Published by: Garded LLC
Contact: thisdudestartedsomething@gmail.com
The short version
girlingo has no accounts. You never give us an email address, a password or a phone number, and there is nothing to sign into. Your progress lives on your phone.
We do not use analytics. We do not use tracking. There is no advertising identifier, and nothing in the app reports back to us about what you tap or how often you open it. Two parts of girlingo talk to a network at all: the one that produces a written read from a conversation, and the one that keeps track of whether you have paid. Both are described in full below.
What stays on your device
All of this is written to the app's private storage on your phone, protected by iOS file encryption, and never sent anywhere:
- your progress: lessons completed, XP, level, streak, skill meters, and where you stopped in a lesson
- your scores from Selfie Check, and the written coaching that came with them
- the name you type in, if you type one — it is optional, and it is only used to say hello on the home screen
- a profile photo, if you add one — it is scaled down and kept on your phone
- your practice and chat history, kept as dates only, so the app can work out your streak and how much XP a conversation has already earned
- the dates of your Wingman reads, so the app can tell how many of the three a free account gets each week you have used
Deleting the app deletes all of it. Profile → Start over also erases it, immediately and permanently, including the profile photo.
Selfie Check
The photograph is measured on your phone using Apple's on-device Vision framework and then discarded.
- it is never uploaded
- it is never written to disk
- no face template, faceprint or biometric identifier is created or stored
- it is not used to recognise you, or to guess your age, gender or ethnicity
Selfie Check measures lighting, framing, angle and background — the things you can change about a photograph. It does not rate attractiveness and does not make claims about you. Only the numeric scores and the coaching text are kept.
Wingman, and what leaves your phone
Wingman is the one part of girlingo that sends anything to a server.
Screenshots. When you give Wingman a screenshot, the image is read on your phone using Apple's on-device text recognition. The picture itself never leaves your device and is never stored. What is sent, and only when a read is actually being produced, is the recognised text of the messages in that screenshot.
Descriptions. If you describe a situation in your own words instead, that text is sent.
Practice conversations. girlingo's practice characters are fictional. What you type to them, and their replies, are sent so the next reply can be written. The conversation is not kept after it ends — only the date, for the allowance count.
That text goes over an encrypted connection to a small service we run, which forwards it to OpenAI, who generate the response and send it back. Our service exists to hold the API key and to stop one person running up the bill; it does not store your conversations, and neither do we. There is no database anywhere in girlingo with your messages in it. OpenAI's handling of API data is described at https://openai.com/policies/.
Alongside that text we send a random identifier for your installation of the app, so the limit can be counted per copy of the app rather than per network. It is generated on your device, it is not linked to you, it is not your device's advertising or vendor identifier, and reinstalling the app replaces it.
If girlingo is running without a live connection to that service, every one of these features falls back to reading and responding entirely on your phone, and nothing is sent at all.
Notifications
If you let her, girlingo will send you a message now and then when the app is closed. These are scheduled by your own phone, not sent from a server. We do not know whether one arrived, whether you opened it, or whether you ignored it, because there is nothing on our side to tell. Turning them off in iOS Settings stops them; nothing else changes.
Other people in your conversations
A screenshot of a conversation contains somebody else's words. Please only give Wingman conversations you are part of, and please do not upload messages from anyone who would object. This is also a condition of the Terms of Use.
Purchases
Subscriptions are handled entirely by Apple through the App Store. We never see your card, your billing address or your Apple Account details, and no part of a payment passes through us.
To keep track of what you have bought, girlingo uses RevenueCat, Inc., a subscription-management service. It is the one third-party SDK in the app. When you buy, restore, or the app checks whether you are still a subscriber, RevenueCat receives:
- an anonymous identifier it generates for your installation of the app. It is not your name, your email or your Apple Account, it is not your device's advertising or vendor identifier, and reinstalling the app replaces it
- the purchase receipt Apple issued, so it can confirm the subscription is real and still running
- the ordinary technical details of any network request, including your device model, your operating system version and your IP address
It does not receive your name, your progress, your photographs, your selfie scores, or anything you have typed to anybody in the app. We use it to answer one question — is this person a subscriber — and it is what makes a purchase follow you to a new phone.
RevenueCat's own privacy policy is at https://www.revenuecat.com/privacy.
Children
girlingo is written for adults and is rated 17+. It is not directed at children and we do not knowingly collect anything from anyone under 17.
Changes
If this policy changes, the updated version will appear here and in the app, with a new date at the top. Material changes will be flagged in the app.
Getting in touch
Questions, or a request about your data, go to thisdudestartedsomething@gmail.com. Because girlingo holds nothing about you on any server, most data requests are answered by the app itself: everything we have is on your phone, and Profile → Start over deletes it.