Privacy Policy
Last updated 4 September 2026 · Applies to the Fluento app and fluentoapp.com
This policy describes what Fluento actually does with your information, written against how the app is built rather than from a template. Where something is imperfect — and one thing is — it says so plainly.
On this page
1. Who we are
Fluento is a language-practice app that connects people for short voice calls. For the purposes of the UK GDPR and EU GDPR, Fluento is the data controller for the information described here.
Contact us about anything in this policy at privacy@fluentoapp.com.
2. What we collect
Information you give us
| Your email address | To create your account, sign you in, and send you a confirmation link or a password reset. Nobody else can see it — not even people you talk to. |
|---|---|
| Your password | Handled entirely by Google Firebase Authentication. We never see it, store it, or have any way to retrieve it. If you sign in with Google, we never receive one at all. |
| Display name, photo, bio | What other people see. Your photo is optional and can be removed at any time. |
| Country, age, gender | All optional. Age and gender may be left blank, and a blank field is simply not shown on your profile. |
| Languages and levels | The language you speak, the languages you are learning, and your CEFR level in each. |
| Interests | The "ask me about" topics on your profile. |
Information created as you use the app
| Presence | Whether you are connected right now, and whether you are on a call. Removed automatically the moment you disconnect. |
|---|---|
| Chat messages | Messages, polls and read receipts you exchange with other people, kept so the conversation is still there next time you open it. |
| Call records | That a call happened, when, and how long it lasted. Never its contents — see section 4. |
| Reviews and approval | Reviews other people write about you, and the like/dislike ratio shown on your profile. |
| Reports | If you report somebody, we store both accounts, both display names, the category, and any note you wrote. |
| Saved words | Sentences and words you save from a story, with their translations, so your dictionary still reads the same on another device. |
| Profile views | A count of how many distinct people opened your profile. We record who viewed you so the count is of people rather than visits — but nobody, including you, can read that list. |
| Founding number | If you hold one, the number and the date it was issued. |
Diagnostics
We use Google Firebase Analytics and Crashlytics to see which screens people use, where sign-up goes wrong, and what is crashing. These record your app version, device model, operating system, country, and an app-generated identifier — never your name, email address, messages, or anything you said on a call.
Fluento deliberately keeps identifiers out of analytics: screen names are mapped to fixed labels before being sent, so a conversation is reported as "a conversation" and not as who it was with.
3. Who can see what
Visible to any signed-in Fluento user
Your display name, photo, bio, country, age, gender, the languages you are learning and at what level, your interests, your approval percentage, how many calls you have had and how long you have talked, your founding number if you have one, and whether you are online.
Yours alone
Your email address, your friends list, the people you have blocked, your saved words, the count of who viewed your profile, and any report you have filed. These are locked to your account at the database level, not merely hidden by the app.
One deliberate exception. If somebody has blocked you, the app is allowed to tell you that — one fact, about yourself, so a message that will not send can explain why instead of looking broken. It cannot tell you who else that person has blocked.
Visible to the person you talked to
Your shared call history — how many calls the two of you have had and for how long. This record belongs to both of you.
Never visible to anybody but us
Reports and app ratings go to a queue that only Fluento can read. The person reported is never told, and neither is anybody else. Not even you can read a report back after sending it.
4. Speech, translation and calls
This is the part most worth reading, because the three behave differently.
Calls are not recorded, and cannot be. Audio travels directly between the two phones using WebRTC. It does not pass through a Fluento server, so there is no copy of it anywhere for us to keep, hand over, or lose. What survives a call is that it happened and how long it lasted.
Dictation during a call does leave your phone
When you hold the microphone key on a call to have a sentence transcribed and translated, your phone's own dictation service does the transcribing — Google's on Android, Apple's on iPhone. It is the same service behind your keyboard's microphone key.
That means the audio of what you dictate is sent to Google or Apple, under the terms you already accepted for your device. It is not sent to Fluento, and we never receive the audio or the transcript. We chose the platform service because the offline alternatives we tried transcribed conversational speech badly enough to be useless — but the trade-off is this one, and you should know about it. If you would rather it did not happen, do not use the hold-to-speak key; nothing else on a call transmits your voice anywhere but to the person you are talking to.
Translating a message does not leave your phone
Chat and story translation run entirely on your device, using Google ML Kit on Android and Apple's Translation framework on iPhone. The text is never transmitted. The first time you translate into a language your phone downloads a language pack of roughly 30 MB from the platform vendor; after that it works with no connection at all.
Call connection details
To connect two phones directly, each sends the other its network address through Fluento's database, and both use public STUN servers operated by Google to discover their public IP address. Your IP address is therefore visible to the person you are on a call with, as it is in any direct voice call. We do not log it.
5. Companies that process data for us
| Google Firebase | Authentication, database, file storage, analytics, crash reporting and this website. Fluento's data is held in Google's infrastructure. |
|---|---|
| Google Sign-In | If you choose to sign in with Google. |
| Google / Apple speech | Dictation during a call, as described in section 4. |
| Google Fonts | Typefaces on this website only. Not used inside the app, which bundles its own. |
We do not sell your information, we do not share it with advertisers, and there are no advertising or tracking networks in the app or on this site.
6. How long we keep things
- Your profile and messages — until you delete your account.
- Presence — removed automatically when you disconnect.
- Analytics events — up to 14 months, then deleted by Google automatically.
- Reports — kept while the account exists and afterwards, because a report about somebody who deleted their account is still the record of why they were removed.
7. Deleting your account
Settings → Delete account. It asks for your password, and there is no undo.
Removed: your sign-in credentials, your public profile, your listing in every lobby, your presence, your own account record, your saved words, your side of every conversation, your inbox row in other people's chat lists, and your photo.
Two things outlive it, and we would rather say so than claim otherwise.
The call history you share with another person belongs to both of you, and the app cannot delete one half of a shared record. Reviews other people wrote about you are their words, not yours, and the app cannot remove them on your behalf.
Some ranking-board entries and profile-view counters may also persist for a short period. If you want any of this cleared, write to privacy@fluentoapp.com from the address on the account and we will remove it by hand.
8. Your rights
Depending on where you live, you may have the right to access a copy of your information, correct it, delete it, restrict or object to how we use it, receive it in a portable format, or withdraw consent.
Most of these you can exercise in the app: your profile is editable in full from Edit profile, and Delete account performs the deletion. For anything else, or for a copy of everything we hold, write to privacy@fluentoapp.com and we will respond within 30 days. If you are in the UK or EU and are not satisfied, you may complain to your national data protection authority.
Our lawful bases are: performance of a contract for your account, profile and the calls and messages you ask for; legitimate interests for keeping the app safe, handling reports, and understanding crashes; and consent for your microphone and photo library, each of which you may withdraw in your device settings.
9. Children
Fluento is not for under-16s. The app puts people on voice calls with strangers, and that is not a service we are prepared to offer a child. If you believe someone under 16 holds an account, write to privacy@fluentoapp.com and we will remove it.
10. Security
Traffic between the app and our servers is encrypted in transit. Access to your private data is enforced by server-side rules rather than by the app: even a modified copy of Fluento cannot read another person's email address, friends list, blocks, or saved words. Call audio never touches our servers at all.
No system is perfect, and we will not pretend otherwise. If we discover a breach affecting your information we will tell you and the relevant regulator as the law requires.
11. Changes to this policy
If we change this policy we will update the date at the top, and for anything significant we will tell you in the app before it takes effect rather than after.