Privacy Notice隐私声明

1. Who we are

Fluent Chinese ("Fluent Chinese", "we", "us") operates the website fluentchinese.online and the learning services offered through it. Fluent Chinese is the data controller responsible for the personal data described in this notice — we decide why and how your personal data is processed.

If you have any question about this notice or about your personal data, you can reach us through the contact details published on our About page.

2. Personal data we collect

• Account data — your email address, display name, password credentials handled by our authentication provider, and your membership status.
• Learning data — practice sessions, answers, streaks, completed sentence patterns, reading progress and the study preferences you set (script, pinyin, English, text size).
• Support and communication data — the messages, questions and feedback you send us.
• Technical and usage data — IP address, device and browser information, pages viewed, approximate location derived from IP, and error logs.

Payment card details are never collected or stored by us. Payments are handled by our reseller and Merchant of Record, Paddle.com.

3. Why we use it, and our legal basis

• Creating and running your account, and providing the lessons, practice and resources you sign up for — performance of our contract with you.
• Saving your progress and study preferences — performance of our contract with you.
• Answering support requests — performance of our contract and our legitimate interest in helping our learners.
• Security, abuse prevention and fraud prevention — our legitimate interest in keeping the service safe.
• Improving lessons and the platform — our legitimate interest in developing a better product, using aggregated or minimal usage data.
• Marketing emails, where offered — your consent, which you can withdraw at any time.
• Accounting, tax and compliance records — compliance with a legal obligation.

4. Who we share data with

• Service providers and subprocessors — hosting, database, authentication, email delivery, media storage, speech and analytics providers acting on our instructions.
• Merchant of Record — Paddle.com, which sells our memberships and handles payment, subscription management, invoicing, tax compliance and refunds.
• Professional advisers — legal, accounting and tax advisers where needed.
• Authorities — where disclosure is required by law or to establish or defend legal claims.

We do not sell your personal data.

5. International transfers

Our providers may process data outside your country, including outside the UK and the EEA. Where that happens, we rely on appropriate safeguards such as adequacy decisions or the applicable Standard Contractual Clauses.

6. How long we keep it

We keep account and learning data while your account is open and for a reasonable period afterwards so you can return to your progress. Support messages are kept while needed to resolve your request. Records required for tax and accounting are kept for the period required by law. When data is no longer needed it is deleted or anonymised. You can ask us to delete your account at any time.

7. Your rights

Depending on where you live, you may have the right to access your personal data, have it corrected or erased, restrict or object to its processing, receive a portable copy, and withdraw consent where processing is based on consent. You also have the right to complain to your local data protection supervisory authority. Contact us to exercise any of these rights; we aim to respond within one month.

8. Security

We apply appropriate technical and organisational measures to protect your data, including encryption in transit, access controls, row-level database security and restricted administrative access. No online service can be guaranteed completely secure, but we work to keep risks low and to respond quickly to any incident.

9. Cookies and local storage

We use strictly necessary cookies and browser local storage to keep you signed in and to remember your study preferences such as simplified or traditional characters, pinyin, English and text size. Where we use analytics or marketing cookies, they are optional and you can manage them through your browser settings, which also allow you to delete existing cookies and local storage for this site.

10. Changes to this notice

We may update this notice as the service develops. The date at the top of this page shows when it was last changed, and material changes will be highlighted on the site.