Privacy Policy

This Privacy Policy explains what personal data TeachLanguagesOnline (operated by Aruna Abicht, a sole trader based in Scotland, United Kingdom) collects, why, and what your rights are. If you have any questions, email hello@teachlanguagesonline.com.

1. Who We Are

For the purposes of UK GDPR, Aruna Abicht, trading as TeachLanguagesOnline, is the data controller for the personal data described below.

2. What We Collect

• Account details: your email address and a securely hashed password (never stored or visible as plain text), created when you purchase a course.
• Purchase records: which course(s) or bundle you bought and a reference to your Paddle order, so we can grant and support your access.
• Quiz responses: your email address and your answers, if you take the “Could You Be an Online Language Teacher?” quiz, so we can send you your result.
• Marketing preference: if you tick the box to receive tips and course updates, your email address and when you agreed.
• Contact messages: your name, email address, and message, if you use the contact form.
• Technical data: your IP address, used only to prevent abuse (like spam form submissions) and deleted automatically within about a week. It’s never used to track or profile you.
• Cookies: a login session cookie (keeps you signed in) and a reading-language preference cookie. Both are strictly necessary for the Site to work, so they don’t need consent. We don’t use any advertising, analytics, or tracking cookies.
• Videos and checkout: videos are embedded from YouTube in privacy-enhanced mode and only load when you press play; Paddle’s checkout only loads when you choose to buy. Once loaded, YouTube and Paddle may set their own cookies under their own privacy policies.

We never collect payment card details ourselves. Paddle handles that, and your billing details (name, card or payment details, billing address, and any tax information needed to charge VAT or sales tax correctly), entirely on its own secure, PCI-compliant systems, as the reseller and merchant of record for your order.

3. Why We Use It, and Our Legal Basis

• To create and manage your account, give you access to the courses you’ve purchased, and send purchase confirmations and password resets: performance of our contract with you.
• To send your quiz result and reply to quiz submissions and contact messages: our legitimate interest in answering the people who get in touch with us.
• To send occasional tips and course updates, only if you ticked the box to agree: your consent. You can withdraw it at any time using the unsubscribe link in any such email, or by emailing us.
• To prevent abuse of our login and forms and keep the Site secure: our legitimate interest in protecting the Site and its users.
• To keep the financial records we’re required to keep: legal obligation.

We don’t sell your data, and we don’t make automated decisions about you.

4. Who We Share It With

Most of the providers below act only on our instructions, as processors, to run the Site. Paddle is different: it’s the reseller and merchant of record for your order, so it independently decides how it handles the billing and tax data your purchase involves: it’s a separate data controller in its own right for that data, not us instructing it what to do with it. Paddle’s own privacy notice, not this policy, governs that processing.

• Paddle: payment processing, as reseller and merchant of record for your order (an independent controller for the billing and tax data involved; see Paddle’s privacy notice )
• Resend: sending transactional emails
• Our database host: securely storing account and purchase data
• Netlify: hosting the Site
• Google (via a private Google Sheet): an internal log of leads and purchases we use for our own records

None of these providers use your data for their own marketing. Some of them process data outside the UK/EEA, mainly in the United States, where our database and the servers that run the Site are located. Where that happens on our instructions (Resend, our database host, Netlify, Google), we rely on appropriate safeguards, such as Standard Contractual Clauses with the UK Addendum, or the UK-US data bridge where the provider is certified. Paddle’s own handling of your billing and tax data as merchant of record is governed by its privacy notice linked above, not by our instructions.

5. How Long We Keep It

We keep account and purchase data for as long as your account is active, and afterward for as long as we’re required to for UK tax and accounting purposes (generally up to 6 years). Quiz and contact form submissions are kept only as long as reasonably needed to respond to you and maintain our own records. If you’ve agreed to receive tips and updates, we keep your email address on that list until you unsubscribe, and afterwards keep a note that you unsubscribed so we never email you again by mistake.

6. Your Rights

Under UK GDPR, you have the right to:

• Access the personal data we hold about you
• Correct inaccurate data
• Ask us to delete your data (subject to our legal obligations, e.g. financial records)
• Object to or restrict certain processing
• Request a copy of your data in a portable format
• Withdraw your consent to marketing emails at any time

To exercise any of these, email hello@teachlanguagesonline.com. You also have the right to complain to the UK Information Commissioner’s Office ( ico.org.uk ) if you’re unhappy with how we’ve handled your data.

7. Children

Our courses are intended for adults considering or working as online language teachers. We don’t knowingly collect personal data from children.

8. Changes to This Policy

We may update this policy from time to time; the “Last updated” date above reflects the most recent change.