Privacy policy

Flashcard Dictionary is an iOS app made by Yusen Zhang. You don’t need an account to use it, and the words you save stay on your device. This page covers the few things the app sends off your device, and why.

What stays on your device

Your saved words, their definitions, your review progress and your review answers are stored only on your iPhone or iPad, and deleting the app deletes them. Apart from the answers you ask AI review to check, described below, they aren’t sent to us or anyone else.

Looking up a word

Version 5.5 and later carry an English and Korean dictionary inside the app, so most definitions come from your device without the word being sent anywhere; pronunciation recordings still come from Wikimedia Commons. For words the app doesn’t carry, and in earlier versions, the app sends the word to an online dictionary for its definition and pronunciation. Version 5.4 and later use Wikimedia’s Wiktionary, with pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, and look Korean words up in the Korean Learners’ Dictionary (KRDict) of South Korea’s National Institute of Korean Language. Version 5.3.1 and earlier use the Oxford Languages dictionary API. The request contains the word and the technical details every internet request carries, such as your IP address. What these services receive is covered by the Wikimedia Foundation and Oxford University Press privacy policies.

If a word has no recording, your device reads it aloud itself, without sending anything.

AI review (version 5.5 and later)

AI review is off unless you turn it on, and the app asks for your permission before it sends anything. In AI review, you say or type what a word means, and an AI checks your answer against the word’s meanings. Its verdict is generated by AI and can be wrong, so you can always change it.

If you speak, your iPhone turns the recording into text, on the device when it can and otherwise through Apple’s speech recognition, which Apple’s privacy policy covers. The app sends us only the text, never the recording.

For each answer, the app sends our server, over an encrypted connection: the text of your answer, the word, up to eight of its saved meanings, the app’s language and your App Store country or region. Our server runs on Alibaba Cloud in Hong Kong and doesn’t store any of this, or your IP address. It passes the word, its meanings, your answer and the language to reply in to DeepSeek (Hangzhou DeepSeek Artificial Intelligence Co., Ltd., in mainland China), which returns the verdict. DeepSeek doesn’t receive your IP address, your country or any identifier from us. DeepSeek handles this text under its own terms and privacy policy. For example, it caches requests, which it says it usually clears within a few hours to a few days.

To stop misuse and apply the daily limit, the app uses Apple’s App Attest, which gives each installation of the app a random key. The first time you use AI review, the app creates the key through Apple’s App Attest service, which Apple’s privacy policy covers. After that, each AI review request also carries the key’s ID and a signature that proves the request came from the app. For each installation, our server keeps a keyed hash of the key’s ID, the key’s public part, a counter and how many answers were checked that day. This record isn’t tied to your name, email or Apple Account, a new installation gets a new key, and the record is deleted automatically 90 days after it was last used.

If you have Premium, the app also sends Apple’s signed record of your subscription, so the server can apply the Premium limit. The server checks Apple’s signature, uses only the result (Premium or not) and doesn’t store the record.

Premium subscriptions

Apple processes all payments. We never see your name, your Apple Account or your payment details.

Version 5.4 and later check whether you have Premium on your device, with Apple’s StoreKit. The app doesn’t send anything about your subscription to us or to any other company, except that in version 5.5 and later AI review sends Apple’s signed subscription record to our server to set your daily limit. There’s no separate account. Restoring a purchase works through your Apple Account.

Version 5.3.1 and earlier use Apphud, a subscription service, to check whether you have Premium. When you open the app, Apphud receives a random ID the app creates, basic device details (model, iOS version, app version, language, region, time zone and App Store country) and your App Store purchase records for this app. Apphud processes this data for us to manage subscriptions and to show us subscription statistics. It doesn’t use it to track you. See the Apphud privacy policy.

Where this data is processed

Oxford University Press, the Wikimedia Foundation and Apphud run their services outside mainland China, and KRDict runs in South Korea, so the data described above may be processed outside your country or region.

AI review uses our server on Alibaba Cloud in Hong Kong and DeepSeek in mainland China. If you’re outside mainland China, including in the European Union, using AI review transfers the text of your answer, the word and its meanings to mainland China. If you don’t want that, leave AI review off.

When you contact us

If you email us, for example through Contact Us in the app, we receive your email address and your message and use them only to reply.

What we don’t do

• No accounts or sign-in.
• No ads, and no advertising or cross-app tracking in the app.
• We don’t sell your data or use it to track you across other companies’ apps or websites.

Children

Flashcard Dictionary is for a general audience. We don’t knowingly collect personal information from children.

Your choices

You can delete any saved word in the app, or delete everything by removing the app. You can turn AI review off at any time on Home’s review card or in Settings. Because the record our server keeps for AI review isn’t tied to your name, email or Apple Account, we can’t find it from an email request; once it’s no longer used, it’s deleted automatically after 90 days. For any other privacy request, including questions about the subscription data Apphud holds, email us and we’ll help.

Changes to this policy

If the app changes how it handles data, we’ll update this page and the date at the top.

Contact

Yusen Zhang, contactflashcarddictionary@gmail.com