Privacy

The short version

Lexy uploads the words you look up. With each one it uploads the sentence that word was sitting in — text read off your screen from whichever app was in front, be that a message, a document, an email or a note — and the name of that app. It goes to our server in Amsterdam, and the word and its sentence also go to OpenAI, who produce the better translation.

There is no switch for this. The sentence is what makes the translation right, and syncing is what makes your vocabulary follow you between your Macs, so both are simply how the app works. If that is not a trade you want to make, this is the part of the page where you find that out — not after installing.

What you get in return: no account to create, no email asked for, no name attached to any of it, and a delete that actually deletes.

What the Mac app uploads

When you press ⌘C twice to look a word up, Lexy reads the text you have selected in the frontmost application, together with the sentence containing it. It translates on your Mac and saves the result there. A few seconds later it sends everything it holds to api.getlexy.app, and that is:

• The sentence around the word. One sentence of whatever was on screen next to your selection, which in something like a PDF can run to a paragraph. Lexy reads the text the field or document exposes to macOS, keeps the one sentence your selection sits in, and uploads that. If the word was in a private message, the sentence from that private message is uploaded and stored.
• Which app it came from. The frontmost application’s name — Safari, Mail, Slack, Preview — stored beside every single lookup.
• The word, and what happened to it. The word itself is stored lower-cased and trimmed, together with its dictionary form — ran is filed under run — never as you happened to type or select it, though of course the sentence beside it carries the text as it appeared. With them: the translation Apple produced on your Mac, the better translation if there is one, and the date and time of every lookup.
• Your target language, so a second Mac agrees with the first about it.

Two things are worth knowing about the sentence in particular. Captures made from the clipboard carry none — there is no surrounding text to read — and neither do apps that do not expose their text to the accessibility API, terminals and most Electron apps among them. And the sentence is the only reason the translation is any good: given bank on its own a translator guesses, given the sentence it knows which bank you meant.

Every request also carries what any web request carries: your IP address, and the app version making it. Those land in the server’s request log, which is short-lived and is never joined to your vocabulary — no row in the database records where a word was looked up from.

Who else sees it

OpenAI. The better translation — the one that arrives a moment after the instant one — is produced by a model run by OpenAI. To ask for it our server sends the word, the sentence around it, and the language you translate into. That is the whole request: no account, no device token, no IP address of yours, nothing that names you or ties two requests together. OpenAI state that input sent through their API is not used to train their models and is retained only briefly for abuse monitoring; their API data usage policy is the authority on that, not us.

This request is what the server exists for. An API key cannot be shipped inside a Mac app, so the app cannot ask a model directly — which is the reason there is a server between you and it at all.

The rest of the list, in full:

• Fly.io runs the server itself, in Amsterdam.
• MongoDB Atlas holds the database, in the EU. This is where your words, sentences and app names are stored.
• Cloudflare serves the app download and the update check at dl.getlexy.app, which sees your IP address and the version you run, and nothing about what you look up.
• Vercel hosts this website, and keeps ordinary server logs.
• Loops and PostHog, for the website only — see below. Neither is in the Mac app, and no word or sentence has ever been sent to either.

What it is used for, and what it is not

Two purposes, both of them things you can see working in the app: getting you a better translation than a word on its own allows, and making your vocabulary the same on every Mac you use Lexy on. That is the entire basis on which we process it — it is what the app is.

It is not sold, not shared with anyone outside the list above, not used for advertising or profiling, and not used to build or train anything of ours. Our own analytics never receive a word or a sentence: the server logs record that a translation was requested and whether it worked, deliberately never the text.

Nobody reads your sentences. We could — anyone who runs a database can read what is in it — so that is a commitment rather than a technical impossibility, and the honest version is that a person would look only when something is broken in a way that cannot be fixed otherwise.

How long it is kept, and how to delete it

Your vocabulary is kept until you delete it. There is no expiry on it, because a word you met two years ago is exactly what a vocabulary is for.

• Deleting one word in the vocabulary window deletes its history outright, on the server as well as on your Mac: every sentence and every app name it had collected, gone, with nothing kept anywhere to reconstruct them from. What is kept is the word itself, its translation, and the date you deleted it — a marker, so that a second Mac that has not synced yet cannot push the word back. Look the word up again and it returns, without its old history.
• Deleting your account is a hard delete and means what it says: every entry, every lookup with its sentences, your settings, and every device token, then the account row itself. No markers, no soft-delete flag, no archive, nothing left behind.
• Deleting the app removes the copy on your Mac. It does not remove the copy on the server — that needs the account deletion above.

To delete your account, open Lexy’s Settings and, under Your Macs, click Delete Everything… and confirm. It deletes the account on the server first and only then empties Lexy on that Mac — so if the server can’t be reached, nothing is deleted and you can try again. Your other Macs are disconnected at the same moment but keep their own copy of your words; do the same on each of them, or their next sync starts a new account from that copy.

If you would rather we did it, write to hello@getlexy.app. The app never asks for an email address, so a message tells us nothing about which account is yours, and we will work out with you how to identify it.

Deleting the Keychain item on its own deletes nothing: the next launch quietly starts a new, empty account, and if that Mac was the only one attached to the old one, what it held is left on the server with nothing able to reach it.

There is no account, and no name on any of this

The Mac app has no sign-up, no sign-in and no password, and it never asks for an email address. On first launch it quietly mints an anonymous account and stores a token for it in your Keychain — one per install — and that token is the only thing connecting your vocabulary to you. We do not have your name, your email address or your Apple ID, and nothing in the database refers to a person.

Adding a second Mac is done by typing a short code shown on the first one, which puts both under the one account. Still no email, still no name. If you give us an email address on this website it lives with our mail provider and is not attached to your vocabulary.

The Accessibility permission is what lets Lexy read the text you have selected, and the sentence around it, out of another application, and notice you pressing ⌘C twice. Lexy watches the keyboard for that one combination and nothing else: it does not record, store or send any other key you press. It does not read your screen or your clipboard except when you look a word up. You can revoke it in System Settings › Privacy & Security at any time, which stops lookups working.

This website

Separate from the app, and much smaller. Vercel hosts it and keeps ordinary server logs; beyond our host there are two processors, and no others.

• Loops (Loops Labs, Inc., United States) stores the email addresses given through the waitlist form on this site and sends the invitation when a spot opens, and occasional product updates. Every email has an unsubscribe link, which removes the address.
• PostHog (EU hosting, Germany) counts page views, downloads started and addresses submitted, each recorded with whether the visitor was on a phone or a computer, whether the headline named the language of their country and whether the examples were in their own language (never which country or language). No email address is ever attached to an analytics event.

Analytics here store their identifier in your browser’s local storage, not in a cookie, and there is no advertising or cross-site tracking of any kind. That is why this site has no cookie banner: it sets no cookies.

Your rights, and getting in touch

You can ask for a copy of what we hold about you, ask for it to be corrected, and ask for it to be deleted — see above for how deletion works, and note that we can only act on a request we can tie to an account. You can also complain to a data protection authority; ours is the Estonian Data Protection Inspectorate.

Write to hello@getlexy.app and we will sort it out. The data controller is Required Technology OÜ, Estonia.

If this page ever has to change in a way that means more of your text leaves your Mac, it will say so here before the version that does it is released.