Privacy policy

Tico Talk (tico.talk) is made by Waël at YouSee360, which is responsible for the data described here. Questions, or a request about your data: hola@tico.talk.

Your notebook (notes, saved verbs, quiz answers and pronunciation results), your settings and the voice clips saved for offline use are kept in your browser’s storage on your device. Clearing this site’s data in your browser removes them.

We store your name, your email address and your password (only as a one-way hash, never the password itself), plus your notebook so it is the same on every device: your notes, saved verbs, quiz answers and pronunciation results (the sentence you practiced, its score and the sounds to work on, never a recording).

Each time you sign in, the session records your IP address and browser type to keep the account secure, and a cookie keeps you signed in for up to seven days. That sign-in cookie is the only cookie Tico Talk sets.

When you press and hold to practice, your browser’s own speech recognition turns what you say into words. In Chrome and Edge that is done by Google’s or Microsoft’s speech service, and in Safari by Apple, on their servers or on your device, under their privacy policies. Tico Talk only receives the recognized words, scores them in your browser, and never receives or stores audio. In browsers that can’t recognize speech, recordings you make to compare yourself stay on your device and are gone when you leave the page.

Recorded clips are served from tico.talk. For a line that has no clip yet, our server asks ElevenLabs to voice that Spanish line from the app; nothing about you is sent with it. Some voices are generated entirely on your device.

When you use the Suggest box we keep what you wrote, its topic, the chapter you had open and, if you chose to add it, your name or email so we can reply. To stop spam we also keep a scrambled code made from your IP address (not the address itself), which can’t be turned back into it. We keep suggestions so we can act on them; ask us and we delete yours.

If you turn on reminders, your browser gives us an address at its push service (Google, Apple, Mozilla or Microsoft) and the keys to send one message a day there, along with your time zone so the reminder arrives in the morning. It isn’t linked to your name or account. Turning reminders off deletes it, and so does the push service telling us it no longer works.

We count visits with Umami, an open-source tool that uses no cookies and stores no personal data: which pages are visited, roughly from which country and device, which link brought the visit, and a few actions such as sharing a word or finishing the daily review. No profile is built about you.

Tico Talk collects nothing when you donate: SINPE Móvil, PayPal and crypto wallets handle the payment under their own terms. To show crypto amounts in dollars, your browser fetches current prices from mempool.space and CoinGecko.

If you write to hola@tico.talk, we receive it through our email provider and use it only to reply to you.

Vercel hosts the app and keeps short-lived server logs. Our database host stores account and notebook data. Umami counts visits, ElevenLabs voices the app’s Spanish lines, Resend sends and receives our email, and your browser’s push service delivers reminders. Each handles data only to provide that service.

Delete your account from the app: open the account menu and choose Delete account. That removes your account, its sign-in sessions and everything synced with it, and clears the copy on that device. You can also write to hola@tico.talk to ask what we hold about you, for a copy, a correction or a deletion.

Tico Talk is made for travelers and adults living in Costa Rica and isn’t directed at children under 13.

If this changes, we update this page and the date at the top. See also About Tico Talk.