Privacy
Last updated 21 July 2026
Tolka has no account, no sign-in, and no user profile. We do not know who you are, and there is nothing in our systems with your name on it.
Your recorded audio never leaves your phone. To interpret a conversation, only the textof what was said is sent to Google's Gemini API and used to produce the answer — nothing more. We do not store it, and neither our servers nor anyone at Tolka can read your conversations.
What stays on your phone
Audio. Speech is transcribed on the device by iOS itself. The audio is converted to text as it arrives and then discarded. It is never written to disk, never uploaded, and there is no recording to recover afterwards — not by you, and not by us.
Your situations.Each situation — its name, the context you typed, and the conversation inside it — is a file in the app's own storage on your iPhone. There is no cloud copy and no sync. Deleting a situation deletes it. Deleting the app deletes all of them.
Your settings, including your language pair and whether you have finished onboarding.
What leaves your phone
One thing does, and only when you ask Tolka to interpret, suggest a phrase, or answer a question:
| What | Where it goes | Why |
|---|---|---|
| The text of the last few turns of the conversation, plus the situation context you wrote | Tolka's server, which passes it to Google's Gemini API | To produce the translation, the explanation and the suggested replies |
| Your subscription receipt from Apple | Tolka's server | To check that a paid request is coming from a paid app. It identifies the purchase, not you |
Tolka's server exists so that the key to the language model is not sitting inside a downloadable app. It is a relay. It does not log, store or retain the text of your conversations — the only things written down are a request timestamp, how many tokens it cost, and whether it succeeded, so that the service can be kept up and abuse can be stopped. None of that contains your words.
Google processes the text to generate the response and, under the paid Gemini API terms Tolka uses, does not use it to train their models. You can read Google's Gemini API terms for their side of that.
What we do not do
- No account, no email address, no password.
- No analytics, no advertising identifiers, no third-party trackers. The app contains no third-party SDKs whatsoever.
- No selling or sharing of anything, to anyone, ever.
- No location tracking. A “situation” is something you type, not somewhere we detect.
- No contacts, photos, or files.
Permissions the app asks for
Microphone, to hear the conversation. Without it the app cannot do its job. Speech recognition, to turn that audio into text on the device. Both are asked for the first time you start listening, and both can be withdrawn at any time in iOS Settings.
Payments
Subscriptions are handled by Apple. We never see your card, your billing address, or your Apple Account. We receive an anonymous receipt confirming that a subscription is active.
Children
Tolka is not directed at children and collects no personal data from anyone, of any age.
Your rights
Under the GDPR you have the right to access, correct and delete your personal data. In Tolka's case those rights are unusually simple to exercise: we hold no personal data about you, so there is nothing to request and nothing for us to delete. Everything the app knows about you is on your phone, and deleting the app removes it.
Changes
If this policy changes in a way that affects what leaves your phone, the date at the top changes and the change is described here. We will not quietly widen it.
Contact
Questions about any of this go to [email protected], and a person answers them.