Privacy Policy
dAIologue is a website and set of apps for learning and teaching English. This page explains what we hold about you, why, who else sees it, how long we keep it, and what you can do about it. We have tried to write it in plain language rather than legal language.
1. Who we are
dAIologue is operated by dAIologue [PP_TODO: registered company name], [PP_TODO: registered address]. If you have a question about your data, write to [email protected].
If your school gave you your account, your school decides what happens to it and we act on their instructions. If you signed up yourself, those decisions are yours.
2. The short version
- We hold your account details, what you have practised and how you scored, anything you save in your notebook, and the messages you send in the app.
- We do not keep recordings of your voice. When you speak in an activity, the audio is sent to be scored and is deleted straight away; only the text of what you said and your score are kept.
- We do not sell anything about you, and we do not send marketing.
- You can download a copy of everything, and you can pause or delete your account, from Account inside the app.
3. What we hold
| What | Why |
|---|---|
| Your name, username, email address, the colour you chose, your first language and your age band. For a learner under 18 whose school invited them, a guardian name, email and (optionally) phone number. | To give you an account, sign you in, and let your teacher see who you are. |
| What you practised, when, your scores and level, your mistakes (for example sounds you mix up), and any certificates. | To show you your progress, to let your teacher help you, and to decide what to give you next. |
| What you write or save: notebook cards and notes, answers you type, what you said in an activity as text, messages you send, and any feedback you send us. | To give you the feature you were using, and to answer you. |
| Technical records: sign-in attempts, roughly when you were active, and the kind of device, browser and country you used. Sign-in records hold a scrambled form of your username and network address, not the originals. | To keep accounts safe, to stop repeated password guessing, and to see that the service is working. |
| Website measurements: pages viewed, which demonstrations were tried, how much data a lesson used, your country, browser, and where you arrived from. These are linked to a random identifier in a cookie, not to your name. | To understand which parts of the site are useful, and to keep lessons usable on slow or expensive connections. |
Cookies are covered separately in our Cookie Policy.
4. Speaking activities and your voice
Several activities ask you to speak. When you do, the recording is sent to a speech service that turns it into text and scores your pronunciation. The recording is not stored by us, and the services we use do not keep it to train their systems.
What we keep is the text of what you said and the score. That text appears in your progress and, on some activities, to your teacher. The recording itself is gone as soon as it has been scored.
On the public demonstrations, which anyone can use without an account, your microphone audio goes directly from your browser to the speech service.
5. Where we use AI
We use AI services to turn speech into text, to score pronunciation, to read text aloud, to make practice material, and to translate messages when you ask for a translation. Only the text needed for that job is sent.
Translating a message means the words of that message are sent to a translation service. Machine translation can be wrong, so please read a translated message as a guide rather than as the exact words.
We do not use what you write or say to train AI systems, and our providers are contractually barred from doing so.
6. Who else sees your data
People
- Your teachers see your work and progress in their own classes.
- If a school gave you your account, that school's administrators see your account and your progress, and can archive or delete it.
- A small number of dAIologue staff can see accounts in order to run and support the service.
- Feedback you send about the beta is shown to us under a code name, not your name, unless you say we may contact you about it.
Companies that process data for us
| Who | What they receive |
|---|---|
| Microsoft (speech, EU data centres) | Audio when you speak in an activity, and the words to be read aloud. |
| OpenAI (United States) | Audio when you speak, for turning into text; and single words looked up in the dictionary. |
| Anthropic (United States) | Practice material being generated, answers being assessed, and the text of a message when a translation is asked for. |
| Google (United States) | reCAPTCHA, which checks that sign-up and contact forms are not being filled in by software, and receives your network address; and the web fonts our pages use. |
| Our hosting provider | Everything, because the service runs on their servers. |
Some of these companies are in the United States. Where that is so, the transfer is covered by the standard clauses approved by the European Commission, or by the EU-US Data Privacy Framework.
7. Why we are allowed to hold it
- To provide what you or your school asked for: running your account, your lessons and your progress.
- Our legitimate interests: keeping accounts secure, preventing abuse, and understanding how the site is used.
- Your consent, where we ask for it: taking part in the beta, and the optional parts of feedback.
- Legal obligations, where one applies.
8. How long we keep it
| What | How long |
|---|---|
| Your account and your learning record | Until you delete the account, or your school does. |
| A paused account | 12 months, then it is deleted. We email you 30 days and 7 days beforehand. |
| An account you asked us to delete | 14 days, so you can change your mind, then it is carried out. |
| Sign-in and activity records | 90 days. |
| Website measurements | 24 months. |
| A message you send us through the contact form or the waiting list | 24 months after we have dealt with it. |
9. What deleting your account actually does
We remove your name, username, email address, password, contact details and guardian details; your notebook and its audio; the messages you sent and received; what you said in activities as text; and anything you wrote to us.
We keep your scores and the record that the work was done, with nothing left pointing to you, so that your class and course figures do not change for everyone else. Your account shows as "a former student" or "a former teacher" where it used to show your name.
If you are a teacher, lessons and activities you published or shared stay on the platform, credited to "a former teacher", because other teachers and classes are using them. Your private drafts are deleted.
Deletion cannot be undone once the waiting period has passed, so download your data first if you want to keep it.
10. Your rights
You can ask for a copy of your data, ask us to correct it, ask us to delete it, object to how we use it, or ask us to limit that use. Most of this you can do yourself, straight away:
- Open Account in the app, by tapping your initials.
- Your data — Download my data gives you everything in files you can open.
- Close account — pause it and come back later, or delete it.
- Profile — change your name, colour and language yourself.
If your school gave you your account, ask your school: they can download your data for you and archive or delete the account. If your school will not help, write to us.
Write to [email protected] for anything else. If you are not happy with our answer, you can complain to the Data Protection Commission.
11. Children
Learners under 18 use dAIologue through a school or a teacher, who invites them. We ask for an age band rather than a date of birth, and for a guardian's name and email address for anyone under 18, so that the guardian can be told the account exists.
Signing up independently, without a school, is for adults aged 18 and over.
Where a school enrols its pupils, the school decides what data is collected and why, and we handle it on their instructions. A guardian who wants a child's data, or wants it deleted, should ask the school first, and us if that does not work.
The public demonstrations on our home page can be used by anyone without an account, including the speaking ones. If you are a parent and would rather your child did not use them, they are the pages before you sign in.
12. Keeping it safe
Passwords and PINs are stored scrambled (hashed), never as you typed them, so nobody at dAIologue can read them. The site is served over an encrypted connection. Repeated password guessing is slowed down and blocked. Sign-in records hold a scrambled form of your username and network address rather than the originals.
No system is perfectly secure. If something happens that puts your data at risk, we will tell you and the authorities as the law requires.
13. Changes to this page
If we change how we use your data, we will update this page and the date at the top, and say so in the app where the change matters.
14. Contact
Questions about anything here: [email protected].