Privacy

Babblebird is a place to translate open source projects. It's run by Lantharos, which decides what's kept and why. This page says what Babblebird keeps about you, what it does with it, and how to have it removed. It was last changed on 8 November 2026.

Nothing here is used for advertising, sold, or shared with anyone beyond what's described below.

Your account

When you sign in, Babblebird keeps your name, your email address and, if you use GitHub or Google, your account number there and your profile picture, plus your GitHub username. It also keeps the access GitHub gives it when you sign in, so it can ask GitHub which repositories you look after. If you add a passkey, Babblebird keeps the passkey's public key, never anything that could sign in as you.

Your email address is used to send you sign-in codes and is never shown to other people. A code is kept, scrambled, for ten minutes or until it's used.

The languages you translate into are kept so the site can open in them.

What you translate

Translations, suggestions, reviews and comments are kept with your account, because they're work you did for a project. The project's translators and maintainers see your name and picture next to them, and the project's history shows what you changed and when.

When translations go to a project's repository, your name and GitHub's private address for your account (the one that ends in users.noreply.github.com) are added to the commit as a co-author, so the project credits you. Repositories are often public, and so is everything committed to them, including those credits. Babblebird can't take a commit back out of someone's repository.

When Babblebird first reads a project, it notes who wrote each existing translation from the repository's history, so earlier translators are credited too. That's a name from a public commit, not an account.

Repositories

When someone adds Babblebird to a repository on GitHub, Babblebird keeps the installation: which account or organisation it belongs to and which repositories it covers. For those repositories it reads the translation files, the files that name apps and their icons, and babblebird.toml. It keeps the text of every message, the icons, and the history it needs to send translations back. It doesn't read the rest of the code.

Screenshots sent by a project's build are kept so translators can see where a message appears. Anyone who can see the project can see them.

Cookies and your browser

Babblebird sets two cookies when you sign in: one that keeps you signed in and one that remembers your session for a few minutes so pages load faster. Adding Babblebird to a repository sets a short cookie for half an hour that checks the round trip through GitHub really started here. There are no other cookies, and no analytics or tracking scripts.

Your browser also remembers your colour scheme and the last language you browsed, on your device only.

Writing to Babblebird

Email you send to one of Babblebird's addresses is kept with its attachments so it can be read and answered, in Lantharos' own support tool. It's checked for spam, and kept for as long as the conversation needs, or until you ask for it to be deleted.

Logs

Like any website, Babblebird's servers log requests and errors so they can be kept running. These logs can include your IP address and browser, are kept for up to a week and are only read to fix problems. Your IP address is also used, without being stored, to limit how often someone can try to sign in.

Who else handles it

Babblebird runs on Cloudflare, which hosts the site, stores the data, keeps the logs and sends sign-in emails on Babblebird's behalf. GitHub and Google handle signing in with their accounts, and GitHub receives the translations Babblebird commits. Data may be handled outside your country, under Cloudflare's, GitHub's and Google's own data protection terms.

How long it's kept

Your account stays until you delete it. Sessions end after a week without use. Translations stay with the project for as long as it uses Babblebird. When Babblebird is removed from a repository, the project stays readable here so its translations aren't lost, until a maintainer deletes it.

Deleting your account

You can delete your account at any time from your settings. That removes your name, email address, GitHub details, passkeys, sessions and languages. Your translations stay in the projects you helped, because they're part of those projects now, but they're shown as made by "A translator". Credits already committed to a repository stay in that repository's history.

Your rights

Wherever you live, you can ask to see what Babblebird keeps about you, have it corrected or deleted, get a copy of it, or object to how it's used. If you're in the European Union or the United Kingdom, the GDPR gives you these rights, and Babblebird keeps your account details because you asked for an account, and your translations and logs because it has a legitimate interest in running the site and crediting translators. You can also complain to your data protection authority.

Write to privacy@babblebird.dev for any of this, and you'll get an answer within a month.