留学生 · STUDY PAL
Privacy
Last updated 3 September 2026
Study Pal has no accounts. You never give it a name, an email address or a phone number to use it, and there is nothing to sign in to. This page describes exactly what the app keeps, what it sends, and what it never collects.
What stays on your phone
Almost everything. The following are stored in your browser’s own storage on your device, are never uploaded, and are gone if you clear the app’s data or delete it:
- Every phrase you have translated, and which you starred
- Questions you asked and the answers
- Places you saved, and any photo you attached to one
- Your test level, your wall, and which episodes you have watched
- Your reading language, your theme, and the city on the button
- Your name, WeChat and Instagram handles, phone number and photos, if you entered them
The profile fields are the clearest case: your phone number is masked on screen so a screenshot of that page does not carry it, and it is never sent anywhere.
What is sent, and why
The app cannot translate on the phone, so the thing being translated has to travel. When you use a feature, only what that feature needs is sent to our server and passed to the provider that answers it:
- Text you type or speak, to translate it
- Recorded audio, to turn speech into text
- A photograph, when you ask the app to read a sign, a menu or a screenshot
- A web address, when you scan a QR code and ask to open it
- Your question, when you ask one
- An approximate location, only when you press “find what’s around me”
None of that is stored on the server after the request that used it. It is processed and discarded.
Who else sees it
Our server passes the content to the companies whose models do the work: Anthropic for translation, reading photographs and answering questions, and ElevenLabs for turning speech into text and text into speech. Looking around you uses OpenStreetMap (Nominatim and Overpass) to find nearby places. Each is governed by its own privacy policy.
There is no advertising, no analytics product, and no third-party tracking code anywhere in the app.
Location
Location is requested only when you press the button that needs it, never on opening the app. The coordinate is rounded to about eleven metres before it leaves your phone — enough to find a noodle shop, not enough to find a bedroom — and it is not written down anywhere. The app does not track you and has no background location access.
What the server does keep
A few counts, and nothing that identifies a person:
- How many devices have used the app. Your browser generates a random number the first time you open it. It is hashed before being stored, and the only things recorded against it are the first day and the last day it was seen — days, never times. It is not linked to anything else and cannot be traced back to you.
- How many times each feature was used — a number per day.
- How many times each screen was opened — a number per day, with no identifier attached at all.
- Lesson topics you typed yourself — the words of the topic only (“getting a bike fixed”), kept when a lesson was written for it, and shown to other newcomers only once three different phones have asked for the same one. Topics with numbers, addresses or links are thrown away. A scrambled fragment of the network address is kept beside it to tell three askers from one.
- How you heard about Laonei, if you answer that one optional question: a total per answer, with nothing about who gave it.
- A photograph you explicitly chose to share, if you turned that switch on. It is reviewed by a person before anyone can see it, and turning the switch off deletes it.
- Boards, if you make one or post to one — scrambled, and only for thirty days. What this means is below.
If you use a board
A board is a page a group shares. It is the one part of this app where something you write is held on a server, so it is worth being exact about what that means. If you never open a board link and never make one, none of this applies to you.
Everything you post is scrambled on your phone before it is sent — the words, and any photograph or clip. The key that unscrambles it lives after the # in the board’s link, and browsers never send that part of an address to a server. So the board sits on our machine as something we cannot read, and neither can anyone who takes the machine.
Anyone holding the link can read it. That is what the link is. There is no account to approve, no request to accept, and no way to un-tell someone a link — so treat a board as a thing you have handed out rather than a thing you control.
If you put your WeChat on a post, everyone with the link gets it. That field is empty unless you type it, it is scrambled like the rest of the post, and clearing it stops it going out with the next one — but a board is people you have not met, and it cannot be taken back from anyone who already read it.
A handle is a name you type, not your name from anywhere else, and you can post without one. The server keeps the board’s title, the times posts were made, and the scrambled posts themselves; it never learns who made them.
Thirty days, and then it is gone — posts and pictures together, with no copy kept. Whoever made a board can delete it sooner, which deletes it for everybody at once. Losing the link means losing the board: there is no other key anywhere, including here.
What is never collected
- Your IP address. Nothing in the app reads one, so no record of one exists.
- Your name, email address or phone number — the app never asks the server for them
- Any advertising or cross-site identifier
- Contacts, calendar, health data, or anything from other apps
- A history of where you have been
Deleting things
Every phrase has a delete control beside it on the home screen. Start the phrases again on the Study screen removes all of them at once, along with everything the app learned from them. Deleting the app, or clearing its data in your browser, removes everything else. None of it needs a request to us, because none of it is ours to hold.
Children
Study Pal is made for adults living, studying or working in China. It is not directed at children and does not knowingly collect anything from them.
Where it runs
On a single server in Tokyo, Japan. It is not hosted in mainland China, and there is no third-party cloud storage or database behind it.
Changes
If this changes, the date at the top changes with it. The app is small enough that the honest version of this page is short, and it is meant to stay that way.
Contact
Questions about any of this can go to the support page.