Last updated: 26 September 2026
This is a translation provided for convenience; in case of discrepancy, the French version prevails.
SurfLingo needs very little to work: an email address for your account, your vocabulary so it can give it back to you, and — if you bought a licence — what it takes to check that the licence is valid. This page states exactly what is collected, why, and for how long.
Nothing is sold, rented or passed on to advertisers. There is no advertising, no profiling and no resale of data.
Thomas Chupin, sole proprietor (entrepreneur individuel, EI), SIREN 829 202 209, publisher of SurfLingo. For any question about your data: support@surflingo.app. The postal address is given in the legal notice (in French).
Email address, name, password (never stored in plain text — only a hash is)
Creating and securing your account, and letting you sign in
Legal basis: Performance of the contract·Retention: As long as the account exists, then 30 days
Saved words and the subtitle sentence in which you clicked them (300 characters at most), estimated level, review history, learning sessions
Giving you back your vocabulary on all your devices and adapting the difficulty
Legal basis: Performance of the contract·Retention: As long as the account exists
Licence key, buyer’s email and name, PayPal transaction IDs, amount
Issuing the licence, proving the purchase, handling refunds and disputes
Legal basis: Performance of the contract, then accounting obligation·Retention: 10 years (statutory retention period for accounting records)
Your Mac’s identifier (SHA-256 hash of the hardware UUID), device name, macOS version, SurfLingo version, activation and last-use dates
Enforcing the limit of 3 Macs per licence, and knowing which versions are installed so as not to break an update
Legal basis: Performance of the contract (licence limit) and legitimate interest (version tracking)·Retention: As long as the licence is active, then 12 months
IP address and browser, for sensitive events only (sign-in, password or email change)
Detecting fraudulent access and letting you see what happened on your account
Legal basis: Legitimate interest (security)·Retention: 12 months
Pages visited, referrer, device type — without cookies or advertising identifiers
Measuring the site’s audience
Legal basis: Legitimate interest·Retention: 14 months
Messages written in the site chat, the page they are sent from, the language requested where applicable, and your email address if you leave it. For a reported problem, the operating system and browser pair (“macOS · Safari”), never more
Replying to you, and knowing which languages to add first
Legal basis: Legitimate interest (replying to people who write to us)·Retention: 90 days after the last message
Email address and what you are waiting for (SurfLingo AI, Windows, mobile…), if you join a waitlist from the site or the extension
Letting you know when what you are waiting for is available
Legal basis: Consent (your sign-up)·Retention: Two years after you sign up, or as soon as you ask to be removed
Without an activated licence, the Player sends nothing about your installation. It only checks whether a new version exists by querying our update server — a request that carries no identifier.
If you activate a licence key, the app sends, each time it starts, your Mac’s hash, its name, the macOS version and the SurfLingo version. This is what makes it possible to check that your licence is still valid and is not used on more than 3 machines. The hardware UUID itself is never sent: only an irreversible hash of it is.
The Player plays your video files locally. Neither the videos, nor the subtitle files, nor the audio are sent to our servers: they never leave your Mac.
One exception, and it comes from you: a word you save to your notebook is sent together with the subtitle sentence in which you clicked it — 300 characters at most — because that sentence is what will remind you, three weeks later, how the word was used. Words you merely click to read a definition are not sent. And if you have no account, nothing is sent at all: the notebook stays on your disk.
The SurfLingo extension (Chrome, Brave, Edge, Arc) recognises the video you are watching and connects it to the SurfLingo apps for Mac. Here is everything it touches.
On the video sites it supports — YouTube, Netflix, Prime Video, Disney+, HBO Max, Crunchyroll, Apple TV, ARTE and france.tv — it reads the page address, the video title and the playback position. On any other site it reads nothing, unless you click its icon: it then checks, in that tab only, whether a video is playing, and reads the same things — address, title, position. Never more: not the rest of the page, not the subtitles, not the sound, not the video, no stream of which is downloaded or decrypted.
The list of episodes you choose to follow (title, address, platform, position — 200 at most), the sites where you have hidden its tab, and a few markers to show the right screen: whether the SurfLingo app is installed, whether you are signed in, your display first name. Everything stays in your browser’s storage, on your computer. “Remove from list” removes an episode; uninstalling the extension erases everything.
The extension’s links to surflingo.app indicate the screen you came from (?src=extension&step=…). If you have accepted audience measurement, it counts these visits, without any identifier.
No advertising, no resale, no profiling, no tracking of your browsing outside the supported video sites, no remotely loaded code. This data is used only for what the extension exists for: connecting your videos to SurfLingo. Its use complies with the Chrome Web Store User Data Policy, including its Limited Use requirements.
SurfLingo AI listens to the sound your Mac plays to turn it into clickable subtitles. By default, everything happens on your Mac: the speech recognition models (Parakeet, Qwen3-ASR, Whisper) run on your chip, and the sound does not leave your machine. It is never recorded; only the text of the sessions is kept, on your disk.
One exception, and you are the one who chooses it: the “OpenAI GPT-Live-Transcribe” engine. If you select it and enter your own OpenAI key, the sound is streamed live to OpenAI, in the United States, to be transcribed — under your OpenAI account and subject to its terms. We receive neither this sound nor your key, which stays on your Mac.
SurfLingo AI has no account of its own: it follows the sign-in and licence of SurfLingo Player on the same Mac, and hands it the words you save. It is the Player that syncs them with your account, as described above. Otherwise, it contacts only surflingo.app, to find out whether a new version exists — without any identifier — and the public repositories (GitHub, Hugging Face) from which the transcription models are downloaded.
Four cookies may be set, and none of them is used to track you: the one that keeps you signed in, a second that lives only ten minutes to secure the round trip to Google, a third that remembers your answer to the banner so you are not asked again, and a last one that remembers the language you choose in the site menu — only if you choose one. Audience measurement, for its part, sets nothing at all — and until you have accepted it, its script is not even loaded.
The details — what each one contains, how long it lasts, the cookies PayPal sets on the payment page — are on the cookies page (in French), where you can also reopen your preferences and change your choice.
On our servers, only one part of SurfLingo calls on a language model, and it never does so on its own: when a word reaches your notebook without a translation — because the dictionary pack was not yet installed at the time of the click — you can ask for it to be translated. On that occasion, and only then, the word, its language and the subtitle sentence in which you clicked it are sent to Anthropic’s Claude model, which returns the translation.
Neither your name, nor your email address, nor your account identifier goes with it: the model receives words and sentences, nothing that links them to anyone. These requests are not used to train any model. And if you would rather do without, do not ask for the translation: nothing is sent.
Everything else runs on your Mac: word recognition, colouring by level and subtitle reading, based on the dictionaries you have downloaded, and SurfLingo AI’s transcription, whose speech recognition models run on your chip — unless you choose the OpenAI engine (see SurfLingo AI). There is no chatbot, no profiling, and no automated decision is made about you.
The bubble at the bottom of the page is for three things: asking a question, reporting a problem, requesting a missing language — and a fourth for producers, starting a partnership. It loads no external script into the page and sets no cookie: what your browser keeps is a token, in its local storage, that lets you find your conversation again after a reload. It gives access to that thread only.
Messages are stored on our server, in France, and relayed to Telegram — outside the European Union — so that we receive them on our phone. In practice, what Telegram sees is what you write, the page you are writing from, the site language, and your email address if you choose to leave one. We do not pass on your name, your account or your IP address.
The thread and its messages are deleted 90 days after the last message. If you would rather not go through the chat, support@surflingo.app reaches the same place.
Only technical service providers, for what they need to do:
Transfers outside the European Union rely on the European Commission’s standard contractual clauses. There are no other recipients: nothing is sold, rented or passed on to advertisers.
You can access your data, correct it, have it erased, request a copy in a usable format, or object to processing based on legitimate interest — audience measurement and tracking of installed versions in particular. For audience measurement, there is nothing to request by letter: you can change your choice at any time from the cookies page (in French). Deleting your account erases your vocabulary and your profile data; only the accounting records linked to a purchase are kept, as the law requires.
Write to support@surflingo.app: you will get a reply within one month. If you are not satisfied with it, you can lodge a complaint with the CNIL, the French data protection authority.
This page may change as the product evolves. Any change that genuinely affects you will be announced to you by email, and the date at the top of the page shows the latest revision.
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