected to your account rests on one of four grounds.

Because you asked us to, under our agreement with you:

creating and running your account;
keeping the record of which version of the Terms you accepted, and of each time we showed you a change, so that we can be sure the version that applies to you has been accepted in good time;
making and storing your cards, scheduling your reviews and keeping your progress;
synchronising all of that across the devices you use, and supporting the app on those devices;
generating a card when you ask;
recording which word sets you have subscribed to, and giving you cards from them;
applying the settings you choose: whether sensitive content is shown to you, your review preferences and vacation mode, the accent your cards are read aloud in, and the language you dictate in;
keeping your vocabulary-test results so that you can see them in the app;
running your trial and your subscription, and counting your credits;
keeping the record of what your credits were spent on;
operating the referral scheme and applying the discounts it produces;
sending you the messages that are part of the service: the link you sign in with, notice that the Terms or this policy is changing, and the warning before we delete an account that has not been used;
recording that you confirmed you are 18 or over, so that we do not have to ask again on every device.

Because we have a legitimate interest, which we have weighed against yours. In each case the interest is named:

keeping the service available and preventing misuse — which is why we count the requests made from your account;
keeping the service secure and working — which is why our servers record the technical details of each request, including the internet address it came from;
understanding how the app is used so it can be improved, and keeping your choice about sharing that data so that we can act on it;
operating lawfully in the countries where Glosseme is available, and not showing you content that is unlawful where you are;
being able to delete accounts that have stopped being used, so that we do not carry the cost of storing data that nobody needs — which is why we keep the date you last used Glosseme;
keeping the cards accurate and free of offensive or inappropriate content for everyone who uses them, being able to answer you if you later ask what happened to a problem you reported, and meeting the app stores' rules for AI-generated content — which is why we keep what you send us in a report;
studying how people learn vocabulary — using the cards you have added, your review history, your progress and your vocabulary-test results — so that we can improve the content and the way we generate it, and understand what helps people learn;
publishing statistics about how Glosseme is used.

Where we publish or share anything drawn from the last two, we do so only in aggregated form, or in a form that identifies nobody. Nothing about you as an individual is published, and no decision about you is made from this work.

You can object to any use of your data that rests on our legitimate interests. The section "Your rights", below, explains how to object and what happens when you do.

Because you consented:

announcements about new features and offers, whether they reach you by push or by email, and keeping your answer so that we can act on it.

You can withdraw your consent at any time, and the section "Notifications and messages", below, explains how. We use consent for nothing else, so withdrawing it stops the announcements and changes nothing else.

Because the law requires it:

the record we keep of an account deletion.

Making a card

When you ask us to generate a card, the text you typed is sent to an external AI service that produces the card for us. Nothing is sent with it: no email address, no account identifier, and nothing else that connects the request to you.

The card we generate for you may join the Glosseme dictionary and be shown to other people — that happens where what you entered is part of the language itself, a word, a name or an established expression. It joins the dictionary as an entry about that word, never as anything about you. Section 14 of the Terms explains why the entry is ours rather than yours.

An automatic check on what you ask for. Before a card is made, an automated check may refuse a request that appears to involve harassment, hatred, sexually explicit material or content that is dangerous. Where it refuses, the app asks you to enter different text. The check looks at what you typed, not at you: nothing about you is recorded or inferred from it.

Free text does not join the dictionary. Where what you type is free text rather than part of the language itself, the card it produces — shown in the app as a phrase or a sentence — stays in your own collection and is not shared with anyone else. What we keep from an edit is described in the section "Card corrections and cards you did not keep", below.

Usage analytics and crash reporting

Two kinds of information are collected automatically.

Usage statistics. Which features people open, where they have difficulty, and how many people complete each step of setting up the app.

Crash reports. When the app stops working, or when part of it fails, we receive a report describing what happened.

Neither is linked to your account. No account identifier is set in either system.

Both are on by default, and you can turn them off. Settings → Privacy → Share usage and crash data turns off both. The setting belongs to your account rather than to one device, so turning it off on one device turns it off on all of them. It stops any further collection, and it deletes any crash report that is still on your device and has not been sent. It does not delete what we have already collected, because we cannot tell which of that data is yours.

When collection starts. Usage statistics are not collected until you reach the sign-in screen, which carries a short notice and a link to this policy. Crash reports start when the app starts, so that a crash during start-up is still reported. Those early reports carry nothing that identifies you, so they cannot be traced to you.

Card corrections and cards you did not keep

Card corrections. When you change something on a card, we keep the text we generated alongside your version of it, so that we can monitor the quality of our cards, correct the cards that are wrong for all users, and improve the way we generate them.

The record does not carry your account, and it carries nothing that connects your changes to one card with your changes to another. We can see only that the same device suggested a change to the same card more than once.

Cards you did not keep. We also keep a record of generated cards you chose not to save, so that we can see which cards people do not keep and improve the way we generate them. Those records carry the card we made, not anything you wrote, along with a device identifier that lets us see which cards were not kept on the same device. Like the records above, they are not connected to your account.

Neither the card correction records nor the records of cards you did not keep are deleted when you delete your account, because we cannot tell which of them are yours.

The setting that turns off usage and crash data does not apply to these records. They are a different kind of record, kept so that the shared dictionary and the way we generate cards can be corrected, and they do not describe how you use Glosseme.

Reporting a problem with a card

Under every card there is a Report a problem button. You choose a reason — that the content is offensive or inappropriate, that it is wrong, or something else — and write a comment. Nothing is sent unless you send it, and before you send it the app shows you exactly which parts of the card we will receive.

What a report contains. The date, the reason and your comment. The word, phrase or sentence the card is about, its type and the language pair. What you typed to generate the card, where the card came from something you entered. The card as you saw it — which is our content where you had not changed it, and your own version where you had. Which screen you reported from, whether the card came from your own input or from a word set, whether you had edited it, the app version and the language the app is set to. Meanings hidden by your sensitive-content setting or by the rules of your country are left out, so a report never shows us anything the app did not show you.

A report is connected to your account, and it is deleted when you delete your account.

What we do with it. We look at the reports we receive and, where it is justified, we correct the entry in the Glosseme dictionary or the way we generate cards. We never change your own card — a card you have saved stays as you left it. We may email you about what we did, but we do not promise to reply to every report.

Who sees it. Only us. Other users never see a report.

The vocabulary test

When you take the placement test we keep a record of the test itself — its outcome, and each question with the answer given and whether it was correct — so that we can tell how difficult each question is and improve the test for all users. Those records carry a device identifier, which lets us see that several tests came from the same device, but they are not connected to your account and we have no way of telling whose they are. We may also use them to study how people learn vocabulary, and share them, or statistics drawn from them, in aggregated form or in a form that identifies nobody. Your own result — the date, the language, your level and your score — is stored separately with your account, and is deleted when you delete your account. The records described above are a different copy, kept for calibration; they are not deleted, because we cannot tell which of them are yours.

How your credits were spent

When you ask us to generate a card, we keep what you typed and when. We also keep a note of each card you add from a word set, and when that reached our servers — which, if you added it offline, is later than the moment you added it. Together these form the record of what your credits were spent on. The record is available to you in the app, and it allows us to resolve any question about it.

Your country and records from our servers

Country. When the app starts, we look up the country your connection appears to come from. We use the result to apply local content rules. We keep only the country; our own code never stores the internet address it was derived from, though the address does appear in the server records described next.

Technical records from our servers. When the app contacts our servers, technical details of each request are recorded automatically, including the internet address it came from. These records are ours — they are held in our systems, our hosting provider keeps them for us, and we set how long they are kept. We do not use these records to build a profile of you; they exist so that the service can run and so that we can investigate faults and abuse. They are kept for 30 days and then deleted.

Dictation and listening

Dictation. Where your device supports it, you can dictate instead of typing. The app passes the recording to the speech recognition feature built into your device, and what happens next is controlled by your device, not by us: depending on the device, the language and your settings, it may be processed on the device or sent to Apple or Google to be turned into text. We cannot tell which of these happens, and we never receive the audio — only the text the speech recognition feature returns, which is then treated like anything else you type.

Listening. When you have a card read aloud, the text is passed to your device's own speech engine. What that engine does with it is governed by Apple's or Google's terms, not ours.

Age

Glosseme is for adults: you must be 18 or over to use it, and you confirm that when you accept the Terms. Turning on sensitive content requires that confirmation as well.

We do not ask for your date of birth. On devices that support it we ask the operating system for your age range and receive only a yes-or-no answer; we do not store the age range itself. On other devices you confirm it yourself. In both cases we keep only that you confirmed, when you confirmed, and which of the two methods you used. We use it to decide whether you may turn sensitive content on, and so that we do not have to ask again on every device, and it is deleted when you delete your account.

Sensitive content and country restrictions

Sensitive content is off unless you turn it on. Some words and expressions carry meanings we mark as sensitive. Those meanings are hidden by default and shown only if you switch them on, which you can do once you have confirmed your age.

Some content is unavailable in some countries. Where the law requires it, certain meanings are hidden regardless of that setting. Those meanings are not shown, and where none of a card's meanings can be shown, a short message appears instead. Nothing in your collection is deleted, and you can still save the cards you create.

You can correct the country. If the country we detected is not correct, you can set it yourself in Settings. Doing so may show or hide content according to that country's rules. The law of the country you are actually in continues to apply to you.

Notifications and messages

Reminders you asked for. If you turn them on, the app reminds you to review your cards. These reminders are scheduled on your device and shown by its own notification system. We do not send them, and nothing about them reaches us. You can turn them off in Settings or in your device's own settings.

Messages that are part of the service. Some emails are not marketing and are sent to you whatever your preferences: the link you sign in with, notice that the Terms or this policy is changing, and the warning before we delete an account that has not been used. Section 5 of the Terms explains why these are part of Glosseme and cannot be turned off. The warning before deletion gives you the opportunity to keep your account.

Messages you can turn off. Announcements about new features and offers are sent only to people who have agreed to receive them.

Announcements on your device are controlled at Settings → Notifications → Announcements. Announcements by email are controlled by the unsubscribe link included in every such message.

Your answer to the announcements question is kept with your account, and it is what decides whether you are added to an announcement email. The two controls then operate independently. If you already receive announcement emails, turning announcements off in the app does not stop them — the unsubscribe link does. Unsubscribing from those emails does not stop announcements in the app. Neither control affects your review reminders or the service messages described above.

Apple or Google gives your device a token so that push notifications can be delivered to it. We pass that token to the messaging service that sends the notification. We keep no list of our own, and the token stops working when you delete the app or your account.

Who else handles your data

The following companies process your data. The companies that process data on our behalf may use it only for us, and only as we instruct.

Apple and Google operate the app stores you buy through, and provide the features built into your device that Glosseme uses: speech recognition, reading cards aloud, and the delivery of push notifications. In those roles they act under their own terms rather than ours — your purchase is a contract with the store, and that store's own privacy policy governs what it does with your data. The section "Dictation and listening", above, explains the speech features.
The company that provides our infrastructure: sign-in, the database in which your cards are stored, the servers that run our code, the analytics and crash reporting described above, and the delivery of notifications.
The company that manages subscriptions for us. It receives your account identifier, what you bought, and identifiers for the device you bought it on, together with the technical description your device sends with every request. Those identifiers are ours alone: they do not identify you in any other company's app. It also receives the country of your store account and, where you have earned an invitation discount, which discount applies. It receives no advertising identifier.
An external AI service, which generates the cards. It receives only the text you typed, with nothing that connects the request to you.

Where your data goes

Glosseme's own systems keep your data in Europe. The services we rely on — the AI service that generates the cards, subscription handling, analytics and crash reporting — may process it outside the UK and the European Economic Area, including in the United States. Where that happens, the transfer is covered by the standard data-protection clauses approved for the purpose, and you can ask us for a copy of them.

How long we keep things

The general rule: for as long as you have an account. Your cards, your word set subscriptions, your progress and statistics, your settings, the record of what you typed when asking for a card, the problems you have reported, and your subscription state are kept for as long as your account exists, and are deleted when you delete it.

If you stop using Glosseme, we may delete your account. After six months with no activity and no subscription, we may delete it and everything in it, apart from the records described in the section "Deleting your account". We will email you one month before we do.

Some data is kept for a fixed period:

Usage analytics and crash data. Our analytics provider holds both and processes them on our behalf. Usage analytics is deleted after 14 months; crash reports after 90 days.
Technical records from our servers. Kept for 30 days, as described in the section "Your country and records from our servers".
A record that your account was deleted. We keep your email address and the dates the account was created, deletion was requested and deletion was completed. This record is kept for two years so that we can demonstrate that the deletion was carried out.
Backups. So that we can recover from a technical failure, we keep encrypted copies of the data on our own servers. Each copy is erased automatically within 35 days of being made, so anything deleted from Glosseme has gone from our backups within 35 days. We use backups for nothing else.

Some records are kept after your account is deleted. The section "Deleting your account", below, sets out which and why.

Deleting your account

You can delete your account at any time, in Settings, or by following the instructions at https://glosseme.app/ai_vocabulary/delete-account if you have lost access to the app. Deletion removes your cards, your word set subscriptions, your progress and statistics, your settings, the record of what you typed when asking for a card, and the problems you have reported. It cannot be undone.

A copy may remain on your own devices. Deleting from inside the app also clears the copy held on the device you delete from. If you asked us to delete your account by following the instructions at https://glosseme.app/ai_vocabulary/delete-account, no device is cleared. Either way, a copy stays on any other device where Glosseme is installed until you uninstall the app.

Copies remain in our backups for up to 35 days. We keep encrypted backups so that we can recover from a technical failure. Your deleted data stays in them until each backup is erased automatically, within 35 days of being made. We never use a backup to restore a deleted account, and if we ever have to restore our systems from one, we delete again every account deleted since that backup was made.

Four kinds of record survive the deletion of your account:

the usage analytics and crash reports described in the section "Usage analytics and crash reporting", which carry no account identifier;
the records described in the sections "Card corrections and cards you did not keep" and "The vocabulary test", which we cannot connect to you;
the two-year record that the deletion took place;
invitation records, because they concern two people. A code you created remains, with the identifier of whoever redeemed that code removed. Where you redeemed someone else's code, your identifier remains in their record until they delete their own account.

Deleting your account does not cancel your subscription. You must cancel it through the app store you bought it from.

Your rights

How to make a request. Write to support@glosseme.app from the email address you sign in with. We will answer within one month. If your request is complex we may need up to two further months. If that is the case, we will tell you within the first month and explain why. We do not charge for responding to these requests.

Why we require the account address. You sign in to Glosseme with a link sent to your email, so that address is how we know an account is yours. We act on a request only when it comes from the address on the account, and we send your data only back to that address. If you write from a different address, we will ask you to send the request again from the address on the account, because we have no other way to confirm that the request is yours. If someone makes a request on your behalf — a solicitor or a relative, for example — write to us and we will ask you to confirm, from the address on your account, that they are acting for you and where your data should be sent.

What you can ask for.

A copy of your data — information we hold about you.
A portable copy — a copy of your data in a structured, machine-readable file.
Correction of anything that is wrong.
Deletion of your data.
Restriction — that we stop using your data without deleting it, for example while its accuracy or our use of it is being checked or disputed.
Objection, where we rely on our legitimate interests. If you object, we will stop unless we have a reason that outweighs yours, and we will tell you what that reason is.

For some of these you can act yourself and do not need to write to us: Settings → Delete account deletes your account, Settings → Privacy → Share usage and crash data turns off usage analytics and crash reporting, and you can set your country yourself in Settings. Where we cannot stop — because the processing keeps the service available, secure or lawful for everyone — we will tell you why.

Records we cannot identify. Some of what we record is not connected to your account and cannot be traced back to it — the usage analytics and crash reports, the card corrections, the cards you did not keep and the per-question records from the vocabulary test described above. We cannot tell which of them are yours, so we cannot show them to you, change them or delete them, and deleting your account does not affect them.

If you want to complain. You can complain at any time to the Information Commissioner's Office at https://ico.org.uk. You do not have to contact us first, although contacting us is usually the faster way to resolve a problem. If you live outside the UK, you can complain to the data-protection authority where you are.

Keeping your data safe

Everything that passes between your device and our servers is encrypted in transit, and what we hold on our servers is encrypted where it is stored — which protects it against anyone who obtains access to the underlying hardware or storage media.

This encryption does not make your data readable only by you. Glosseme is not end-to-end encrypted, and we can see what is in your account. That access exists to run the service and to answer support requests, and it is used for nothing else. The research described in the section "How and why we use it" is done on a copy in which account identifiers have been replaced.

Signing in requires a link sent to your own email address. There is no Glosseme password, so no password of yours can be guessed or reused.

On your device. Your cards are stored in the app's own database, protected by the encryption your device applies to app data rather than by anything we add.

These measures reduce the risk of your data being exposed. We cannot guarantee absolute security. If there is ever a breach, what limits the damage is how little we hold: no name, no date of birth, no password and no payment details. Payment is handled by the app stores, and payment card details never reach us.

Changes to this policy

We will change this policy from time to time. Every version has its own number and its own effective date, and a published version is never edited afterwards — a change produces a new version, and the previous version remains available in its original form.

If a change is significant, we will tell you at least 31 days before it takes effect, by email or in the app. If we have to make a change sooner — because the law requires it, or to keep Glosseme secure — we will tell you as soon as possible. Smaller changes, such as a clearer sentence or a corrected address, take effect when published, and are recorded by a new version number.