01Who we are
izifi is a Finnish–English dictionary and vocabulary-learning app published by Nooa Lab Oy, a company registered in Finland. For privacy matters, Nooa Lab Oy is the data controller.
Nooa Lab Oy · Helsinki, Finland
Email: phuc.tran@nooalab.fi
02Data that stays on your device
The following never leaves your phone and is not sent to us. We cannot see it:
- Your search and browsing history inside the app, including the sentences you break down.
- Your saved words, study decks, flashcards and review schedule.
- Your app settings (detail level, language, theme).
This data is removed when you clear it in the app or delete the app.
03Data sent to our server (online lookups only)
izifi ships with an offline dictionary. When a word isn't in the offline data — or when you open an advanced entry — the app requests it from our lookup service at izifi.nooalab.fi. That request contains:
- the word or phrase you're looking up, so the server can return a result; and
- a random installation identifier — a UUID generated on first launch and stored on your device. It is not your name, email, phone number, Apple or Google account, device identifier or advertising identifier, and it is not linked to your identity.
We use the installation identifier and your network (IP) address only to apply fair-use rate limits and prevent abuse of the service. We do not log the words you look up, and we do not build a search history on the server. Rate-limit counters are kept in memory and reset when the service restarts.
04What we don't do
- No account or login.
- No advertising and no advertising identifiers.
- No tracking SDKs inside the app. The one third-party component that reports anything is Google's translation (section 06), and only once you use it.
- We don't sell or share your data, and we don't track you across apps or websites.
Our website (nooalab.fi) uses privacy-friendly, cookieless visit counting for aggregate country statistics. That applies to the website only, not to the app.
05Pronunciation
Spoken pronunciation uses your device's own speech synthesis: Apple's on-device voices on iPhone, and the phone's text-to-speech engine on Android (usually Google's). Nothing is sent to us for this feature. On Android, if you've chosen a text-to-speech engine that uses online voices, that engine's own privacy terms apply.
06Sentence translation (Google)
The sentence breakdown can also show a machine translation of the whole sentence. When you choose Translate with Google for the first time, and agree to the download, the app downloads Google's translation engine (through Google Play) and its Finnish–English model, about 40 MB. Translation then happens on your phone: the sentence is not sent to us or to Google.
Google's ML Kit, which provides this translation, sends Google technical information for diagnostics and usage analytics: device and app information, performance metrics, error codes, the languages translated and a per-installation identifier. See Google's ML Kit data disclosure. If you never use the translation, ML Kit is not started and sends nothing. You can delete the translation model in Settings › Storage.
07Feedback you send
You can send us feedback from the app (Settings › Feedback, an entry's menu, or the sentence breakdown). Only what you write is sent, together with what the form shows before you send it: the kind of feedback, the word or sentence you sent it from, the app version and whether it's the Android or the iPhone app. It goes to our server with the installation identifier, so the app can show you the status of your reports and our reply in Your feedback. We store it with a one-way hash of the identifier, not the identifier itself, and no name, email or account.
We read your feedback to fix and improve izifi, and we never publish it or show it to other users. Reports are deleted after 12 months. Delete my feedback in Your feedback deletes all of your reports from our server at once. Please don't write personal details in your feedback.
08Purchases (izifi Premium)
izifi Premium is sold through the app store: Google Play on Android, the App Store on iPhone. The store handles the payment, and we never see your name, payment method or card details.
To unlock Premium, the app sends the purchase token that Google Play gave it, together with the product (subscription or lifetime) and the installation identifier, to our server. The server asks Google whether the purchase is valid and active, and confirms (acknowledges) it to Google, as Google requires. The token is kept only in the server's memory to avoid asking Google on every request (at most 3 days), is not written to logs or disk, and is not shared with anyone else. On iPhone, the app sends the original transaction ID of your App Store purchase instead, and the server asks Apple's App Store Server API whether the purchase is valid and active; the answer is kept only in the server's memory (about an hour), is not written to logs or disk, and is not shared. The server also counts in memory how many installations use the same purchase on a given day, to stop one purchase being shared publicly.
If you download the complete offline dictionary, the file is served from our server to Premium users; we don't record which words you look up in it.
09Legal basis and where data is processed
For the limited server processing described above, our legal basis under the GDPR is our legitimate interest (Article 6(1)(f)) in operating the lookup service and keeping it free from abuse. Checking a Premium purchase is necessary to provide what you bought (Article 6(1)(b), performance of a contract). Feedback you send is processed on the basis of our legitimate interest in answering it and improving izifi. Our lookup service is hosted within the EU (Amsterdam, the Netherlands).
10Retention
Data on your device remains until you clear it or uninstall the app. On the server side we do not retain your lookups, and rate-limit counters are transient (held in memory only). Feedback you send is kept for 12 months, or until you delete it in the app. Purchase checks are cached in memory for at most 3 days; your subscription itself is managed by Google Play or the App Store, where you can cancel it at any time.
11Children
izifi is a dictionary suitable for all ages. It does not knowingly collect personal data from anyone, including children.
12Your rights
Under the GDPR you have the rights to access, rectify, erase, restrict and object to the processing of your personal data. Because the installation identifier is random and not linked to your identity, we generally cannot connect it to a specific person, so we may be unable to locate "your" data on request. You can clear local data in the app's settings or by deleting the app, which also stops the installation identifier from being sent.
For any request, email phuc.tran@nooalab.fi. You may also lodge a complaint with the Finnish Data Protection Ombudsman (tietosuoja.fi).
13Changes to this policy
If the app's data practices change, we'll update this page and revise the date at the top.
14Contact
Nooa Lab Oy · Helsinki, Finland
Email: phuc.tran@nooalab.fi