Pardon for Gmail privacy

What Pardon for Gmail does

Pardon for Gmail is a Chrome extension for language learners. While you write an email in Gmail, it underlines mistakes and gives you a hint so you can fix them yourself. To find the mistakes, it sends the text you are writing to our server to be checked.

What leaves your browser

• The text you type in the body of a Gmail draft, while you write it.
• When you rewrite a sentence, the sentence before and after your change.
• The language you write in (English, Spanish, French or German).
• Your Pardon sign-in, so we can check that your plan is active. It names your account, not your email text.

It does not send the earlier messages quoted in a reply, your signature, the subject line, the people you write to, or anything from your inbox. It does not read emails you receive.

Where it goes

• Our server, hosted by Vercel in Paris, France.
• Our own grammar checker (LanguageTool, open source), hosted by Railway in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
• Claude, an AI model made by Anthropic, reached through OpenRouter in the EU. It writes the hint for each mistake. We use it with zero data retention: neither OpenRouter nor the model provider stores your text or uses it to train models.

What we keep

Nothing. Your text is checked and then dropped. We do not save it in a database and we do not write it to our logs: when a check fails, the log says only that it failed. The grammar checker holds recent checks in memory for a short time to answer faster; that memory is never written to disk and is cleared whenever the checker restarts.

What stays in your browser

The extension saves three things in your own Chrome: the language you write in, your Pardon sign-in, and a list of the kinds of mistakes you made in the last seven days, such as "verb tense", with the date. That list is what lets the summary say which mistake came up most this week, and it never leaves your browser. It holds no email text. Signing out removes your sign-in, and removing the extension deletes all three.

What we never do

• Sell your data or share it with anyone other than the services listed above.
• Show you ads or use your writing for advertising.
• Use your writing to train AI models.
• Let a person at Pardon read your drafts.

Our use of information received through the extension follows the Chrome Web Store User Data Policy, including its Limited Use requirements.

Changes

Before any change to what is sent or kept, we will update this page, and the date at the top will change.

Contact us

Questions about your data: email support@pardonmylanguage.com, or write to Hiya Labs, Inc., 7901 4th St N, Ste 300, St. Petersburg, FL 33702. Our full privacy policy covers the rest of Pardon.