In short
- No account. We never ask for your name, email, phone number or contacts.
- No ads, no analytics or tracking SDKs, and we don’t sell or share data for advertising.
- Your library, progress and notes stay on your device and in your private iCloud.
- On-device transcription, translation and look-up run on your device and send nothing to us.
- AI features send only the content they need (an episode link, a sentence) to process your request.
On your device & iCloud
Your subscribed shows, episodes, playback progress and saved notes are stored in the app and synced through your own iCloud account (Apple CloudKit private database). We cannot read this data. Transcripts and translations of episodes are stored on your device only.
Online features
Some features are processed on our servers (hosted on Supabase) and by the AI providers listed below. Each request carries the anonymous device ID described in the next section, and providers see the request’s IP address.
| Feature | What is sent | Processed by |
|---|---|---|
| AI transcription | The public link of the episode’s audio file and its language — not your recordings | Groq |
| AI translation | Transcript lines of the episode and the target language | Groq |
| AI word & sentence look-up | The selected word or phrase and the sentence around it | Groq |
| Read aloud | The text to be spoken | Google Cloud Text-to-Speech |
| Talk with a podcast host | Your messages in the conversation; a voice sample of the host taken from the show’s public feed | Groq; Alibaba Cloud Model Studio |
| AI courses | The course title, languages and your lesson request | Groq |
| Podcast search | Your search words (no device ID) | Groq; Apple iTunes Search |
| Transcript on the Web | The transcript you choose to share (text, furigana, translation) with the show and episode titles. Anyone with the link can read it for 24 hours, then it is deleted; you can stop sharing earlier. | Our server (Supabase); the page is served by Vercel |
Transcripts and translations of public episodes are cached on our servers by episode link, so the next listener gets them instantly. The cache is not linked to you or your device. AI courses you create are stored on our servers and can be opened by anyone who has their link.
Anonymous device ID
The app creates a random identifier and keeps it in your iCloud Keychain, so your devices share it. It is not your Apple ID, advertising ID or any hardware ID. We use it only to check your Premium status and to count monthly usage limits (for example, hours of AI transcription).
Purchases
Payments are handled entirely by Apple. To unlock Premium, the app sends us Apple’s signed transaction record, and Apple notifies us of renewals. We keep the product, the original transaction ID and the expiry date, linked to the anonymous device ID. We never see your payment details or Apple ID.
Microphone & speech recognition
Shadowing recordings are kept in a temporary file on your device for playback and comparison, and are never uploaded. Speech recognition is performed by Apple — on the device where supported, otherwise by Apple’s speech service under Apple’s privacy policy.
Podcast hosts & Apple
To play a show, the app connects directly to the servers that host its feed, audio and artwork, which you choose; they see your IP address as they would with any podcast app. Opening a shared Apple Podcasts or Spotify link contacts Apple’s iTunes Search or Spotify’s public link-preview service.
Retention & your choices
- Delete the app to remove its data from your device; manage iCloud data in Settings › [your name] › iCloud.
- Usage counts are kept by month; purchase records are kept while needed to provide Premium and to meet legal obligations.
- To ask for access to, or deletion of, server records, contact us below.
- Mebae is not directed at children under 13.
Contact
Bluewhale Network LLC
Email: bluewhaleinfo.jp@gmail.com
We will post any changes to this policy on this page and update the date above.