Privacy Policy
1. Controller
VakyaLingua is the controller for personal data processed through VakyaLingua.
For privacy questions and requests, contact contact@vakyalingua.com. See our operator and contact details.
Your VakyaLingua account works across the German, French, Italian and Spanish courses. Account details and consent choices are shared across these courses; learning progress is stored for each course. Copilot has additional privacy information for its tools.
2. What we collect and why
| Data | Purpose | Legal basis |
|---|---|---|
| Name, email, phone number | Create and run your account, help you recover it, send lessons and receipts | Contract (Art. 6(1)(b)) |
| Promotional consent choice, consent version, date and channel; name, email and notification subscription where enabled | Record your choice and send course news, offers and discounts only while this option is on | Consent for promotional messages (Art. 6(1)(a)); consent records demonstrate and honour your choice |
| Password (hashed) | Secure login | Contract (Art. 6(1)(b)) |
| Lesson and test activity | Show your progress, unlock the next lesson | Contract (Art. 6(1)(b)) |
| Payment metadata (amount, date, provider reference — never full card numbers) | Bookkeeping, refunds, statutory retention | Legal obligation (Art. 6(1)(c)), contract |
| Exam results you choose to report (passed or not, exam provider, date, score) | Check how well our lessons and mock exams prepare students; anything published is totals only, never individual results. A few weeks after you finish a level we may email once or twice to ask (unsubscribe in any of these emails) | Legitimate interest (Art. 6(1)(f)) |
| Notification address of your phone or browser (only if you turn on notifications) | Tell you when your next lesson unlocks; you can turn it off on the dashboard or in your phone/browser settings at any time | Consent (Art. 6(1)(a)) |
Voice and speaking checks
Several parts of VakyaLingua let you speak instead of type: the "say it aloud" step in lessons, speaking practice, the level tests, the speaking simulator in the mock exams, and the free speaking check at /speaking-check, which works without an account.
- What is recorded: your microphone is used only while you press the microphone button. Your browser's own speech recognition turns what you say into text. Depending on your browser this is done by its provider (Google for Chrome, Microsoft for Edge, Apple for Safari), under that provider's privacy terms: Google, Microsoft, Apple. None of these providers says where the audio is processed, so you should assume it may be processed outside the EU, especially in the USA. We have no contract with these providers and do not receive the audio.
- We ask first: before your browser sends your voice to its provider for the first time, we show a short question naming the provider and saying that it may process the audio outside the EU. Only if you choose "OK, use my voice" does the speaking check start. Your answer is remembered in your browser (local storage, no cookie) so we don't ask again on every page; if you choose "Not now", nothing is sent and you can still say the answer aloud. To withdraw your OK, clear this site's data in your browser settings; you will be asked again next time.
- On your device where possible: newer versions of Chrome can recognise speech on the device itself once the language pack is installed. When the browser reports that this is available, we use it, the audio stays on your device and no question is shown.
- What we receive: only the recognised text, never a recording. Our server receives no audio and stores none. "Record yourself and compare" in speaking practice stays on your device.
- Purpose: to check which words of your spoken answer were understood and show you the result.
- What we keep: in lessons and speaking practice, only whether an item was understood (no text). In the level tests, the recognised text of each spoken answer is saved with your result so you can review it. In the mock-exam speaking simulator, only whether the task was met. In the free speaking check, nothing about what you said.
- IP address (free speaking check only): to allow a limited number of free checks per day, we use your IP address, stored only as a scrambled code that changes every day. Codes from earlier days are deleted automatically. Legal basis: legitimate interest in preventing misuse (Art. 6(1)(f)).
- Legal basis: sending your voice to your browser's provider, and any processing outside the EU, rests on your consent given in the question above (Art. 6(1)(a) GDPR, Art. 49(1)(a) GDPR, § 25(1) TDDDG). Checking the recognised text rests, for account holders, on providing the course (Art. 6(1)(b)) and, for the free speaking check, on our legitimate interest in letting visitors try the course (Art. 6(1)(f)).
- Storage period: level test results as long as your account exists; nothing is kept from the free speaking check beyond the daily code above.
- Your rights: you can download your data from your dashboard, delete your account there, or write to contact@vakyalingua.com for access or deletion.
Daily reminder email
- What we store: your email address, the time you chose, your time zone (filled in by your browser, you can change it), when you asked for and confirmed the reminder, and when we last sent one.
- Opt-in with confirmation: the reminder is off unless you turn it on in your dashboard. We then email you a confirmation link, valid for 7 days, and send nothing until you click it.
- What we send: one email a day at your chosen time with a link to your next lesson. After 14 days without a visit we send one last "pick up where you left off" email and stop until you come back.
- How to stop: the one-click unsubscribe link in every reminder, or "Turn off" in your dashboard.
- Email provider: reminders are sent through our email service at Hostinger, the same service that sends login codes and password-reset emails.
- Legal basis: your consent (Art. 6(1)(a)), which you can withdraw at any time without affecting your course.
- Storage period: while your account exists; turning the reminder off stops all sending, and deleting your account deletes these settings.
Emails that cannot be delivered
If an email to your address comes back as undeliverable (for example "this account does not exist" or, repeatedly, "mailbox full"), we record the address, the error code and the date, and stop sending reminders and summaries to it. Emails you ask for yourself, such as login codes and password-reset links, are still sent. Confirming a daily reminder link clears the record. Legal basis: our legitimate interest in not sending email to addresses that do not work (Art. 6(1)(f)). You can ask us to remove the record at contact@vakyalingua.com.
Visitor counting (no cookies)
To see whether the site helps people learn, we count visits and learning activity on our own server. No analytics company is involved and nothing is stored on your device for this.
- Page views: we count them on our server from the request your browser makes anyway to load a page. No script runs in your browser for this. From that request we note the page address (without anything after a "?"), the name of the website that linked to it (for example "google.com", taken from the request's referrer), and a campaign tag if our own link carried one.
- Counting visitors: to count visitors per day we combine your IP address and browser name with a secret that changes every day, and keep only the resulting 16-character code. The IP address itself is not stored, and because the secret changes daily the code cannot link your visits on different days.
- Learners: if you are signed in, we also note once a day that your account was active, and, when you open a lesson from a daily reminder email, that the link was used. Together with the lesson progress we already keep, this shows how many learners come back the next day and the next week. These figures are only looked at as totals.
- Free speaking check: we count how many checks are started, with the same daily code; nothing about what was said.
- Legal basis: our legitimate interest in measuring and improving the course (Art. 6(1)(f)). Nothing is stored on your device, and nothing is read from it beyond the data your browser sends with every page request in order to receive the page, so § 25 TDDDG does not require consent and no consent banner is used.
- Storage period: these records are deleted after about 13 months (400 days). Deleting your account removes the activity notes linked to it.
Promotional messages and your choice
Promotional consent is requested separately from the terms and is ticked by default. You can untick it when you register, and you can create an account and use the courses without agreeing to promotions. Account verification, password recovery and service messages are separate from promotional messages.
You can withdraw promotional consent at any time by unticking the promotional messages option in your profile, or by emailing contact@vakyalingua.com. Withdrawal does not affect your course access or the lawfulness of processing before withdrawal. We record opt-ins and withdrawals so future promotional messages follow your latest choice.
3. Who else sees it (processors)
- Your browser's push service (e.g. Google for Chrome/Android, Apple for Safari/iPhone, Mozilla for Firefox) — delivers notifications to your device if you turn them on. The content is end-to-end encrypted; the push service only sees that a notification is being delivered.
- Your browser's speech recognition (e.g. Google for Chrome, Apple for Safari, Microsoft for Edge) — only if you use a speaking check (lessons, speaking practice, level tests, the mock-exam speaking simulator or the free speaking check): your browser sends what you say to its provider to turn it into text, possibly outside the EU and only after you agree (see Voice and speaking checks), and we receive only that text to check it. "Record yourself and compare" stays on your device and is never uploaded.
- YouTube (Google Ireland Ltd.) — hosts lesson videos, loaded in privacy-enhanced mode and only after you click to play a video.
- VakyaLingua's hosting provider (Hostinger) — runs the server this site runs on.
4. Retention
We keep your account and progress data while your account is active, plus a limited grace period after you ask us to delete it, to prevent accidental loss. Payment records are kept as long as tax law requires (typically up to 10 years in Germany), even after account deletion. Accounts that never set a password are deleted automatically after a few weeks.
5. Your rights
Under Articles 15–21 GDPR you can ask us for a copy of your data (also available any time from your dashboard), correction, deletion, restriction of processing, or object to processing based on our legitimate interests. You can delete your own account and its personal data from your dashboard at any time. You also have the right to complain to your local data protection authority.
6. Cookies
We set exactly one cookie, needed to keep you logged in — no advertising or analytics cookies. Visits are counted without cookies (see Visitor counting). See our Cookie Notice for detail.