Polycast

Privacy policy

Last updated 19 October 2026

In short: Polycast keeps what it needs to run your account and your learning: how you sign in, your language settings, your listening progress and the words you save. No adverts, no tracking across other apps or websites, and nothing is sold. You can delete your account and everything in it from the app at any time.

Who runs Polycast

Polycast is made by Finlay Panting, an independent developer in Salzburg, Austria. He is the controller of your personal data under the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). For anything about your data, write to privacy@polycast.app.

What Polycast keeps, and why

Your account

Your email address if you sign in with an emailed code, or an anonymous identifier from Apple if you use Sign in with Apple (Apple may share a private relay address instead of your real one). This is how Polycast knows which learning history is yours.

Your settings

Your own language, the language you're learning, the interests you pick, your guide (Mia or Leo), guidance level, subtitle choice and the flag colours for your icon. These shape what Polycast shows and how the guide talks to you.

Your learning

Which episodes you've listened to and how far you got, whether you listened with the guide, and the words you save (with the sentence and short clip timing they came from) and when to review them. This is the core of the app: it lets you pick up where you left off and practise your words.

Your plan

Whether you're on the free plan or Plus, whether you've used your free episode, and how many hours of new episodes you've prepared this month. Polycast needs this to apply the right allowance.

Notifications

If you allow notifications, a push token for your phone, used to tell you when an episode is ready and, at most once a week, when a show you finished has a new episode. You can turn these off in your iPhone's Settings.

What you type to find a show

Searches and "what you're in the mood for" requests are used to find shows for you. Mood requests are sent to Google's Gemini model to choose matching shows.

Your own API keys (optional)

If you choose to use your own ElevenLabs and Google keys, they're kept in your iPhone's secure storage. When you prepare an episode with them, they're sent to Polycast's server, held encrypted only while that episode is being prepared, and then deleted. They're used only to prepare the episodes you ask for.

Crash reports

If the app crashes or starts slowly, a technical report goes to Expo (the company behind the tools the app is built with). Nothing in it identifies you: no account, email or listening history.

App opens

The first time the app is opened on a phone, Polycast adds one to a daily count. Nothing is sent that identifies the phone or you.

What Polycast doesn't do

The legal basis

Most of this is needed to provide the app you signed up for (GDPR Article 6(1)(b)). Notifications rely on your consent, which you can withdraw in your iPhone's Settings. Crash reports, the daily open count and keeping Polycast secure and within its costs rely on Polycast's legitimate interest in running a reliable app (Article 6(1)(f)).

Who helps run Polycast

A few companies process data on Polycast's behalf, only to provide their part of the service:

Some of these companies are based in the United States. Where data leaves the EU, it's protected by the EU–US Data Privacy Framework or the European Commission's standard contractual clauses.

How long it's kept

Your account and learning history are kept for as long as you have an account. When you delete your account, your profile, saved words and listening history are deleted straight away. Records of episode preparation stay, with your name removed, because prepared episodes are shared with every learner. Backups held by Supabase roll over within a few days. If you just stop using Polycast, write to privacy@polycast.app and your account will be deleted.

Your rights

You can ask to see the data Polycast holds about you, correct it, delete it, receive a copy of it, restrict how it's used, or object to how it's used. You can delete your account yourself in the app: You → Delete my account. For everything else, write to privacy@polycast.app and you'll get a reply within a month.

If you're unhappy with how your data is handled, you can complain to the Austrian Data Protection Authority (Datenschutzbehörde) or the authority where you live.

Children

Polycast isn't meant for children under 14. If you think a child under 14 has made an account, write to privacy@polycast.app and it will be deleted.

This website

polycast.app sets no cookies and uses no analytics. Vercel, which hosts it, keeps standard server logs (such as IP addresses) for a short time to keep the site running and secure. If you send a removal request from the creators page, the show's name, your contact details and your message are kept so it can be handled, and deleted 12 months after it has been handled.

The Polycast mailing list

When you sign up on polycast.app, your email address, the language you picked (if you picked one) and whether you'd like to try the beta are kept by Loops, the email service Polycast uses. You'll get an email asking you to confirm first, and you're only added once you do.

After that, Polycast will email you about Polycast: when it launches, beta invitations if you asked for one, and occasional updates such as new languages, features and news. The language you picked helps make those emails relevant to you. Your address is only used for Polycast emails, and it's never shared or sold.

Every email has an unsubscribe link, and unsubscribing takes you off the list straight away. You can also ask to be removed, or to see what's held about you, at privacy@polycast.app. The legal basis is your consent (GDPR Article 6(1)(a)), which you can withdraw at any time.

Changes

If this policy changes in a way that matters, the app will tell you before the change takes effect. The date at the top shows when it last changed.