Privacy policy
This describes what VocNova actually does with your words, as built. It is written to be read rather than to be defensible.
What we collect
Your email address, and a password we never see in the clear — it is stored as an argon2id hash. Signing in with Google gives us your address from Google instead.
A display name, a gender and a year of birth, if you answer those questions. All three are optional.
The two languages you chose, because every meaning and example is written between them.
The words you keep, their meanings, an example each, and how well you have been remembering them.
Messages from any chat account you connect, and notifications from the apps you tick — only those apps, and only after you grant Android's permission yourself.
Photographs you take in the app, while they are being read.
Fault reports when something goes wrong: the kind of error, a scrubbed message, a stack trace and the build. The scrubbing happens on your phone, because your phone is the only side that knows which strings came out of your messages.
What we never collect
No advertising identifiers, no location, no contacts, and nothing about what you tap. There is no advertising in this product and no third party receives your data for their own purposes.
Where it goes
Our server, over TLS, hosted in the European Union.
A language model — DeepSeek or OpenAI, or your own provider if you have supplied your own API key — which reads text and, when you ask for it, photographs, in order to produce your cards and for no other purpose.
Google Firebase Cloud Messaging, to deliver a notification while the app is closed. It carries a preview of up to 120 characters so Android can display it, and you can turn that off.
Google ML Kit reads photographed pages on your phone. Nothing is sent to Google for that.
What is encrypted
The tokens that let us read a connected account, and your own model key, are encrypted at rest with per-record keys wrapped by a master key held outside the database.
Your phone's copy of your messages and captured notifications is encrypted with AES-256-GCM. The key is issued by the server after you sign in, so this is not end-to-end encryption and we do not claim it is — the server fetches those messages and has to read them to build your cards. What it means is that the file on your phone is useless to anybody who takes the phone, roots it, or reads it from another app.
Notifications captured while the app is closed are sealed with a key held in your device's own keystore, which never leaves the device.
Backups are turned off for this app: nothing is copied to Google Drive or taken off by a device transfer.
How long we keep it
Messages: about a week on our server, and only until your devices have them. They are deleted once every active device has confirmed storing a copy, and in any case seven days after we received them. After that your phone holds the only copy.
Notification text: never written to our database at all.
Photographs: not stored. They are read and dropped.
Fault reports: fourteen days.
Your cards, folders and profile: until you delete them, or your account.
Your choices
Delete your account from inside the app, under Settings. It removes your profile, cards, folders, connected accounts and their credentials, devices, study history, fault reports and anything still held for a device. It is immediate and cannot be undone. To ask for deletion without the app, write to the address below.
Disconnect a chat account at any time. The stored credential is destroyed and we ask the provider to revoke it.
Turn off notification reading, or untick individual apps, at any time.
Use your own model key, so the reading of your words is billed to you.
Turn off message previews in notifications.
Change your password, which also signs out every other device.
The website, and the waitlist
vocnova.com carries no analytics, no advertising and no third-party scripts of any kind — there is nothing on the page to track you with, which is checkable by reading the source.
If you join the waitlist we store the address you typed, the date, the language you were reading the site in, and the country Cloudflare reports for the connection — so the launch email can go out in a sensible order. Nothing else, and no cookie is set.
It is used for exactly one email, on the day the app opens. To be taken off the list before then, write to hi@vocnova.com and the record is deleted; the list is destroyed once that email has been sent.
Children
VocNova is not directed at children under 13 and we do not knowingly collect their data.
Changes
If this policy changes in a way that affects what happens to your data, the app will say so before the change takes effect.
Contact
Write to hi@vocnova.com — for a question, a deletion request, or anything on this page that is not clear.