Privacy Policy
You can read, listen to and study most of Hello Deutsch without telling us anything. If you create an account, we store your email address, your name, your country and your learning progress — so that your progress follows you to every device you sign in on. We do not run advertising, we use no third-party analytics, and we do not sell or share your data with anyone who is not listed on this page.
What changed in version 2.12. Two additions, both about the books in Short Stories. In the A2 reader books you can write your answers to the exercises on the page itself; if you are signed in, we keep what you wrote in each book, so that it is there on your other devices too. And we keep how far you have read in each book, so that a book opens where you left it. Both are kept with your learning progress, are never read by anyone else, and are deleted with your account. See section 3.
What changed in version 2.11. One addition, about your course exercises. When you choose a wrong option in an exercise, we now keep which option it was, with your learning progress. It lets Dr Woo point you to what to practise, and explain why an answer was wrong when you ask him. We never keep the text of anything you type as an answer. It is deleted with your account. See section 3.
What changed in version 2.10. One addition, and you can switch it off. Dr Woo, the owl who guides you around the site, can now say your first name — “Guten Morgen, Amjad!”. To do that we make a short recording of your first name in his voice. It is made from your first name alone, or from the spelling you give us for how it sounds, by Amazon Polly, a voice service of Amazon Web Services that runs in the United States. The recording is kept with your account, played only to you, and deleted when you switch it off or delete your account. You can switch it off, hear it, or tell him how your name sounds under Preferences. See section 3 and section 8.
What changed in version 2.9. One change, about your clock. We already read your device's time offset so that a reminder arrives in your evening rather than ours. We now also read your timezone's name if your browser offers one — Europe/Berlin, Asia/Kolkata — because a name follows daylight saving and a bare offset does not, and we read it when you open the site rather than only once you have studied. It is used for one thing: deciding what hour it is where you are. It is not a location and we do not treat it as one — in particular we no longer use it to guess which country you are in, which we had been doing on our own admin screens and which was often simply wrong. See section 3.
What changed in version 2.8. One change, about email. If you have an account, we now send you emails about your learning and about Hello Deutsch — progress notes, reminders, and news about the course, including what the full course offers. Before this, those went only to people who had ticked a box, and many people were never shown the box. Every one of these emails says why you are receiving it and carries an unsubscribe link; one click stops them all, for good, and does not touch your account. Emails about your account itself — sign-in codes, receipts, password changes — are unaffected. See section 7.
What changed in version 2.7. One question, and it is optional. Your profile now asks why you are learning German — for work, for an exam, because you are moving somewhere, and so on — with a box to say it in your own words if none of those fit. We use it for exactly one thing: choosing which encouragement to email you, so that somebody sitting an exam in March is not sent the same note as somebody learning for a partner. It is not used for advertising, it is not shared, and it changes nothing about what you can see or what you pay. Leaving it as Prefer not to say has no effect on your account, and you can change or clear your answer at any time from your profile.
What changed in version 2.6. One addition, and only if you ask for it. You can now switch on a daily reminder — a notification from your browser in the evening, if you have not practised yet. Switching it on stores one record per browser: the address your browser's notification service gave us, and the keys that go with it. It identifies the browser rather than you, and switching the reminder off deletes it. The reminder we send carries no message at all — your own browser writes the words — so nothing about you travels through Google's notification service.
What changed in version 2.5. One addition, and it is about you rather than about the site. Alongside your progress we now keep, for each day you use Hello Deutsch, how many times you came back that day and roughly how many minutes you were actually reading. It is counted only while the page is open in front of you and something has happened recently, so a tab left open overnight is not recorded as a night of study. We use it to tell whether a lesson is working and to decide who to write to — nothing more. It is part of your progress, so it moves between your devices with everything else, you can see it, and deleting your account deletes it.
What changed in version 2.4. One addition. There are now two forms inside the site — Contact us and Report an issue — and anything you send through them reaches us as an email. §7a says what those forms ask for, what happens to a screenshot you attach, and the one thing we add to your message that you did not type: which account it came from, so a reply can find you. Nothing sent through them is stored in our database.
What changed in version 2.3. One thing. The content protection described in §9 has always paused the page when it thinks the lessons are being copied wholesale; it now also records that it happened, against your account, so that we can warn you instead of the only other option we had, which was to close the account. §9 says exactly what is recorded — the kind of gate and a rough area, and nothing else — and §13 says how long it is kept.
What changed in version 2.2. Two things, and one of them reverses something this policy used to promise. We now count page views — our own counters, on our own server, no Google Analytics and no third party — and version 2.1 said there were no analytics of any kind and that this was why you were never asked to accept cookies. So now you are asked, once, and refusing is one press and costs you nothing. Section 5 describes exactly what is counted. Second, sign-up now offers a tick-box for German learning emails; it is not pre-ticked, and nothing is sent to anyone who does not tick it.
What changed in version 2.1. Checkout was built, and with it an optional billing address — state or region, city, street and postal code — so that a receipt or tax invoice can carry one. Only your country is required; every other line in that form may be left blank. Version 2.0 said we store no address at all, which stopped being true the day that form appeared, and this change is what keeps that sentence honest.
What changed in version 2.0. Version 1.0 described a site with no accounts and no cookies. Accounts, sign-in and saved progress now exist, so this policy has been rewritten to describe them. If you used the site before 25 August 2026 and never created an account, nothing about your data has changed: it is still only in your browser.
The short version
- No advertising, and no third party watching you. We do not use Google Analytics or any equivalent, we run no advertising pixels, and we do not build profiles of you for anyone else.
- We count page views only if you say yes. They are our own counters, on our own server, and they record that a page was opened — not who opened it. You are asked once, you can refuse in one press, and you can change your mind at any time from the cookie settings link in the footer. See section 5.
- Most of the site needs no account. Browse, read, listen and practise the free material without telling us who you are.
- An account means we hold your email, name and progress. That is what makes progress follow you between devices.
- One cookie. A sign-in session cookie. Not for advertising, not for tracking, and only after you sign in. Counting, if you allow it, uses no cookie at all.
- We never see your card. Payments are handled by Razorpay; card details never reach our servers.
- You can take your data or delete it at any time — see section 14.
1. Who we are
Hello Deutsch is a German-language learning site. For the purposes of the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 (India) we are the Data Fiduciary for the personal data described here; for the purposes of the UK and EU GDPR we are the data controller. You can reach us, including our Grievance Officer, at the address in section 17.
2. Using the site without an account
If you do not create an account, we do not know who you are. Your lesson progress, quiz scores, streaks and settings are written to your browser's local storage on that device and are never sent to us. Clearing your browser data removes them completely, and we cannot recover them because we never had them.
Our servers still see the ordinary technical information every website receives in order to answer a request — see section 11.
3. What we store when you have an account
When you create an account we store the following, and nothing else:
| What | Why |
|---|---|
| Your email address | To sign you in, to confirm the address is yours, and to send the messages in section 7. We also keep a one-way hash of it as the lookup key, so that the address itself is not needed to find your account. |
| Your name | What we call you on the site, and what appears in the watermark described in section 9. |
| Your country | Sets your currency and the tax rate shown in the price. Required before we can bill you correctly. |
| Your email preference | Whether you have unsubscribed from learning and promotional emails, and when. We keep that record so that an unsubscribe stays permanent — it is what stops us emailing you again. We also keep whether you ticked the learning-emails box, if you were shown one. |
| Your billing address (optional) | State or region, city, street and postal code, if you choose to give them. Only your country is required. We ask for the rest so that a payment receipt or tax invoice can carry a proper address, and we use it for nothing else — not for delivery, not for marketing, not for profiling. |
| Your password | Held only by Amazon Cognito, only ever as a hash. We never receive, see or store your password, and we cannot tell you what it is. |
| Your plan and status | Whether your account is active and whether it is free or paid. |
| Your learning progress | Lessons completed, exercise scores, vocabulary learned, streaks and your level. This is what makes progress follow you between devices. |
| Your mistakes in course exercises | Which wrong option you chose in a course exercise, or the kind of mistake it was, and when you ask Dr Woo why an answer was wrong, which question you asked about. Never the text of anything you typed. It is kept with your learning progress, so that Dr Woo can point you to what to practise and explain a wrong answer, and it is deleted with your account. |
| Your answers written in a book | In the A2 reader books in Short Stories, the exercises can be answered on the page itself. If you are signed in, what you write there is kept, book by book: each answer as you last wrote it, with the time, so that your other devices show the same. An answer is cut at 400 characters. It is read by nothing and nobody but your own browser, it is kept with your learning progress, and it is deleted with your account. Clearing an answer in the book clears it everywhere. |
| Your place in each book | How far you have read in each book in Short Stories — the page you are on, the furthest page you reached and whether you finished it — so that a book opens where you left it and the shelf can show your progress. Starting a book again from the beginning resets it everywhere. It is kept with your learning progress and deleted with your account. |
| Your timezone | Your device's offset from UTC and, where your browser reports one, your timezone's name (for example Asia/Kolkata). It is read from your browser, never guessed from your billing country, and it is used for one thing: knowing what hour it is where you are, so that a reminder or a progress note arrives in your evening and not in the middle of your night. It is not a location, and we do not use it to work out which country you are in. |
| Your name, in Dr Woo’s voice (you can switch it off) | A recording, a second or two long, of your first name said three ways, so that Dr Woo can greet you by name. It is made from your first name — or from how you told us it sounds, on the Preferences page — and from nothing else. It is played only to you and never shown to anyone else, and it is deleted as soon as you switch the feature off or delete your account. If your name does not look like a first name (an email address, a word like “Test”, or a word he will not say), nothing is recorded and he greets you without it. |
| Your sessions | One record per signed-in browser. We store a hash of the session token, never the token itself, so a copy of our database cannot be used to sign in as you. |
| Your devices | A random identifier generated in your browser, plus a short label derived from your browser and operating system (for example "Chrome on Windows"). This enforces the limit on how many devices one paid account may be used on, and lets you see and remove them. |
| Your reminder subscription (optional) | Only if you switch on the daily reminder. Your browser gives us an address at its own notification service (Google's, in Chrome) plus two keys, and we store one record per browser you switch it on in. It identifies that browser, not you, and it is what lets us send the evening nudge. The reminder itself carries no message: your browser writes the words. Switch it off and the record is deleted. |
| Account events | A record of security-relevant actions — a password change, a Google account being linked, an administrator viewing your account. Kept so that we, and you, can tell what happened. |
We do not store your date of birth, your phone number, or any special category of data. We do not ask for them. The only address we hold is the optional billing address above, and only if you type it in yourself.
4. Signing in with Google
If you choose Continue with Google, Google tells us three things: your email address, your name, and whether Google has verified that the address is yours. We request nothing else — no contacts, no calendar, no Drive, no profile picture. We store a permanent reference to your Google account so we can recognise you next time.
Using this button means Google processes the sign-in, under Google's own privacy policy. If you would rather not involve Google, use an email address and a password instead — every part of the site works the same way.
If you sign in with Google using an address that already has a password account, we join the two only when Google confirms the address is verified, and we email you to say it happened. If Google does not confirm it, we refuse and sign nobody in.
5. Cookies and browser storage
We set exactly one cookie, and only after you sign in. It is
the session cookie that keeps you signed in. It is marked
HttpOnly, Secure and SameSite=Lax, it is
restricted to this exact host, and it contains a random value — not your email,
not your name, nothing readable. Signing out deletes it.
If you buy a subscription, we also set short-lived cookies that authorise your browser to fetch the paid lessons. They expire on their own and carry no personal data.
There are no advertising or tracking cookies of any kind, first-party or third-party, and there is no third-party analytics service on this site — no Google Analytics, no PostHog, no pixel, nothing that can follow you to another website.
Counting page views — the one thing we ask permission for
We would like to know which parts of the course people actually use: how many visits a level gets, how many people open the plans page, where a lesson loses people. You are asked once, on your first visit, and refusing is a single press. Nothing is sent and nothing is stored on your device before you answer.
If you allow it, this is the whole of what happens:
- Your browser sends us an event name from a fixed list —
for example
page_viewwith/plans, orlesson_openwithB1. Never the address of the page, never which lesson, never anything you typed. - It is sent to our own server, in India, and to nobody else. There is no third party in the path at all.
- The request is deliberately sent without your session cookie, so these numbers cannot be connected to your account — by anyone, including us.
- What we store is a counter: “this event happened 412 times on this day, in this country”. Not a row per visit, not a visit history, and nothing that can be traced back to a person.
- Your browser keeps one date in its own storage, so the first event of a day can be counted as a visit. There is no visitor ID, which means two days from the same browser look like two different people to us.
- The counters are kept for 400 days and then deleted.
If you refuse, none of that happens: no request, no storage, no counter — and the site works exactly the same. You can change your answer whenever you like with the cookie settings link in the footer of any page.
Separately from cookies, the site stores your settings and a copy of your progress in your browser's local storage, so the site works offline and loads instantly. Clearing your browser data removes that copy; if you have an account, your progress is still on our servers and returns when you sign in.
6. Payments
Paid subscriptions are processed by Razorpay. When you pay, you are handing your card or UPI details to Razorpay, not to us: card numbers never reach our servers and we never store them.
Razorpay tells us only what we need to run the subscription — that a payment succeeded or failed, an order and payment reference, the amount and currency, and when the access period ends. We keep those records because tax and accounting law requires it; see section 13. Razorpay processes your payment under its own privacy policy and is independently responsible for the data you give it.
7. Email we send you
We send email only when it does something for you:
- confirming your email address when you sign up;
- a link to reset your password, when you ask for one;
- a notice that your password was changed, or that Google sign-in was added to your account — sent so that you find out if it was not you;
- a welcome message when your account is ready;
- receipts, and a reminder before your access ends, once you have a paid plan.
Everything above is sent because you did something that needs an answer, so it arrives whether or not you asked for a mailing list.
We also send learning and promotional emails to account holders. Because you have an account, we may email you about your own learning and about Hello Deutsch — progress notes, reminders, German learning tips, and news about the course, including what the full course offers. They come at most once a day, and they taper off rather than continuing indefinitely.
Every one of them can be stopped in one click. Each says at the bottom that you are receiving it because you have an account, and carries an unsubscribe link. Clicking it stops all of these emails permanently — no sign-in needed — and does not affect your account or the account emails listed above. You can also turn them off in your account settings. Email is delivered through Amazon SES.
7a. Messages you send us
Two forms in the menu — Contact us and Report an issue — send us a message by email. They ask for your name, an email address to reply to, an optional contact number, and what you want to say. You can attach up to three screenshots, three megabytes in total.
Only what you type or attach. The form does not collect the page you were on, your browser, or anything about what you had been studying. The one thing we add is which account the message came from, so that a reply can be matched to a person — which also means you can put a different reply address in the form from the one on your account, and we will see both.
Where it goes. To support@hellodeutsch.com, as an ordinary email, delivered through Amazon SES. It is not stored in our database. The only thing kept on our side is a count of how many messages an account has sent today, so that the form cannot be used to send mail in bulk; that count is a number, holds none of your words, and is deleted after seven days. Your message then lives where email lives — in the mailbox it arrived in.
You need to be signed in to use the forms. If you cannot sign in, write to the same address directly; it is in the footer of every page.
8. Where your data lives, and who processes it
Your account data and progress are stored in Amazon Web Services in the Asia Pacific (Mumbai) region, encrypted at rest with a key that belongs to this project alone. The site itself is delivered through a content delivery network with servers around the world, which serve lesson pages and audio — not your account data.
One exception, and only if Dr Woo says your name: to record it, your first name — or the spelling you gave for how it sounds — is sent to Amazon Polly in the US East (N. Virginia) region of Amazon Web Services, because the voice he speaks with runs only there. Nothing else about you is sent with it. The recording comes back and is stored with your account in Mumbai.
These are the only third parties that process personal data for us:
| Who | What they do | What they get |
|---|---|---|
| Amazon Web Services | Hosting, database, sign-in, email delivery, and Dr Woo’s voice (Amazon Polly) | Everything in section 3; Amazon Polly receives only your first name, and only if Dr Woo says it |
| Sign-in, only if you choose it | Your Google email and name | |
| Razorpay | Payments, only if you buy | Your payment details and billing country |
We do not sell your personal data, we do not share it for advertising, and we add nobody to this list without updating this policy first.
9. Content protection
Paid lessons carry a faint watermark showing the name and account the page was opened with. It exists to discourage the wholesale copying of lessons, and it is shown only to you, on your own screen. We mention it because it uses your name, and you should not discover that by noticing it.
The same protection watches for a handful of patterns that mean the lessons are being taken rather than read: an automated browser, lessons opened far faster than anyone can read them, copying more than a lookup's worth of text at once, and printing or saving to PDF. When one of those trips, the page says so and pauses, and we record that it happened against your account.
What we record is the kind of thing that tripped and roughly where on the site — nothing else. Not the page, not the lesson, not what was selected or copied. It is a safety record, not a reading history, and it is kept for 180 days.
Nothing about this is automatic on our side. It never suspends you, never changes your plan and never takes anything away by itself. A person looks. If we think something needs saying, we send you a warning by email and show it to you the next time you open the site, and you can reply and tell us we have it wrong — these checks are guesses, and they do get it wrong. Warnings we have sent you are kept for 400 days.
10. The microphone
Some exercises can listen to you speak. Your browser asks permission first, and the recognition happens inside your browser. The audio is not uploaded to us and we never receive a recording. The recognised text is compared with the expected sentence and then discarded; only your score is saved, with the rest of your progress.
11. Hosting, logs and security
Like every website, our servers record technical details of each request — IP address, the page requested, the time, and your browser's user-agent string — in order to serve the page, to keep the service available, and to detect abuse such as repeated failed sign-in attempts. These logs are kept for a short period and are not used to build a profile of you.
Our own application logs are filtered so that email addresses, passwords, tokens and cookies are removed before anything is written down.
Passwords are never in our custody. Traffic is encrypted in transit. Stored data is encrypted at rest. If a breach ever affects your personal data, we will notify you and the relevant authority as the law requires.
12. Why we are allowed to do this
- To give you the service you asked for — your account, sign-in, saved progress and any subscription. Under GDPR this is performance of a contract; under the DPDP Act it is processing for the purpose you gave the data for.
- To keep the service secure — session records, device records, rate limits and account events. Under GDPR, our legitimate interest in preventing account takeover and misuse.
- To meet legal obligations — tax and accounting records for payments.
- To email you about your learning and the course — the emails in section 7 sent because you have an account. Under GDPR, our legitimate interest in keeping in touch with our own users about our own service, with an unsubscribe in every message (the ePrivacy rule for existing customers); under the DPDP Act, processing for the purpose you gave us your email for. You can object at any time by unsubscribing.
- With your consent — the microphone, which your browser asks about separately and which you can refuse or withdraw at any time.
13. How long anything is kept
| What | How long |
|---|---|
| Your account and progress | Until you delete your account |
| Sign-in sessions | At most 30 days, and sooner if unused for 7 days or you sign out |
| Email confirmation links | 24 hours |
| Password reset links | 30 minutes, and one use only |
| Account and security events | Up to 400 days |
| Content-protection records (§9) | 180 days |
| Warnings we have sent you | 400 days |
| Payment and refund records | Kept as long as tax and accounting law requires, even after the account is deleted. These records are kept because we are legally required to; they are not used for anything else. |
| Server request logs | A short operational period |
14. Your rights, and how to use them
Whatever country you are in, you can ask us to:
- Show you what we hold about you;
- Correct anything that is wrong;
- Delete your account and everything attached to it;
- Give you a copy of your data in a portable form;
- Withdraw consent where we relied on it;
- Nominate someone to exercise these rights on your behalf if you die or become incapacitated, as the DPDP Act provides.
To delete everything, ask us at the address below. Deletion removes your profile, your progress, your sessions, your device records and your sign-in credentials. It cannot remove payment records that tax law requires us to keep, and it cannot remove data Razorpay or Google hold in their own right.
To remove only the copy in this browser, open My Journey and press "Reset all progress", or clear this site's data in your browser. If you have an account, that resets your progress everywhere, on purpose — a reset on one device is not undone by another device that was offline when you did it.
We answer within 30 days. If you are in the UK or EU you may complain to your data protection authority; if you are in India you may complain to the Data Protection Board.
15. Children
Hello Deutsch is not directed at children. Accounts are intended for people aged 16 or over; if you are under 18, the DPDP Act requires a parent or guardian's consent, and you should ask them before creating one. If we learn that we hold an account belonging to a child without that consent, we will delete it.
16. Changes to this policy
The version number and effective date at the top change whenever this policy does, and material changes are noted on the site. Where a new feature collects something not described here, we will update this policy before the feature is released. Version 1.0 said that and we did not manage it when accounts launched; version 2.0 exists to put that right, and we intend to hold to it.
17. Contact and grievance officer
Questions, requests, complaints and data-protection grievances — including those addressed to our Grievance Officer under the DPDP Act — go to:
We aim to answer every message within 30 days.
Last updated 26 August 2026. See also our Terms of Use.