Your data, plainly explained.

Last updated 4 October 2026. Draft — for legal review before this is treated as binding.

Want your data destroyed? Jump straight to the erasure form. →

1. Who we are

Street Cat is a language-learning service that lets you practice a foreign language by chatting with a language model "street cat" over WhatsApp or Telegram, in text and voice notes — with an optional free web account to manage your cats and billing.

The data controller is:

Street Cat
Lisbon, Portugal
Email: contact@streetcat.app
NIF 337075590

We are based in the European Union and comply with the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

2. You are talking to a language model

Street Cat is a language-model chatbot, not a human. The voices you hear in voice notes are language-model-generated (synthetic) voices. We tell you this here and during onboarding in accordance with EU AI transparency rules.

3. What data we collect

Data you give us directly:

Your phone number or Telegram chat ID — this is your chat identifier. We receive it automatically from WhatsApp or Telegram when you message us.
Your WhatsApp or Telegram profile name — as shared by the platform you use.
Messages you send — text messages and voice notes you send to Street Cat.
Onboarding quiz answers — your target language, skill goals, interests, register preference, country/accent preference, learning goal, and content preferences.
Web account details (optional) — if you create a free account on our website: your email address, a hashed password (we never store your plaintext password), display name, and native language.
Support requests — anything you send us when asking for help.
Waitlist and cat suggestions (optional) — the phone number, email and language you give us when you ask to be told about a new language or suggest a cat.
Feedback — ratings, comments and problem reports you send about how a language or a cat is working.

Data we generate about you:

Transcripts of your voice notes — we convert your voice notes to text so the language model can understand and respond to them.
Conversation history — we store your chat history so the cat remembers your conversations and your learning progress.
What the cat has picked up about you — a running summary of your conversations and the interests you've mentioned, written by the language model so your cat remembers you past the last few messages. Send PROFILE to see it.
Your vocabulary — which words you've seen and used, per language, behind the "your words" page.
Usage and billing data — your plan, how much of your daily and monthly allowance you have used, message counts, and trial status.

Payment data: Payments are processed by Stripe. We never see or store your card details. We receive from Stripe only a confirmation of payment, the amount, and a reference linking the payment to your chat or web account.

What we do NOT collect: we do not access your WhatsApp/Telegram contacts, your other chats, your location, or your device data. We do not use your voice to identify you biometrically.

4. Why we process your data (legal bases)

Purpose	Data used	Legal basis (GDPR Art. 6)
Providing the service	Chat identifier, messages, transcripts, history, quiz profile	Performance of a contract (Art. 6(1)(b))
Personalising content to your goals and interests	Quiz answers, conversation history	Performance of a contract (Art. 6(1)(b))
Web account management (optional)	Email, hashed password, display name, native language	Performance of a contract (Art. 6(1)(b))
Billing and payment reconciliation	Chat/account identifier, usage data, Stripe confirmations	Performance of a contract (Art. 6(1)(b))
Daily check-in message	Chat identifier	Performance of a contract (Art. 6(1)(b)); opt out any time
Service safety, abuse prevention, debugging	Messages, usage data	Legitimate interests (Art. 6(1)(f))
Reviewing conversations to find where the cats go wrong (bad corrections, confusing onboarding) and fix them	Messages, transcripts, quiz profile	Legitimate interests (Art. 6(1)(f)) — you can object any time by emailing us
Preventing repeated free-trial abuse	A keyed hash of your chat identifier (not the number itself) plus the date the trial was used	Legitimate interests (Art. 6(1)(f))
Tax, accounting, consumer-protection law	Billing records	Legal obligation (Art. 6(1)(c))
Optional preferences	Your explicit choice in the quiz	Consent (Art. 6(1)(a)), withdrawable any time

We do not use your conversations to train language models, and we do not sell your data or use it for third-party advertising.

5. Who we share data with (processors)

Google (Gemini API) — Writes the cat's replies, reads your sign-up answers, turns your voice notes into text, and voices some cats. Receives: your messages, recent conversation and profile; the audio of your voice notes.
Hatchbox — Deploys and manages our server. Receives: access to the server, and so to what it stores.
Meta Platforms (WhatsApp Business Platform) — Delivers messages between you and your cat on WhatsApp. Receives: your phone number, profile name, and the messages and voice notes you exchange.
Stripe — Takes payments (an independent controller for payment data). Receives: your payment details, and a reference linking a payment to your chat or account.
Telegram — Delivers messages between you and your cat on Telegram. Receives: your Telegram ID, profile name, and the messages and voice notes you exchange.
Anthropic — A language model we use to read conversations back and find where the cats went wrong. Receives: the conversation being reviewed.
DigitalOcean — Hosts our server, database and backups, and the speech models we run ourselves. Receives: everything we store.
ElevenLabs — Turns the cat's replies into voice notes for most languages. Receives: the text of the cat's reply, which can include your name or something you told it.
OpenAI — Voices the cats for some languages, and stands in when another voice provider is down. Receives: the text of the cat's reply.

For some languages (currently those listed under "models we run ourselves" on the page linked below) your voice notes are transcribed or voiced by open-source models we run on our own server rather than by another company: your audio doesn't leave our infrastructure, and it isn't stored once it's transcribed.

The full list, with where each company is, the safeguard for any transfer, and the date it was added, is always at who receives your data (last changed 2026-10-04).

Some providers are located in the United States. Where data is transferred outside the EEA, we rely on the EU–US Data Privacy Framework and/or Standard Contractual Clauses, plus additional safeguards where appropriate. We do not share your data with anyone else, except if required by law or to protect our legal rights.

6. How long we keep your data

Conversation history and voice transcripts: deleted 12 months after your last activity, or immediately on request. If you still have fish you paid for, or a plan or course still running, we keep your account until that runs out rather than delete something you bought.
Voice note audio: not stored. The audio is transcribed as it arrives and discarded; only the transcript is kept.
The cat's voice notes: a copy is cached so the same line isn't generated twice, and deleted once it hasn't been used for 90 days.
Feedback and problem reports: kept with your account. If a report quotes a chat message, that quote is deleted 12 months after the report was last handled, or straight away when you delete your data.
Quiz profile and account data: deleted 12 months after your last activity, on the same terms as your conversations.
Waitlist and cat-suggestion signups: deleted 12 months after you sign up.
Erasure requests: kept for 90 days after we've handled them, as a record that we did.
Backups: we keep 30 nightly copies of the database, so anything deleted is gone from the backups within 30 days.
Billing records: kept for 10 years as required by Portuguese tax law.
Free-trial fraud-prevention record: a hash of your chat identifier, keyed with a secret only our server holds, and the date you used the free trial — never your phone number or any conversation content. It is kept, and deliberately survives erasure, so that deleting your data and starting over can't grant an endless series of free trials. Without that secret it can't be matched back to you.

You can ask us to delete your data sooner at any time — including instantly, by messaging the cat directly. See delete your data below.

7. Age requirement

Street Cat is not intended for children under 16. WhatsApp and Telegram themselves require users in the EU to be at least 16 (or the age set in their country). If we learn we have collected data from a child under this age, we will delete it. If you believe a child is using Street Cat, contact us at contact@streetcat.app.

8. Your rights

Under the GDPR you have the right to:

Access the personal data we hold about you;
Rectify inaccurate data;
Erase your data — message the word DELETE to the cat (WhatsApp or Telegram) for instant erasure, use Delete account in your web account's settings, or use the erasure form below;
Restrict or object to processing based on legitimate interests;
Data portability — receive your data in a machine-readable format (we send everything we hold about you as a JSON file);
Withdraw consent at any time, where processing is based on consent;
Complain to a supervisory authority — in Portugal this is the CNPD, www.cnpd.pt.

To exercise any right, email contact@streetcat.app or message the cat. We respond within one month.

9. Delete your data

The fastest way is to message the cat. Send the word DELETE to your cat on WhatsApp or Telegram. It will ask you to confirm, and the moment you do, your profile and your entire conversation history are erased — every cat, plus any web account and Telegram chat linked to you — no waiting, no email thread. On the website, Settings → Delete account does the same.

If you can't reach that chat any more — you changed number, deleted the app, or only ever had a web account — fill in the form below and we'll do it for you. Because anyone could type a stranger's phone number into a public form, we don't erase straight from this form: we verify the request belongs to you first, then delete. We confirm when it's done, within one month at the latest.

Request erasure of your data

Where do you use Street Cat? (optional, helps us find you)

WhatsApp Telegram Web account

Phone number you chat from

Email on your web account

Anything else we should know? (optional)

Give us at least one of the two — the phone number or the email. We only use what you enter here to find and delete your data.

What gets destroyed: your profile and quiz answers, every message you and the cat exchanged, your voice-note transcripts, what the cat had picked up about you, your vocabulary, your feedback, your daily check-in record, any waitlist or cat-suggestion signup, and your web account and its link to your cats.

What we must keep: billing and payment records, which Portuguese tax law requires us to retain for 10 years. These are invoicing records only — they contain no conversation content. We also keep one small fraud-prevention record — a keyed hash of your chat identifier and the date you used the free trial (never your number or any messages) — so erasing and re-registering can't reissue the free trial indefinitely; without our server's secret it can't be traced back to you. A refund request you've made stays until we've handled it, so the refund isn't lost. Usage-cost records stay for our accounts with your identifier removed. Deleting your data also ends your access to any remaining paid time, and cancels an active subscription; we can't restore any of it afterwards.

10. Security

Data is encrypted in transit (TLS) and at rest. Access to production data is limited to the founder. WhatsApp and Telegram messages are encrypted between your device and the respective platform; once delivered to us, they are protected by the measures above.

11. Automated decision-making

The cat's replies are generated automatically by a language model, but we make no automated decisions about you that produce legal or similarly significant effects. Billing actions follow simple, transparent rules based on your plan.

12. Changes to this policy

We may update this policy as the service evolves. We will tell you in the chat before any change to what we use your data for, or to your rights, takes effect. When we add or replace a company that processes your data for the same purposes (a new voice provider, say), we sign a data processing agreement with it first and add it to who receives your data before it receives anything; that page shows the date of every change. The "last updated" date at the top always reflects the current version.

13. Contact

Questions? Email contact@streetcat.app.