Privacy policy

If you only read the site: nothing that identifies you. Our host, Vercel, records ordinary server logs (your IP address, browser type and the pages requested) for a short time to run the service and keep it secure. We use Vercel Web Analytics to count visits; it does not use cookies and does not identify individual visitors.

If you sign in: sign-in is through Google. Google sends us your name, email address and profile picture, and we store them. We use a cookie to keep you signed in; it exists only for that purpose. We do not see your Google password.

Your profile: anything you add on the account page—a display name, a profile picture, and, if you choose, where your Fuzhounese is from (a county or district, and optionally a town or village).

Your contributions: the words, meanings, example sentences, pronunciations, requests and votes you submit, and any audio you record or upload. When you contribute, we also record the time and, if you have set it on your profile, where your Fuzhounese is from, so that a recording from Changle stays labeled Changle even if you later change your profile.

Suggestions and reviews: if you suggest an improvement to a word, we keep the suggestion and whether it was accepted. If you are an editor, we keep a record of what you reviewed.

The assistant: if you use “Ask the dictionary”, each question and answer is kept with your account, with what it cost to answer. The question is sent to Anthropic, whose model produces the answer, under its privacy policy; the dictionary's own text goes with it, nothing about you does. We read the questions it could not answer to decide which words to add next.

Anyone on the internet can see:

• your display name and profile picture;
• where your Fuzhounese is from, only to the level you chose—nothing, the county or district, or the county and village;
• the month and year you joined;
• every word, meaning, example and recording you contributed that an editor has approved.

A recording is your voice, and it is published with your display name and origin label next to it. Please do not record if you are not comfortable with that.

Never public: your email address, the exact time of your contributions, anything an editor rejected, and a village you entered but chose not to show. If you set your origin to “Nothing” or “County only”, the village field is not stored at all.

Only to run the dictionary:

• to sign you in and show you your own contributions;
• to credit you for what you add;
• to label recordings and words with where the speaker's Fuzhounese is from;
• to let editors review what is submitted and to stop abuse (rate limits and the like);
• to contact you about your account or a contribution, if we ever need to.

We do not sell your data, do not show advertising, do not build profiles of you, and do not send newsletters.

Four companies process data on our behalf, each under its own privacy policy: Vercel hosts the site and runs the analytics; Supabase stores the database, your sign-in session and the audio and picture files; Google handles sign-in; Anthropic answers the questions you put to the assistant. Their servers may be in a different country from you, so using the site means your data can be transferred there.

Beyond that, we share personal data only if the law requires it. Published contributions are, of course, shared with everyone: see the next section.

Everything published in the dictionary is licensed CC BY-SA 4.0, which lets anyone copy and reuse it as long as they credit the source and share alike. That includes recordings. Once a contribution is published, copies of it may exist elsewhere that we cannot recall. The terms of service say more.

Your account and profile: until you ask us to delete them. Approved contributions: as part of the dictionary, indefinitely, because removing words would break it for everyone else. Rejected submissions: kept privately with the editor's note so you can see why, until you delete your account. Assistant questions: until you delete your account. Server logs: a matter of weeks, set by Vercel.

You can change your display name, picture and origin settings on your account page at any time. For anything else, email noahdlee519@gmail.com from the address on your account and we will:

• send you a copy of everything we hold about you;
• correct anything that is wrong;
• delete your account. Your profile, email, rejected submissions and pending items are removed. Recordings of your voice are removed too, if you ask. Words and meanings that were already published stay in the dictionary under the licence, credited to “a contributor” instead of your name.

We answer within 30 days. If you are in California or another place with a privacy law that gives you further rights, those rights apply and the same address is the way to use them. We do not discriminate against anyone for exercising them.

You must be at least 13 to make an account. If you are under 13 we do not knowingly collect anything from you; if a parent tells us a child has made an account, we delete it. Recordings of younger speakers are welcome through a parent's account, with the parent's consent.

Contributions and profile changes go over an encrypted connection. Editors can see pending submissions, and the site owner can see the whole database, including email addresses; both are bound by this policy. No website can promise perfect security, and if we learn of a breach that affects you we will tell you.

If this policy changes in a way that matters, the date at the top changes and, if you have an account, we will say so on the site before it takes effect. Small clarifications may be made without notice.