Privacy Policy for Ordlyd

Last updated: 6 September 2026

This is the English version of the Ordlyd privacy policy. The Norwegian version at www.ordlyd.no/personvern is the authoritative text; in case of any difference, the Norwegian version prevails.

In short

• The text you read and write never leaves your machine. Text-to-speech, the dictionary, spell checking and word suggestions all run locally in your browser.
• We store your e-mail address and licence code, both cryptographically transformed into pseudonyms, so that we can verify that you have a valid licence. Pseudonymised is not the same as anonymous — see section 3.6.
• We do not store your name, age, class, diagnosis, browsing history, or anything about how you use Ordlyd.
• Your settings live only in your own browser.
• If you select English, an English language pack is downloaded once. The download sends no information about you — see section 2.
• Licence data is stored in the EU (Frankfurt), and all processing — including e-mail delivery — takes place on servers in the EU. See section 6.
• If we suffer a security breach, we notify the data controller within 24 hours — see section 11.

The rest of this document explains this precisely.

1. Who is responsible

LEAD IT v/Ordlyd.no

Organisation number: 997950941 (Norway)

Postal address: Gravaåsen 8, 3940 Porsgrunn, Norway

E-mail: post@ordlyd.no

Privacy contact: Christoffer Corzani, christoffer@corzani.no Data protection officer: We are not required to appoint a data protection officer under Article 37, and have not appointed one voluntarily.

We are the data controller for the personal data described here.

One important exception: If you received Ordlyd through your school, municipality or county authority, they are the data controller and we process data on their behalf as a data processor. Their privacy policy then applies in addition to this one, and we process data according to our agreement with them. Questions about your data should then be directed to your school owner first.

2. What Ordlyd does on your machine — and what is never sent anywhere

This is the most important section of this policy, so we state it plainly.

Ordlyd is installed as a browser extension and has technical access to the content of the web pages you visit. That access is necessary for the extension to read aloud text you select and to offer word suggestions in the text field you are writing in.

None of that content is sent to us. The speech synthesis, the dictionary, the spell checker and the word suggestions are part of the extension itself and run on your own machine. Ordlyd also works without internet access, precisely because no text needs to be sent anywhere to be processed. Norwegian is bundled with the extension itself; English requires a one-time download, as described below.

We do not receive, and cannot see:

• the text you read or have read aloud
• the text you write
• which web pages you visit
• what you look up in the dictionary

Your settings — whether typing echo is on, reading speed, theme, and whether the dictionary box is shown — are stored locally in your browser and are not sent to us.

Your licence is also stored locally: a signed licence receipt, a random installation ID, an installation secret, and a masked version of your e-mail address so the popup can show which account is activated.

About language packs: If you select English in the settings, Ordlyd downloads an English language pack once: word lists (about 2 MB) from our own server, and the English voice (about 61 MB) from the public piper-voices archive at Hugging Face (huggingface.co). These requests contain no information about you — no e-mail address, no licence, and no text. As with all web traffic, the server that responds sees the IP address the request comes from; the only thing Hugging Face sees is that a browser fetched a public voice file. The pack is stored locally in your browser, and afterwards English also works without internet access.

3. What personal data we process

Ordlyd requires a licence code. To administer licences we process the following:

3.1 About you as a user

We never ask for, and never record, your name, date of birth, class, school, diagnosis or any other health information.

About lists from associations: If you received Ordlyd through an association for people with reading and writing difficulties, it is the association that shares your address with us, and the association is responsible for having a legal basis for doing so. We store the address only as a hash and a masked display, and it is the association — not us — that hands out the licence codes. We never contact members directly.

3.2 About your installations

We do not fingerprint your hardware — no machine name, serial number or disk ID.

3.3 Counters to detect licence misuse

Ordlyd is handed out free of charge, and we need to detect whether a licence code is being spread on the internet. For that we store, per licence and per day:

• how many installations are active
• how many different networks the contact comes from

The network is stored as a pseudonymised code, derived from the first parts of the IP address (the first three groups for IPv4). We do not store your full IP address, and the code cannot be used to find out where you are. These counters are deleted automatically after 30 days.

If the numbers are unusually high, the licence is flagged for review. No licence is ever closed automatically — a person reviews it first.

3.4 Operational logs and audit trail

• Audit trail: We log administrative actions — that a licence was created, closed or reopened, and that a receipt was issued. The log contains internal IDs, not e-mail addresses.
• Sign-in attempts: To prevent guessing of licence codes, we count attempts per account and per network, both as hashes. These are deleted after one day.
• Providers' operational logs: Our providers (see section 6) keep ordinary operational logs of requests to the service, which normally include the IP address. These reside with the provider and are deleted according to their routines. We do not use them to track individual users.

3.5 If you register yourself

If you obtain a free trial licence at lisens.ordlyd.no/registrer, this happens:

• You provide your e-mail address. We store it as a hash and as a masked display, exactly as described above — not in readable form.
• We send the licence code to the address. The address then passes through LetterMint (section 6).
• We store when the trial period ends, and that the licence was obtained by you.

If you enter an address you do not own, you get nothing: the code goes to the inbox, not to the screen. We also limit how many times the same address can be registered, so the service cannot be used to send unwanted e-mail.

The response on the page is always the same, whether or not the address exists with us. That is deliberate: a response revealing who is registered would in practice reveal who has reading and writing difficulties.

If you are later added by a school, municipality or association, your licence is moved there automatically — you keep your code, and the trial period no longer applies.

3.6 Pseudonymised — not anonymous

We use the word pseudonymised deliberately, not "anonymous". The difference matters for your rights, so we state it plainly:

• The data in section 3 is still personal data. The whole GDPR applies to it, and you have every right listed in section 8.
• The hash of your e-mail address is not readable, but it is recognisable: if someone supplies the same address, we compute the same code. That is precisely why sign-in works — and why it is not anonymous.
• The masked address (j***@school.no) is stored in readable form. It reveals the domain, that is, which school or organisation you belong to, and often enough to guess who it is within a small group.
• The pepper key is held outside the database. Anyone obtaining both the database and the key could test guesses against known e-mail addresses. Pseudonymisation makes that job hard — it does not make it impossible.

Anonymous data would be data we cannot link to you at all. We do not have that, and we do not pretend otherwise.

4. Why we process the data, and on what legal basis

We do not use the data for marketing, profiling, or automated decisions with legal effect for you.

5. How long we store data

Deletion runs automatically every day.

About ongoing licences with no end date. Such a licence has no end date, but it is still deleted automatically if it has not been used for 24 months. If the licence was never used at all — for example an address a school imported but the pupil never activated — the deadline runs from when it was created.

The 24 months are chosen carefully in both directions. A shorter deadline would sooner or later remove the licence of a pupil away for a school year through illness or leave. A longer one would be hard to defend against the storage limitation principle in Article 5(1)(e). If your licence is deleted because it sat unused, you lose nothing irreversible: you request a new code and you are back.

You can of course request deletion earlier (section 8).

The data that is deleted is pseudonymised (section 3.6) — that is, it remains personal data right up until deletion.

6. Who processes data on our behalf

We use these sub-processors:

Vercel, Supabase and Cloudflare are US-owned companies. LetterMint is European. With the move from Resend to LetterMint, all processing now takes place in the EU — including e-mail delivery, which used to be the exception. We have data processing agreements with all four, and for the US-owned providers the processing is additionally governed by the EU Commission's Standard Contractual Clauses, as an extra safeguard against US law reaching data that in fact resides in the EU.

The website and the licence server are two different services. The licence server (lisens.ordlyd.no) is hosted by Vercel and does not go through Cloudflare. The website (ordlyd.no) — where you read about Ordlyd and find this policy — is hosted on Cloudflare. Your licence data is processed only by the licence server.

Changes to this list: If we replace or add a sub-processor, we update this list and notify customers with a data processing agreement at least 30 days before the change takes effect. The customer may object within that period; if we cannot reach agreement, the customer may terminate the agreement for the affected service at no cost.

About e-mail delivery: when we send you the licence code, your e-mail address and the content of the message pass through LetterMint, which processes in the EU [RETENTION AT LETTERMINT]. We never send more than what is necessary: your address, the licence code and how to get started. No names, no usage information, and none of the text you read or write.

We never sell personal data, and we do not share it with anyone beyond this, unless legally required to do so.

About distribution of the extension: Ordlyd is distributed through Microsoft Edge Add-ons. Microsoft processes data about downloads and installation under its own privacy policy, independently of us.

About downloading the English voice: If you select English, your browser fetches the voice file directly from the public model archive of Hugging Face, Inc. (US) — see section 2. Hugging Face does not process data on our behalf; we send nothing there, and the download is an ordinary web request from your browser. Any operational logs at Hugging Face are governed by their own privacy policy.

If we change sub-processors, we will update this list.

7. Security

Some of the measures protecting the data:

• E-mail addresses and licence codes do not exist in readable form in the database. They are stored as hashes created with a secret key kept outside the database, so a leak from the database alone does not yield a readable list of users.
• Your licence code is never stored in plain text anywhere. If you lose the code, it cannot be recovered — you must be issued a new one. That is a deliberate cost to protect you.
• The database is closed to everything except the service's own access.
• All communication is encrypted over HTTPS.
• The licence receipt the extension uses is digitally signed, and the signature is verified on your machine. A fake server therefore cannot impersonate us.
• The extension never talks directly to the database. All access goes through the licence server's own interface, so no database key exists in any program handed out to users.

What we have tested, and what we have not. We run automated tests of the licence logic, the signature chain and the cleanup job on every change, plus a review of the security headers on our services. We have not commissioned an independent penetration test, and we say so rather than leaving it unmentioned. The full list of measures, tests and the incident routine is in the security documentation (section 12).

8. Your rights

You have the right to:

• access the data we hold about you
• have incorrect data corrected
• have data deleted
• have processing restricted
• object to processing based on legitimate interest
• receive your data, or have it transferred to another party (data portability)

Contact us at post@ordlyd.no. We respond as quickly as we can, and at the latest within one month.

About access and deletion in practice: Because your e-mail address exists only as a hash, we locate your data by computing the hash of the address you provide. We therefore need you to state the e-mail address the licence is registered to.

If your school or municipality is the data controller, we assist them in answering you: we respond to requests for access, rectification, erasure and portability within 10 working days, so that they can meet their own one-month deadline. The controller may also require insight into how we process the data — see the audit right in section 12.

If you believe we process data in breach of the rules, you can complain to the Norwegian Data Protection Authority (Datatilsynet) — datatilsynet.no.

9. Children and young people

Ordlyd is used by pupils, including children under 15. We have designed the service to collect as little as possible: no names, no age, no information about what the pupil reads or writes, and no tracking across websites.

If Ordlyd is handed out through a school or municipality, the school owner is responsible for the processing and for informing pupils and guardians.

10. Cookies and browser storage

This section covers three different places, because they behave differently.

The extension uses no cookies. It stores your settings and licence receipt locally using the browser's own storage area for extensions, and — if you choose English — the language pack in the browser's file area (OPFS). None of this is sent to us.

The licence pages (lisens.ordlyd.no) use no cookies and store nothing in your browser beyond what happens in the form itself while you fill it in.

The website (ordlyd.no), where you read about Ordlyd:

The website sets no marketing cookies and shares no data with advertising networks.

11. Security breaches and notification

If we detect a personal data breach — data going astray, being altered, or becoming unavailable when it should not — the following applies:

The notification states what happened, which data and how many people are affected, the likely consequences, and what we are doing about it. The short 24-hour deadline is deliberate: the controller has only 72 hours to reach Datatilsynet, and must have time to assess the matter.

We keep an internal record of all breaches, including those that are not notifiable. The full routine is in the security documentation (section 12).

12. Documentation for schools, municipalities and associations

Before a municipality, county authority or school can adopt Ordlyd, they must be able to document their own compliance. These documents are therefore publicly available at lisens.ordlyd.no/dokumenter, and provided on request:

The audit right follows from the data processing agreement: the controller may require insight into the documentation and an answer to a security questionnaire within 15 working days, and may require an audit once a year, or after a breach.

13. Changes

We may update this policy. The date at the top shows when it was last changed. For material changes we notify the customers we have agreements with, and update this page well before the change takes effect.

14. Content attribution

Ordlyd is built on open language resources:

• Bokmålsordboka and Nynorskordboka: © University of Bergen and the Language Council of Norway
• Norsk ordbank: Språkbanken, CC-BY 4.0
• Word frequencies: FrequencyWords (Hermit Dave), built on OpenSubtitles, CC BY-SA 4.0
• English word list: SCOWL, © Kevin Atkinson et al.
• English pronunciation: CMU Pronouncing Dictionary, © Carnegie Mellon University
• English word classes: Open English WordNet, CC BY 4.0
• Speech synthesis: Piper