Your conversations live on your phone. We do not read them, and we build no feature whose purpose is reading them.
Only text you ask to translate leaves the device — encrypted, for translation and suggestions. Your voice, and the voices around you, are processed on the phone and never uploaded.
You can delete everything, in the app, yourself. Deleting your account removes your backups first, then the account — we never report a deletion that isn't complete.
Loquela is an iOS app made by Bits@Work Ltd, a New Zealand company. For anything in this policy, write to . Because conversations held through Loquela can touch on health, we treat everything it handles as sensitive by default, under the New Zealand Privacy Act 2020 and, where it applies, the GDPR.
The heart of Loquela never leaves the phone or iPad it runs on:
Speech is handled on the device by Apple's built-in recognition and voices: what people say around you is turned into text on the phone, and your replies are spoken by the phone. No audio recording is ever sent to us.
One thing needs the internet: translation. When a line needs translating, or when Loquela suggests replies, the text of that exchange is sent over an encrypted connection to our servers and on to our translation provider, which returns the result. We do not log the content of these requests on our servers, and our translation provider does not use them to train its models.
Each install also generates a random identifier for itself — a number, not a name. It travels with translation requests so we can count the free translations that install has used, and so a subscription can be matched to the device that bought it. It is not derived from your phone, your Apple Account or anything about you, and it is not used for advertising or shared with anyone.
When there is no connection, nothing is sent — Loquela keeps listening, speaking and showing your phrases, and translation resumes when the connection does.
Loquela works without an account. If you create one — to keep a backup, or to subscribe — we store:
Account data and backups are stored in Microsoft Azure's Australia East region — your data lives in Australia.
We do not read your backups; our safeguards are operational and audited — least-privilege access, an audit trail on every maintenance action, and encryption at rest. This is a promise we keep, stated honestly: we do not, rather than a claim that we technically could not.
Subscriptions are bought through Apple. Apple handles the payment; we never see your card details.
You can delete your account from inside the app. Deletion is real and immediate: your backups are removed first, then your account data. If your backups cannot be removed, the deletion stops and tells you — we will not report an account deleted while copies of its data still exist. Deleting your account does not cancel an Apple subscription; the app points you to Apple's subscription settings for that.
Conversations on your device are yours to delete at any time, in the app.
You can ask us for a copy of the personal information we hold about you, ask us to correct it, or ask us to delete it. Write to and we will respond. If you are not satisfied, you can complain to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner (New Zealand) or your local data protection authority.
If this policy changes in a way that matters, the app will tell you before the change applies to you. The current version always lives at this page.