Privacy policy

VietScene is an app for practising English through photos: you take a picture of a moment in your day, write about it in English and get private feedback from AI. This page explains what the app collects, what it sends to whom, and how you delete your data.

What the app collects

• Google or Apple account: your name and email address, to sign you in and so friends can recognise you. If you sign in with Apple and hide your email, the app only receives Apple's relay address.
• Username: a name you choose, so friends can find you. Invite links look like vietscene.com/add/<username>.
• Content you create: your photos, captions and replies, scene descriptions (the sentences you write, their corrections and the hints you opened), phrases in your notebook, review history, coins and what you spent them on.
• Friends: the people you connect with, and the likes and replies in your group.
• Notification token: if you allow notifications, a Firebase Cloud Messaging device token tied to your session, to tell you about replies, likes and friend requests.
• iPhone widget: if you add a widget, the app keeps a read-only token on the device so the widget can fetch new photos. It cannot post or change anything.

The app does not collect your location, contacts or advertising data.

How AI handles your content

• Captions: not sent to AI by default. Only when you turn on “Ask AI to fix my caption” for a moment is that caption's text sent to DeepSeek for feedback.
• Describe the scene: when you choose it for a photo, that photo is sent to an AI vision model (through the 9router gateway) to find the details to describe. The text the model returns, and the sentences you write, are sent to DeepSeek to write hints, correct your sentences and translate them. Photos you simply post are never sent to AI.
• Reply suggestions: when you ask for one, the message you are replying to is sent to DeepSeek.
• Listening to English sentences: the voice runs on VietScene's own server; the sentences read aloud never leave it.
• Feedback, corrections and scene descriptions are private: only you can read them. Friends only see the photo and caption you choose to share.
• What you write is not written to the server's system logs.

Microphone and voice

• Say it after the model: your speech is turned into text by your phone's own speech recognition (Google on Android, Apple on iOS) and is not recorded. VietScene only counts the attempts and the words heard.
• Retell a photo: what you say is sent to VietScene's server, turned into text by Groq (the Whisper model) and then discarded; the audio is not kept. The text is sent to DeepSeek to see which phrases you used again and to correct the grammar. The app keeps only the sentences in which you used a phrase correctly, as evidence in your notebook.

Your own voice (only with your consent): if you turn on “Shadow in my own voice”, the app records about 25 seconds to create an AI copy of your voice. A voice is sensitive personal data, so VietScene only does this after you agree separately in the app.

• The voice copy only reads sentences from your own feedback and scene descriptions. Nobody else can hear it, and it cannot be made to read anything else.
• The recording used to create the voice is sent to GenMax and their provider MiniMax, then deleted from VietScene's server as soon as the voice is ready (within 24 hours at the latest).
• Your reading of the corrected sentence is kept as “You today” so you can compare, until you delete it.
• When you tap “Detailed score”, what you just said is sent to Microsoft Azure to score each word's pronunciation, and is not stored.

Crash reports and app usage

• Crash reports: when the app crashes or hits an error, it sends a report to Sentry: where in the code it happened, app version, device model, OS version, the screens you just opened and your account id (a random string, not your email or name). Reports never include screenshots, your photos or what you wrote.
• App usage: to find what is confusing, the app records how you move through screens with Microsoft Clarity: which screens, where you tap and scroll, device model, and your account id. Every screen that can show your content is masked before it leaves the device (text becomes dots, pictures become empty boxes), so your photos, writing, feedback, replies and friends' names are never recorded.
• Update prompts: the app reads settings from Google's Firebase Remote Config, using a random installation id not tied to your account or content.

VietScene Plus

• Payment: Plus is bought and paid for through the App Store or Google Play. VietScene never sees your card number or payment details.
• Purchase history: to know which accounts have Plus, the app uses RevenueCat. RevenueCat receives your VietScene account id (a random string) and the purchase history the store sends: which plan, purchase and renewal dates, whether it was cancelled, country and currency. It does not receive your name, email or anything you wrote.
• Founder price: while Plus is not on sale, the app records when you open the Plus page or tap “Keep the launch price”, tied to your account, to see how many people are interested and to honour the price promised to you.
• Cancelling: in the App Store or Google Play subscription settings. Deleting your VietScene account does not cancel a store subscription.

Where data is stored

Photos are stored privately on Cloudflare R2 and can only be opened through short-lived links issued by our server. Everything else is in a database on VietScene's server in Vietnam. The connection between the app and the server is encrypted. Review reminders are scheduled on your phone and do not go through the server.

Third parties

Your data is never sold or used for advertising. The services below receive only what their job needs:

• DeepSeek: the text to give feedback on, write hints for, correct or translate, as described above.
• AI vision service (through the 9router gateway): only the photos you choose to describe.
• Groq: what you say in Retell a photo, to turn it into text.
• GenMax and MiniMax: creating and speaking with your voice copy, if you turn it on.
• Microsoft Azure: pronunciation scores when you ask for them.
• Cloudflare R2: photo storage.
• Google Firebase: Remote Config and push notifications. A notification may quote a short piece of a reply or a dare.
• Sentry (crash reports) and Microsoft Clarity (app usage, masked).
• Google or Apple: sign-in, and payment for Plus.
• RevenueCat: account id and Plus purchase history.

Your controls

• Delete a post: it disappears at once, together with its photo, comments, likes and AI feedback. The photo is removed from storage; if storage is briefly unavailable, the server keeps retrying until it is gone.
• Remove a comment: the writer can remove their own; the post's owner can remove any comment under it.
• Leave a friendship: either side can leave without the other's consent. After that, they no longer see anything of yours.
• Block someone: the friendship ends at once, what they wrote under your posts is hidden, and they cannot send you a friend request until you unblock them.
• Report content or a person: an administrator reads the report and acts on it: removes the content, suspends the account, or dismisses the report if nothing is wrong.
• Delete your voice: in the app, under Your voice. The voice copy is deleted at GenMax together with every sentence spoken in it; you can also delete your “You today” recordings.
• Delete your whole account: right in the app. All your posts, photos, scene descriptions, phrases, coins, voice and recordings, friendships and what you wrote under other people's posts are deleted, and the photos are removed from storage. Signing in again with the same Google or Apple account creates a brand-new account.

Content rules

VietScene does not allow harassment, hate, violence, sexual content or spam. Such content is removed and the account may be suspended. A suspended account keeps its data but cannot post, comment or add friends until the review is over.

Changes to this policy

The app is new and changes often, and this policy changes with it. The latest version is always on this page, with its date at the top.

Contact

Any question about privacy: contactmatureenglish@gmail.com.