Privacy

  • 900 words (~ 15 minutes)

Chinese Boost is run by Kensio Software. This page says what happens to your personal data when you use the site.

When you have no account

Nothing is collected. The site loads no analytics, no advertising, no social widgets and no fonts or scripts from anywhere else. There is no tracking to opt out of because none was built.

When you create an account

An account stores your email address, a password, an identifier generated for you, and a record of each device you are signed in on.

The password is held by Amazon Cognito and is never visible to this site. The identifier is ours and is what your saved work is filed under.

Why: to give you an account and keep you signed in. The lawful basis is performance of a contract, which is the service you asked for. Keeping the sign-in pages resistant to abuse relies on legitimate interests.

Your email address is used to confirm the account and to reset a password. It is not used for marketing.

Lookup history

Lookup history is optional. You can enable, pause or clear it on your account’s lookup history page. It records visits to dictionary entries and example sentences while you are signed in. Free history holds up to five distinct words and sentences for 30 days after each lookup. Pro history holds up to 1,000 for 365 days. Repeated lookups refresh that period.

We also keep a separate internal archive of pseudonymous lookup events to explore related-word features. These events identify the reader using an internal identifier, the word or sentence, and the time of the lookup. They exclude email addresses, passwords and authentication session identifiers. Archived events are retained indefinitely, including after active history expires, you clear it, or you delete your account. Pausing history stops future collection. Expired active history is hidden immediately. Background deletion and backup expiry happen later.

The browser extension

The Chinese Boost extension for Chrome and Firefox looks up Chinese words on other websites. It talks to chineseboost.com and nothing else, and it loads no analytics.

When you look a word up. The extension reads the page in your browser and works out the words there. It then asks chineseboost.com for each word’s dictionary entry. That request names the word. It leaves out the page you are on and the text around the word. The first lookup also downloads the dictionary itself. These requests reach the site’s server logs, kept for one month, the same as any page of the site.

The extension reads a page only when you ask it to. It reads a page when you right-click a selection or press its toolbar button on a tab, and it reads every page of a website you have added to its list. The list and the extension’s other settings stay in your browser.

When you connect your account. Connecting gives the extension an identifier for your session, held in your browser. With it, the extension asks which of the words it is showing you have saved already. Saving a word sends the word and the name of the website you read it on, such as bbc.com, which is kept as a tag on the saved word. Only the website’s name is sent, without the rest of the page’s address. You can end the connection from your account page, and removing the extension deletes the identifier from your browser.

Lookups made in the extension are not added to your lookup history.

Firefox lists what the extension sends before you install it, in three categories. Website content is the words you look up, browsing activity is the website a saved word was read on, and authentication information is the session identifier.

Where it is held

With Amazon Web Services, in their London region. Nothing is transferred outside the United Kingdom. AWS acts on our instructions and does nothing else with it.

Nothing is sold, and nothing is shared with anyone else.

How long it is kept

A sign-in record expires thirty days after it was created and is deleted automatically. Server logs are kept for one month. Your account and the work saved against it are kept until you ask for them to be deleted.

Cookies

Three, all of them necessary to sign you in and keep you signed in. One carries the identifier for your session, one holds a sign-in in progress for the few minutes it takes, and one tells the page whether to draw a sign-in or a sign-out link. None of them identifies you to anyone else and none is used for tracking, so there is no consent banner to click through.

Your rights

You can ask for a copy of your data, ask for it to be corrected, ask for it to be deleted, ask for it in a portable form, or object to how it is used. Write to privacy@chineseboost.com and it will be dealt with within a month.

No decision about you is made automatically, and nothing here builds a profile of you.

If you are unhappy with the answer you get, you can complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office at ico.org.uk.

Changes

This page is updated when what the site does changes. The date below is when it last did.

Last updated: 6 October 2026.