Steeping

Privacy Policy

Last updated: October 26, 2026

Who We Are

Steeping is operated independently by its developer ("we", "us", "our"), based in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Privacy or data-access questions reach us at the contact below.

What We Collect

  • Account info: Email address and password (hashed) when you register.
  • Content you bring in: Text you paste and YouTube URLs you submit for bilingual playback, along with our sentence-aligned transcripts and generated audio.
  • Speaking practice: When you start a conversation, your voice is streamed to Google (Gemini) in real time so the AI character can answer. Each thing you say is also sent to Google on its own to transcribe it and suggest a more natural way to say it, and the whole recording is sent once more after the call to build your lesson. We do not store your recordings. We keep the text: the conversation transcript, your sentences with their suggested versions and translations, and the expressions saved for next time, plus short audio clips of the character reading the suggested versions.
  • Listening data: Which sentences you played, how far you got, and which target language you chose — used to improve sentence alignment and translation quality.
  • Billing data: Managed by Stripe. We do not store your credit card details.
  • Analytics: Basic usage metrics (page views, feature usage) to improve the product.
  • Feedback you choose to give: Answers to an optional question, such as the one on the page that opens when you remove the Chrome extension, together with the extension version, your browser's language and an anonymous install number. If you are signed in, the answer is linked to your account. We read answers to improve Steeping.
  • Search and AI crawlers: When an automated crawler that names itself (such as Googlebot, Bingbot or ChatGPT-User) requests a page, we log the time, the page, the response status, the crawler's user agent, IP address and network (looked up through Team Cymru's public IP-to-network service). This shows us how search engines and AI assistants read the site. Requests from ordinary browsers are not logged this way. Crawler records are kept for 90 days.

How We Use Your Data

  • To provide and improve the text-to-speech service.
  • To manage your subscription and billing.
  • To respond to support requests.

Third-Party Services

  • Supabase: Authentication and database hosting.
  • Stripe: Payment processing.
  • Google (Gemini, Cloud Text-to-Speech) and ElevenLabs: Translation and speech synthesis. Google (Gemini) also runs the speaking-practice conversation and transcribes what you say in it.
  • YouTube: When you submit a YouTube URL, we fetch the publicly available transcript from YouTube's infrastructure.
  • Vercel: Application hosting.

Data Retention

Your data is retained while your account is active. You can delete your account and associated data by contacting us.

Your Rights

You can request access to, correction of, or deletion of your personal data at any time by emailing us.

Contact

Privacy questions, data-access requests, or account-deletion requests: support@steepingworld.com. For product feedback, the form on our Roadmap page reaches the same inbox.