Iris

Privacy notice

What this is for

Iris is a test project. It is run to develop a machine translator and to find out where it goes wrong — bad translations, slow ones, failures under load — and to make it dependable enough to be worth using. It is not a finished product, it is not commercial, and it is not anyone's business model.

That is also the honest answer to why anything is kept at all. A translation that came out wrong is only fixable if the text that produced it still exists. The retention below is set to the shortest span that still allows that, and to nothing longer.

Because it is a test, it may be wrong, it may be unavailable without warning, and its data may be cleared at any time. Nothing here should be relied on for anything that matters.

What we process

When you translate something we store the text you submitted, the translation, the language and option settings, and the IP address the request came from. When you upload a document we store the extracted text the same way; the uploaded file itself is deleted as soon as the text has been extracted from it.

Why

Translations are produced by a model running on our own hardware in Europe. Nothing is sent to a third-party translation provider, there is no analytics, and your text is not used to train anything or shown to anyone outside the people running this.

How long

These are enforced by a scheduled job, not by anyone remembering. Being a test, the whole database may also be cleared before any of those spans elapse.

Your data, removed

The Erase my data and withdraw consent link at the foot of the translator deletes the consent record for this browser and everything tied to it — your translations, your documents, and any uploaded files — immediately, and without you having to identify yourself.

Use it before you clear your cookies. There is no login here, so that cookie is the only thing that connects you to your own data. Clearing it deletes nothing: the rows stay in the database until their retention period runs out, we can still read them, and you can no longer point at them to ask for them to go. Clearing your cookies is the one thing that makes erasure impossible rather than unnecessary.

Cookies and browser storage

One cookie, holding the identifier of your consent record and nothing else. It is signed, HTTP-only, and set to SameSite=Lax. There is no analytics, no advertising, and no third-party script on this site.

The translator also keeps a short list of the languages you have used in this browser's local storage, so it can offer them first instead of guessing. It stays on your device, is never sent to us, and holds language codes and nothing else. Clearing your browser data removes it.

TODO before publication

These need someone qualified rather than a good guess, so they are left blank instead of filled in with something that reads like law.

Back to the translator Esc