Privacy notice

Hoda is operated by MohammadEbrahim Mohammadi Panah, Richard-Wagner-Str. 1, 85057 Ingolstadt, Germany. This person is the controller within the meaning of Art. 4(7) GDPR. You can reach us at salam@hoda.buzz.

Account data: your email address, display name, interface language, time zone, and the date on which you gave your consent. If you give it, your date of birth is stored too; it is required only when you donate, to confirm that you are 18 or older, and it otherwise helps us choose age-appropriate lessons. Where no date of birth is on record, we ask you to confirm your age yourself when you donate; we check that confirmation at that moment and keep nothing about it. We check the 16-or-older rule from your confirmation at sign-up, not from your date of birth. We use the account data to create and run your account and to keep your progress across your devices. Legal basis: Art. 6(1)(b) GDPR (performance of a contract); for the 18-or-older check when you donate, Art. 6(1)(c) GDPR (legal obligation).

Learner profiles: the name, date of birth, sex, avatar, level, points, honey, streak and progress of each profile, plus its practice schedule. The schedule decides only which question practice asks next; it holds no reward. On a device without an account, the date of birth of the first profile is also what we check to confirm that a giver is 18 or older. Legal basis: Art. 6(1)(b) GDPR; for that 18-or-older check, Art. 6(1)(c) GDPR (legal obligation).

Push notifications: the browser's push endpoint, its encryption keys and a short browser identification string. We use it only to deliver the practice reminder you asked for. Legal basis: Art. 6(1)(b) GDPR; you withdraw it by turning the switch off, which removes the subscription.

Feedback: the message you write, and — where you report a problem with a particular item — that item and a copy of its text. We use it to read and fix what you report. Legal basis: Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR — our legitimate interest in improving the content — and Art. 6(1)(a) GDPR where you write to us of your own accord.

Server logs: your IP address, the time, the requested address, and browser details. The hosting provider keeps them for a short time, to keep the service secure and to trace misuse. Legal basis: Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR — securing our service and investigating abuse.

Data on your own device: if you learn without an account, everything stays on your device — profiles, progress, practice cards and preferences. Nothing is sent to us, and nothing can be recovered if the device is lost.

The audio you hear is not your voice. The app plays a cloud voice reading the curriculum, and the recording of that passage is made once and shared by everyone who reads the same text in the same voice. A spoken answer you record yourself stays on your device and is never sent to our servers.

What we do not collect: no advertising or analytics identifiers, no third-party tracking cookies, no location, no contacts, no photos, no microphone recordings.

Only the following services ever see anything about you. The first four act on our instructions, are bound to us by a data-processing agreement, and may not use your data for its own purposes; your browser's push service delivers an encrypted message and cannot read it:

• Supabase — the database and the private store for the read-aloud audio. It holds your account (email address, display name, the date of birth you gave, interface language, time zone, the date you gave your consent), your learner profiles and their progress, your practice schedule, and anything you send us as feedback.
• Cloudflare — the hosting this app runs on, and the bot check on sign-up, sign-in, password reset and payment. As the host it sees the request data of every request — your IP address, the time, the page you asked for — in its server logs, and your name and email address pass through it when the app hands a donation to Stripe. The bot check runs in your browser, so your IP address and browser details go to Cloudflare at the moment it runs.
• Stripe — the payment processing, if you donate. It gets your name, your email address and your payment details; your card number never reaches us.
• Our email service — sends the account emails, such as confirming your address or resetting your password. It gets your email address and the email itself.
• Your browser's push service — Google, Mozilla, Apple or whichever your browser uses — carries the encrypted practice reminder to your device. It receives the push endpoint and the encrypted message, but not the reminder's text.

The database and the stored audio files stay in the European Union. Some of the services above may process data outside the EEA — Stripe and Cloudflare can, and so may the email service. Where data leaves the EEA, the transfer is covered by the European Commission's standard contractual clauses and the further guarantees of the GDPR.

• Account data, profiles and progress: until you delete your account, then removed from the live database at once and from the database's own backups as those roll over.
• Feedback: linked to your account while it is open, so we can follow up; when you delete your account the link is removed and the message remains without it for as long as it helps us improve the content.
• Server logs: the hosting provider keeps a record of each request for a short period, for security and troubleshooting, and then deletes it.
• Donation records: kept for as long as the tax law requires us to keep them.
• Where a dispute is pending, we may keep the records concerned for as long as the dispute lasts.

You can exercise the following rights at any time, and we answer within one month:

• Access (Art. 15 GDPR) — in the app under Settings → Privacy → "Download my data" you get every record the app holds about you, as a JSON file.
• Rectification (Art. 16 GDPR) — your email address, password, language, notifications and the profiles on your account you can change yourself in Settings; a birth date can be corrected once every 30 days.
• Erasure (Art. 17 GDPR) — in the app under Settings → Privacy → "Delete account". This removes your account, every profile and all progress with it.
• Restriction of processing (Art. 18 GDPR).
• Objection to processing based on Art. 6(1)(e) or (f) GDPR (Art. 21 GDPR).
• Data portability (Art. 20 GDPR) — the JSON download, in a machine-readable format.
• Withdrawal of consent (Art. 7(3) GDPR), where you gave one — at any time, without affecting the lawfulness of the processing before that.
• Complaint to a data protection supervisory authority (Art. 77 GDPR). The authority for us is the Bayerisches Landesamt für Datenschutzaufsicht (BayLDA), Promenade 18, 91522 Ansbach, Germany, poststelle@lda.bayern.de.

An account needs a name, an email address, a password and your confirmation that you are 16 or older. Without these we cannot give you an account. Everything else — your date of birth, learner profiles, notifications — is optional.

None. Hoda does not profile you, does not score you, and takes no decision about you by automated means. The level a learner is at follows from the answers given, and nothing else.

Data is encrypted on its way to us, only those who need it can reach it, no profile is public, and points and honey are written by the server alone — a device cannot claim them for itself.

Hoda is meant for people aged 16 and over. A younger child learns only as a learner profile inside a parent's or guardian's account, and we never knowingly collect data from a child who holds an account. If you believe a child has given us data directly, write to us and we will delete it.

We publish every change here with a new date and version number. A change that materially affects how your data is used is announced in the app and may ask you to confirm the notice again.

Write to us at salam@hoda.buzz. We do not sell your data and do not use it for advertising.