It’s a bit of a cliché, but your privacy really is important to us.
We collect data from you to improve our website and to be transparent about that, we’d like to explain what data we collect, why we collect it and what we do with it. Most of the data we collect is in anonymous form.
Google Analytics
We use Google Analytics to better understand how people use our site.
We use anonymous tracking, which means that the IP is anonymized shortly after being sent to Analytics Collection Network. The full IP address is never written to disk in this case.
We also ensure that we never send personal identifiable information to the Google Analytics system.
There is no way to identify individuals from the data.
In short: analytics information is not personal data, so we do not specifically ask for your prior consent.
We use the data to improve the content we publish on the site. For example, we can see how much time people spend on a certain page, on what pages people exit the site, etc. In other words, the data tells us which pages are popular and which are not. We keep this in mind when creating new content for the site.
All our Google Analytics data will be retained for 52 months. After which it will be automatically deleted.
Comments
When you want to comment on one of the articles of this website, you’ll be asked to supply your name, email address and website (optional).
We collect the data shown in the comments form, and also the visitor’s IP address and browser user agent string to help spam detection.
Your email address will not be published, but stays in our database for the time the comment and page are online. Your email address will ONLY be actually used when a comment of yours requires a personal reply from one of our team members.
However, this is extremely rare and has only happened about two times in five years.
Your email address will not be used for any other purposes. You won’t be subscribed to our newsletter or anything. (If you want to subscribe to our newsletter, you’ll have to use one of the sign up forms you can find on almost any page.)
Your name will be displayed above your comment. If you indicated you have a website, your name will become a link to your website.
The only people who have access to your email address are the ones operating SmartLanguageLearner.com. It will never be shared with anyone else.
This data will be retained for as long as the post on which you commented stays online. If you want to delete your comment and your data, please drop us an email at: legal@smartlanguagelearner.com
Please know that we have the right to delete any comment we deem inappropriate, disrespectful or if we think the comment simply doesn’t fit the discussion.
An anonymized string created from your email address (also called a hash) may be provided to the Gravatar service to see if you are using it. The Gravatar service privacy policy is available here: https://automattic.com/privacy/. After approval of your comment, your profile picture is visible to the public in the context of your comment.
Email Newsletter
If you sign up for our newsletter, you will get regular emails from us. As it stands, you can expect to receive about one email per week from us. In case this radically changes, we’ll let you know through the same newsletter so you can unsubscribe if you don’t wish to receive more emails.
When you sign up for our newsletter through one of the sign up forms, you’ll give us consent to send you our newsletter. We only send you other stuff (apart from the newsletter), if we get your explicit consent to do so. (Since our sign up forms are all about one thing only, there’s no need for checkboxes to comply with the GDPR law.)
The company that supplies us the email marketing services is SendPulse. They collect your email address, your response to the emails sent out like opens, clicks, location, date of subscription and email client. You can read their privacy policy here.
SendPulse, the data controller, shares the mentioned data with us. We only use this data to improve our mailings and get more engagement from our subscribers.
The only people who have access to this data are SendPulse and SmartLanguageLearner.com.
The data will be retained for as long as you’re a subscriber. Even after unsubscribing some of your data may still be in the system. In case you want to delete all this data, drop us an email at: legal@smartlanguagelearner.com and the data will be deleted.
Affiliate Products and Services
SmartLanguageLearner.com participates in several affiliate programs. This means that we recommend products and/or services to our readers, and if the reader buys we receive a commission at no extra cost to you (in some cases, you can even get a discount by buying through our links).
Affiliate links are not individually marked, but every page that has affiliate links comes with a note letting you know that the links on the page may be affiliate links.
As a rule of thumb, if an external link takes you to a product or service page, it’s best to assume it’s an affiliate link.
Once you click on an affiliate link you’ll be taken to the site of the vendor. There you may be tracked differently than on SmartLanguageLearner.com. They’re likely to place a tracking cookie on your computer. Therefore we recommend you read the privacy policy of such an external site, especially if you plan to buy something.
Of course, if you buy, you’ll have to hand over some of your personal data in order to complete the purchase. Usually the vendor shares some of that data with us, but never actually payment details other than the date and the amount of the purchase.
In some (rare) cases, the vendor may share your Country, City, IP address and Username with us.
SmartLanguageLearner.com only tracks individual clicks on affiliate links (always anonymously), the other tracking is done by the vendor.
We use clicks and sales data to improve our affiliate offers. The only we use for that are: click data and sales data (date, product(s) purchased and order amount). We don’t use other data that in some cases we have access to through vendors we’re affiliated with.
It’s important to know that apart from the individual anonymous clicks that we track, we never store data the vendor supplies us with, other than total sales amount for days, weeks, months and years. This can never be individually traced back to you.
SmartLanguageLearner does not share this data with anyone, but can’t be held responsible for what the vendors we’re affiliated with do with the data. That’s why we recommend you check out their privacy policies.
If you’ve made a purchase or visited a vendor’s site want access to your data and/or delete it, you must contact them, since we can’t trace the data we’ve got back to you.
Also, we partner with Rakuten Marketing, who may collect personal information when you interact with our site. The collection and use of this information is subject to the privacy policy located here: https://rakutenmarketing.com/legal-notices/services-privacy-policy/
Advertisements
Cookies and Web Beacons
We do use cookies to store information, such as your personal preferences when you visit our site. This could include only showing you a popup once in your visit, or the ability to login to some of our features, such as forums.
We also use third party advertisements on Smart Language Learner to support our site. Some of these advertisers may use technology such as cookies and web beacons when they advertise on our site, which will also send these advertisers (such as Google through the Google AdSense program) information including your IP address, your ISP , the browser you used to visit our site, and in some cases, whether you have Flash installed.
This is generally used for geotargeting purposes (showing New York real estate ads to someone in New York, for example) or showing certain ads based on specific sites visited (such as showing cooking ads to someone who frequents cooking sites).
DoubleClick DART cookies
We also may use DART cookies for ad serving through Google’s DoubleClick, which places a cookie on your computer when you are browsing the web and visit a site using DoubleClick advertising (including some Google AdSense advertisements). This cookie is used to serve ads specific to you and your interests (”interest based targeting”).
The ads served will be targeted based on your previous browsing history (For example, if you have been viewing sites about visiting Las Vegas, you may see Las Vegas hotel advertisements when viewing a non-related site, such as on a site about hockey).
DART uses “non personally identifiable information”. It does NOT track personal information about you, such as your name, email address, physical address, telephone number, social security numbers, bank account numbers or credit card numbers.
You can opt-out of this ad serving on all sites using this advertising by visiting http://www.doubleclick.com/privacy/dart_adserving.aspx
You can choose to disable or selectively turn off our cookies or third-party cookies in your browser settings, or by managing preferences in programs such as Norton Internet Security.
However, this can affect how you are able to interact with our site as well as other websites. This could include the inability to login to services or programs, such as logging into forums or accounts.
Deleting cookies does not mean you are permanently opted out of any advertising program. Unless you have settings that disallow cookies, the next time you visit a site running the advertisements, a new cookie will be added.
Ezoic
Smart Language Learner also uses a third-party ad agency called Ezoic. Through this service, ads are placed on Smart Language Learner.
Please read Ezoic’s privacy policy here.
“What Type of Language Learner Are You” Quiz
This is a quiz to determine what type of language learner you are.
All submitted data (the answers you supply) through this quiz will be retained for 12 months, after which it will be automatically deleted.
No other personal identifiable information is being collected.
Security
We take the protection of your data very seriously.
Smart Language Learner is hosted by a reputable hosting company (WPX Hosting), that has several security measures in place to ensure safety of your data.
All traffic on Smart Language Learner is encrypted by SLL, the standard security technology for establishing an encrypted link between a web server and a browser.
Our data controllers Google (analytics) and SendPulse (email newsletter) also have sturdy security measures in place to protect your data. You can read their privacy policies here: Google – SendPulse.
To find out about the security measures of external sites (like our affiliate partners), we recommend you read their respective privacy policies.
Usually they can be found by looking for a link on the homepage that says “privacy policy”, “privacy statement” or sometimes it can be found in their “terms of service”.
Your Legal Rights
Under certain circumstances, you have rights under data protection laws in relation to your personal data. These include the right to:
• Request access to your personal data.
• Request correction of your personal data.
• Request erasure of your personal data.
• Object to processing of your personal data.
• Request restriction of processing your personal data.
• Request transfer of your personal data.
• Right to withdraw consent.
These rights are explained in detail here:
https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-the-general-data-protection-regulation-gdpr/individual-rights/
If you wish to exercise any of the rights set out above, please email us at legal@smartlanguagelearner.com.
You will not have to pay a fee to access your personal data (or to exercise any of the other rights). However, we may charge a reasonable fee if your request is clearly unfounded, repetitive or excessive. Alternatively, we may refuse to comply with your request in these circumstances.
We may need to request specific information from you to help us confirm your identity and ensure your right to access your personal data (or to exercise any of your other rights). This is a security measure to ensure that personal data is not disclosed to any person who has no right to receive it. We may also contact you to ask you for further information in relation to your request to speed up our response.
We try to respond to all legitimate requests within 30 days. On occasion it may take us longer if your request is particularly complex or you have made a number of requests.
Our full contact details are:
Noel van Vliet
Email address: legal@smartlanguagelearner.com
Postal address: 350 metros al sur de la escuela central de Atenas, Atenas, Alajuela, Costa Rica