Privacy policy

BuddyLingo operates BuddyLingo and is the controller of the information described below. Questions, requests and complaints go to privacy@buddylingo.app, and we answer them.

A child never creates an account, never enters an email address and is never asked for contact details. The account belongs to an adult, who sets up a profile for their child. That profile holds only what the product needs in order to teach:

• A first name or nickname — so the tutor can greet them. It does not have to be their real name.
• An age — which decides the reading level and which games appear.
• Chosen interests — dinosaurs, football, space — so the word packs are about something they care about.
• Learning progress — which words are mastered, which are shaky, session lengths, scores and streaks.

• Account details: your email address, an optional name, and a password we never see in readable form. If you sign in with Google we receive your email, name and profile picture from Google instead.
• Subscription status: whether you are on trial, active or lapsed, when the period ends, and the last four digits of the card used. We never see or store your full card number. It goes directly to our payment processor.
• Technical data: ordinary server logs kept by our hosting provider, and a record of how much AI usage an account has consumed, so we can spot abuse and keep the service running.

Three parts of the product send content to an AI model in order to work at all. This is the section worth reading twice.

• Spoken lessons and pronunciation games. While a lesson or a speaking game is running, your child's microphone audio is streamed to Google's Gemini API so the tutor can hear and respond. It is processed to produce the reply. We do not record it, store it, or keep an audio archive.
• Homework photographs. If you photograph a worksheet, that image is sent to the model to read the words off it. We keep the extracted word list; the photograph is not retained after processing.
• Chalk drawings. When your child traces a letter or number, the drawing is sent to the model to be checked. It is not kept afterwards.

The microphone is only ever open during an active lesson or speaking game, only after the browser has asked your permission, and never in the background. If you decline microphone access, everything else in the product still works.

• We do not sell personal information, ever.
• We do not show advertising to children, and we do not build advertising profiles.
• We do not use your child's work, voice or progress to train AI models.
• There is no social feature: no chat with strangers, no public profile, no way for another user to reach your child.

We use a small number of well-known providers, each doing one job and bound to use the data only for that job:

• Supabase — accounts, authentication and the database holding progress.
• Google (Gemini API) — the tutor's speech, listening and reading of homework images.
• Dodo Payments — our merchant of record. They take the payment, hold the card details and handle tax; we receive only the subscription status and the last four digits.
• Vercel — hosting and delivery of the site.

Progress is stored against your account so it follows your child from one device to another, and a copy also lives in the browser on each device you use, which is what lets the app open instantly and keep working through a dropped connection.

We keep account and progress data for as long as the account exists. If you delete your account, the associated child profile and progress are deleted with it. Billing records are kept for as long as tax law requires us to keep them.

You can ask us to show you what we hold, correct it, export it, or delete it — including everything belonging to your child's profile. Write to privacy@buddylingo.app from the address on the account and we will act on it within 30 days. You may also complain to your local data protection authority if you think we have got something wrong.

Because the account belongs to you rather than to your child, these rights are exercised by you on their behalf.

We use cookies for one purpose: keeping you signed in. There are no advertising cookies, no third-party trackers and no cross-site profiling, which is why you have not been shown a consent banner.

If we change how we handle data in a way that materially affects you, we will email the address on your account before the change takes effect. The date at the top of this page always reflects the current version.