Gloss · Privacy Policy
Privacy Policy
The short version
Your glosses live on your phone. To explain something new, Gloss sends the text, and only the text, to our server and to Anthropic, the AI company that writes the explanation. Short answers are kept, to answer the next person who asks, with nothing that says who asked. Once you sign in, a backup of your glosses is kept with your account until you delete it. Nothing in the app is measured unless you say yes. We don’t track you across apps, don’t sell data, and show no ads.
Who we are
Gloss is made by PixelPaw SRL, Str. Cânta nr. 39, Bl. 508, Sc. B, Et. 4, Ap. 15, Iași, Romania: trade register number J22/83/2023, fiscal code (CUI) 47434294, VAT number RO47434294. We decide what happens to your data, so under the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) we’re its controller. Write to us at privacy@gloss.day about anything here. Help and feedback’s email, in Gloss under You, carries your account code and your membership’s purchase number, so that we can find your account and your membership; delete them from the email if you’d rather not.
What stays on your phone
Your library, lists, practice, settings, streak and level are kept on your phone, in Gloss’s own storage, which only its widgets and its share extension can read. Notifications are planned on your phone, and nothing is sent to plan them. When an app shares a web page’s address with the text, Gloss keeps the site’s name with the gloss, on your phone and in your backup, and never sends it to be explained.
To explain a word or a passage
When you look up a word Gloss doesn’t have yet, paste a passage, or share text to Gloss from another app, Gloss sends that text to our server, with the style and the language, and our server asks Anthropic’s Claude to explain it. Anthropic gets the text, the style and the language, and nothing about you: not your name, your account or your phone.
Before the first passage you paste or share is sent, Gloss asks you, once. Words already in Gloss are explained on your phone, and nothing is sent.
Anthropic may not train its models on what we send. It keeps it for up to 30 days, longer only if its safety checks flag it, and we’ve asked it to keep nothing at all (zero data retention).
What our server keeps
- Every short answer. A word, a phrase, or a passage of twelve words or fewer, with its explanation, is kept so that the AI never has to explain it twice. It’s kept with no account and nothing that says who asked, and anyone who asks the same gets the same answer. A longer passage is explained and not kept.
- A word’s voice. The first time a new word is explained, Amazon Polly reads the word aloud, and the clip is kept in our public files. Polly gets only the word.
- What’s looked up. Each lookup is counted by its text and its week, with no account, so that Discover can show what’s trending and words many people look up can join Gloss’s list. Gloss also sends the words you open from its own list, to be counted.
- Reports. Something off? sends the word (or the passage, when it’s twelve words or fewer), the style you were reading and your reason. Reports are kept with no account, and no person reads them: the AI checks the explanation again, and a reported quote comes out of the next update.
- Your paste counts. How many passages your account sent each day, and when in the last minute, for the limits in our Terms, never the text.
Our server sees your phone’s IP address with each request, as every server does, and doesn’t keep it.
Signing in
Gloss asks you to sign in with Apple after you buy. We ask Apple for your name only, never your email. Our server keeps the identifier Apple gives us for you, which is neither your name nor your email, and a token from Apple that lets us end the sign-in when you delete your account. Your phone keeps your login in its keychain.
While you’re signed in, a backup of your glosses follows you to a new phone: your library and lists, with the passages you pasted or shared and their readings, your answers and practice, your settings, the name on your library card, and your progress. It’s kept with your account until you delete it.
Your membership
Apple sells the membership and takes the payment. We never see your card. Gloss sends our server Apple’s signed record of your purchases, and Apple tells our server when they change. From them we keep the plan, its dates, the price and the currency, so that Gloss opens for you on any phone. When you delete your account, these records stay, without your account, for our accounts.
Analytics and crash reports
The first time you open Gloss, it asks whether it may measure how the app is used. Until you tap Allow, nothing is sent: no analytics and no crash reports. If you allow it, Gloss sends events, such as a gloss opened, a game started or a plan bought, and crash reports to PostHog, in the EU, under a random ID that isn’t your account or your name. They never hold the text you look up, paste or share. We use them to see what works and to fix what breaks, never for ads. You can change your answer in You, under Analytics: turning it off stops sending and forgets the random ID.
The website
On gloss.day, the box on the home page explains one word a day. The word you type is sent to our server and to Anthropic, as a lookup in Gloss is, with nothing about you. Its explanation is kept with the short answers, with nothing that says who asked, and the lookup is counted as Gloss’s are, for the word list.
To hold the box to one word a day, the site sets one cookie, named gl, which holds only the date and how many words you looked up that day, and is gone after two days. Your browser also keeps the day and the word you looked up, so that the box remembers it when you come back. That copy never leaves your browser, and stays until you clear it.
The site runs no analytics, advertising or tracking scripts. Cloudflare, which serves it, sees your IP address with each request, as every server does, uses it to turn away scripts that ask too often, and counts the site’s visits without cookies.
Who handles your data for us
These companies handle data for us, under contracts that let them use it only to run Gloss:
- Fly.io runs our server, in Frankfurt, Germany.
- Neon keeps our database, in Frankfurt.
- Cloudflare serves this website, forwards the email sent to our addresses at gloss.day, and keeps our public files (the word list and the voice clips) and a nightly copy of our database in its R2 storage, in the EU.
- GitHub runs the nightly copy and the weekly update of the word list.
- Amazon Polly reads new words aloud, in Frankfurt.
- Anthropic writes the explanations, in the United States.
- PostHog keeps the analytics and crash reports, if you allow them, in Frankfurt.
Apple runs Sign in with Apple and the App Store under its own privacy policy.
Each of these companies is based in the United States. Where your data leaves the EU, or can be reached from outside it, the transfer is covered by the EU–US Data Privacy Framework or the European Commission’s standard contractual clauses.
Why we use it
- To give you Gloss as our Terms promise: explaining, the backup, the membership. That’s our contract with you.
- To keep answers, count lookups, read reports back to the AI, hold the limits and run the website: our legitimate interest in keeping Gloss accurate, affordable and safe, while keeping nothing that says who you are where it isn’t needed.
- Analytics and crash reports: your consent, which you can take back at any time.
How long it’s kept
- On your phone: until you delete it, or delete Gloss.
- Your account, backup and paste counts: until you delete your account. Paste counts from past days go as you paste again.
- Short answers, voice clips, lookup counts and reports: as long as Gloss runs, since nothing in them says who you are.
- Membership records: as long as the law requires us to keep our accounts.
- Nightly copies of our database: 30 days.
- Analytics and crash reports: up to a year.
Deleting your account
In Gloss, under You, then Account, Delete account deletes your account and everything with it. Our server deletes your account, your backup and your paste counts at once, and ends your sign-in with Apple. The nightly copies that still hold them age out within thirty days. Your phone erases what Gloss kept on it. Your membership stays with your Apple Account until you cancel it in Settings. Signed out, Delete my data erases what’s on your phone.
Your rights
You can see, export, correct or delete what we hold about you. Export your glosses and delete your account in Gloss, change the name on your library card there, or write to privacy@gloss.day. You can also object to how we use your data, ask us to limit it, or take back your consent to analytics at any time. We answer within thirty days.
Short answers, lookup counts and reports hold nothing that links them to you, so we can’t find yours among them.
If you’re unhappy with our answer, you can complain to the data protection authority where you live, or to ours, Romania’s ANSPDCP, at dataprotection.ro.
Children
Gloss is meant for people 16 and older.
Changes
When this policy changes, we’ll update the date at the top, and tell you in Gloss before a change that matters takes effect.