Privacy Policy

LinguaCommons has no advertising, no sponsors, and no commercial trackers. To be specific about what that means in practice:

• There is no analytics package on this site — no Google Analytics, no Plausible, no product-analytics SDK.
• We set no cookies at all, for tracking or anything else.
• There are no advertising pixels, social embeds, or third-party scripts that observe you as you read.
• We do not sell, rent, or share personal information with anyone. There is no arrangement under which we could.
• There are no user accounts, so there is no profile of you to build.

You can read this entire site — every guide, every deck, every reference page — without giving us anything at all.

Two forms on this site transmit information, and both require you to fill them in and submit them deliberately.

The contact form. When you write to us through Contact, we store the name you give, the email address you give, your message, and the time it arrived. We need the email address to reply to you.

The newsletter. If you subscribe, we store your email address and the date you signed up. Nothing else — no name, no reading history, no interests.

These submissions are held in our database (Supabase, described below) under rules that allow the public website to add a record but never to read, change, or delete one. Submitted messages can only be read with an administrative credential that is not present in your browser.

The site remembers a number of things so it behaves sensibly when you come back. All of it is stored locally in your own browser, and none of it is ever transmitted to us or to anyone else:

• your light or dark theme preference;
• script and display preferences — Shavian, Simplified or Traditional Chinese, Interslavic script;
• the site edition you last read, so we can offer to take you back to it;
• your saved items list;
• your spaced-repetition progress on vocabulary decks;
• your best scores in the practice games.

Because this lives in your browser rather than on a server, it does not follow you to another device, and clearing your browser's site data erases it permanently. We have no copy of it to restore.

Running a website means other companies necessarily handle some data. Ours are:

• Vercel hosts and serves the site. Like any web host, its servers process the requests your browser makes, including your IP address, in order to deliver pages to you.
• Supabase stores contact-form and newsletter submissions, as described above.
• Render hosts a small backend service used for site functionality. It is not sent personal information.

We use these providers to operate LinguaCommons, not to learn about you, and we do not ask any of them for reports about our readers.

Where we cannot offer a checked-in edition of the site in your language, we offer a full-page automatic translation instead. Choosing it hands your request to Google Translate and navigates you to a Google-hosted address. At that point you are on Google's service, the page you read is machine-generated, and Google's privacy policy applies rather than ours. We flag this before you go, and you never have to use it — the English site and every checked-in edition remain available.

We recommend outside dictionaries, tools, and reading material throughout the site, and our Encyclopedia and Dictionary are served from a separate LinguaCommons address. Once you follow a link away from here, the privacy practices of that destination govern, and we have no control over or responsibility for them.

LinguaCommons is a general-audience educational site and is not directed at children under 13. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children. Since the only way to send us anything is to type it into a form, if you believe a child has sent us their details, write to us and we will delete the record.

Contact messages are kept while they are useful for answering you and understanding recurring problems with the site. Newsletter addresses are kept until you ask to be removed.

You can ask us at any time what we hold about you, ask for a copy of it, ask us to correct it, or ask us to delete it — and you do not need to give a reason. Depending on where you live you may have these rights under law; we intend to honour them regardless of where you live. Write to us through the contact form from the address concerned, and to unsubscribe from the newsletter simply say so.

If we change what we collect, this page changes with it, and the date at the top will tell you when. We are a small project in active development; if a future feature would require collecting more than it does today, we will say so here plainly rather than quietly widening the wording.

Questions about this policy, or about anything we hold, go to the contact page. Our Terms of Use cover the rest of the relationship between you and this site.