Privacy ་ Kerog for iPhone

Privacy Policy

Last updated 19 September 2026 ་ Applies to Kerog for iPhone and to this website.

Kerog collects nothing about you. There is no account, no sign-in, no analytics, no advertising, and no tracking of any kind. No usage data is gathered, and none is sold or shared, because none exists.

Everything the app does with Tibetan — listening, reading a photographed page, translating, speaking and the dictionary — runs on your phone, and works in aeroplane mode.

There are exactly two ways anything can leave your phone, both described in full below. One is a feature you switch on yourself and which is off until you do. The other is Apple's own English dictation.

Who is behind this

Kerog is made by Ramon Blanquer — one person, with no company behind it, no investor, and nothing being sold. That matters here only because it is why there is no reason to collect anything about you: there is no business that data could serve. Questions about anything on this page go to blanquer.ramon@gmail.com, and are answered by the person who wrote the app.

What the app stores, and where

Recordings, transcripts, photographed pages and anything you type are held on your device, in the app's own storage, the same as any other file on your phone. They are not copied anywhere else. Deleting an item in the app deletes it; deleting the app removes all of it.

Nothing in that storage is readable by anyone but you, and none of it is backed up to any server run by this project, because there is no server run by this project. If you have iCloud backup switched on for your device, your phone's own backup behaviour applies, which is a matter between you and Apple.

The two things that can leave your phone

1. The Cloud (Monlam AI) — off until you switch it on

Models small enough to fit on a phone are less accurate than models running on a server. So Settings has a section called Cloud (Monlam AI) with a switch for each task — speech to text, translation, reading a page, speaking. Every one of them is off when you install the app.

If you switch one on, then for that task and no other, the relevant content is sent to Monlam AI, a Tibetan-language AI service run by the Monlam Tibetan IT Research Center. That means:

Sent, if you switch it on: Speech to text — the audio you recorded or shared in.
Translation — the Tibetan or English text of that sentence.
Reading a page — the photograph of the page.
Speaking — the text to be read aloud.
Never sent, ever: The word-by-word gloss and the dictionary. Both are bundled with the app and always run on the phone, whatever the switches say.
Never sent, ever: Your identity. Nothing that identifies you or your device accompanies a request, because the app holds nothing that identifies you.

Two things worth knowing before you switch one on. Kerog uses Monlam AI's free public service, which is not run by this project and carries no promise of availability — it can be busy, slow, or unavailable, and when it fails the task falls back to your phone. And where a task sends a file rather than text — your recording, or your photograph of a page — that file is uploaded to Monlam and kept on their servers, for as long as their own terms provide.

Monlam AI's own handling of what it receives is governed by their terms, not by this policy. Their service is at monlam.ai. If you would rather send them nothing at all, leave every switch off and the app is complete without them — that is the state it ships in.

2. Apple's dictation, in the two places the app listens for English

Tibetan speech never goes to Apple. The Tibetan recogniser is bundled with Kerog and runs on the phone, and the only other place Tibetan audio can go is the Cloud switch described above.

English is different. Rather than bundle a second large model, Kerog uses Apple's dictation, which is already on your phone. Two things in the app use it:

The microphone in Look up — tapping it and saying a word to search the dictionary.
Recording or listening with the direction set English → Tibetan — speaking English to have it translated for the person in front of you.

Worth knowing about the first one, because it is not what you would guess: when you say tashi delek into the Look up microphone, that goes through Apple's English recogniser, not the Tibetan one. That is deliberate — catching the word as an English speaker would spell out the sound is exactly what lets the dictionary find it.

In both cases Kerog asks Apple to do the recognition on the device. Most iPhones have Apple's English dictation installed, and on those it does stay on the phone. On an iPhone that does not have it, Apple's dictation sends that audio to Apple instead — exactly as it would for any other app you dictate into. It is Apple handling it under Apple's privacy policy, and Kerog neither sees a copy nor keeps one.

Permissions the app asks for

Microphone: To record or listen. Audio is transcribed on your phone unless you switched the Cloud on for speech.
Camera: To photograph a page of Tibetan. The photograph is read on your phone unless you switched the Cloud on for pages.
Photo library: Only the images you pick. Kerog does not browse, index or scan your library.
Speech recognition: Apple's dictation, for English only, as described above.

Refusing any of them disables that one way in and nothing else. You can change your mind at any time in the iPhone's own Settings.

Children

Kerog is rated 4+ and is suitable for any age. It collects nothing from anyone, children included, and it has no user accounts, no messaging, no user-generated content shown to other people, and no advertising.

This website

This site is static — text, pictures and short silent videos. It sets no cookies, runs no analytics, and has no tracking pixels or share buttons.

It is hosted on Cloudflare Pages, which like any web host records the requests it serves, including IP addresses, as part of delivering and protecting the site. That is Cloudflare's processing under their privacy policy. The site's typefaces are served by Google Fonts, so loading a page tells Google your IP address — the one third-party request on the site, and the only reason your browser contacts anyone but Cloudflare.

Your rights

Data-protection law gives you rights to see, correct, export and erase personal data held about you. They are satisfied here in the simplest possible way: there is nothing to see, correct, export or erase, because nothing about you is collected or stored by this project. What is on your phone is yours, under your control, and removable by deleting the app. If you believe otherwise, write and ask — the address is above.

Changes to this policy

If the app changes in a way that changes this page, this page changes with it, and the date at the top moves. Material changes — anything that would send something new off your phone — will also appear in the app's release notes rather than only here.