Dutch From Zero
Dutch From Zero
The short version: we collect as little as possible. Details below.
Dutch From Zero (dutchfromzero.com) is a free educational website that teaches beginner Dutch. This policy explains what data the site handles and how third-party services we use — mainly Google Analytics and Google AdSense — may collect information through your browser.
We aim to collect as little personal data as possible ourselves. The lessons, exercises and audio all work without signing in, and most of what happens stays on your own device. You can optionally create an account, which stores your email address on our server; sections 3 to 5 explain exactly what that involves.
The app stores progress, practice settings and guest practice allowances in your browser using local storage. Signed-in learners also sync lesson completion and the last lesson visited to their account. We collect compact learning statistics as described in section 6; we do not store individual exercise answers or click histories.
Creating an account is optional for reading lessons and listening to examples. Guests can complete three exercise sets per lesson and ten answers per standalone practice before a one-hour cooldown. A free account unlocks unlimited practice and lets lesson progress follow you to another device.
If you do create one, this is everything we store:
For signed-in learners, we store completed lessons, their completion times and the last lesson visited, so progress can be restored on another device.
The sign-in cookie keeps you signed in and is removed when you sign out. Learning summaries use the account session to distinguish registered learners from guests; no email address is copied into those statistics.
Deleting your account removes its account records and synced lesson progress. Daily statistical totals are retained without account identifiers; temporary learning hashes expire during the cleanup described in section 9.
We send account email — confirmation links, password resets, and notices when your sign-in methods change — through Resend, which processes your address in order to deliver those messages. News and updates go only to people who ticked that box, through the same service.
AI practice is optional and needs an account. If you never open it, nothing in this section applies to you.
Your messages are stored. When you practise, what you write and what the tutor replies are saved to your account, so the conversation is still there when you come back and so we can count your monthly allowance. "Start over" hides a conversation from you; the messages remain on our side, because the count of what you have sent is how the allowance works.
Your messages are sent to a third party. The replies are generated by an external AI provider, so the text of your practice conversation — together with the lesson you are practising — leaves our server and reaches theirs. It is not sent with your email address or your name. We have not yet connected a provider; this policy will name them here before the feature is switched on.
Please do not put personal information in a practice conversation. It is a language exercise. Write about the weather, not about your medical history.
Spoken replies are produced by your own browser's built-in speech synthesis. No audio is generated by us or sent anywhere.
Deleting your account deletes your conversations along with it, immediately.
A paid plan is optional. Every lesson, exercise and audio example is free without one.
We never see your card. Payment is handled entirely by an external payment provider. We receive only a customer reference, which plan you are on, whether it is active, and when the period ends — never a card number.
A payment provider has not been chosen yet, and no payment can currently be taken. This policy will name the provider and link to their own privacy policy before any real transaction is possible.
Records we have to keep for tax and accounting are kept for as long as the law requires, even after an account is deleted. That is the one exception to deletion being complete.
Our own learning dashboard uses small summaries of lesson and cheat-sheet visits, practice starts and completions, and active reading and practice time. It also counts successfully sent cheat-sheet PDFs and daily downloaders. Active time excludes hidden or unfocused tabs and inactivity beyond one minute. A random browser identifier is kept in local storage for guests; registered learners and PDF downloaders are deduplicated with a keyed hash of their account identifier. Daily totals are split into guest and registered groups. These learning tables contain no email addresses, IP addresses, exercise answers, audio recordings or click histories.
When a guest sees the practice-limit popup, a first-party dfz_learning_prompt cookie can connect that popup to a completed registration or sign-in in the same browser within seven days. A window starts with the first popup; repeated popups do not extend it. Clicking the registration link is counted separately from successfully creating an account. Our learning tracker respects your browser’s Do Not Track and Global Privacy Control signals and does not run on account or sign-in pages.
This site uses Google Analytics 4, a web-analytics service provided by Google, to understand how visitors use the site (for example, which lessons are viewed, general device and browser type, and an approximate location derived from your IP address). Google Analytics sets cookies and processes this data on our behalf so we can improve the lessons.
This data is aggregated and is not used to identify you personally. You can prevent Google Analytics from using your data by installing the Google Analytics Opt-out Browser Add-on, or by blocking cookies in your browser. See How Google uses information from sites that use its services.
This site displays ads through Google AdSense. Google and its advertising partners use cookies and similar technologies to serve ads, measure their performance, limit how often you see a given ad, and help prevent abuse.
For more detail, see Google's Advertising & cookies and Privacy Policy.
Depending on where you live (for example, under the EU/EEA and UK GDPR), you have the right to access, correct, delete, or restrict the processing of your personal data, and to object to personalized advertising.
Because this site stores almost no personal data itself, you can exercise most of these rights directly:
Progress stored in your browser remains on your device until you clear this site's data or local storage in your browser settings. Data collected by Google Analytics and Google AdSense is retained and managed by Google in line with their own policies.
Learning statistics retain daily aggregate totals. Temporary page summaries and deduplication hashes cover only today and yesterday; popup attribution records and their cookie expire after seven days. Cleanup runs during regular site traffic and admin report refreshes. The guest browser identifier stays locally until you clear site data; unsent summaries in the browser are limited to 16 and are discarded once their reporting day is too old.
AI practice conversations are kept for as long as the account exists and are erased with it. Records required for tax and accounting are the exception — those are kept for the period the law requires.
Account data is kept for as long as the account exists, and is erased immediately when you delete it. Sign-in sessions expire after 30 days of disuse. Password reset links expire after one hour and confirmation links after 24 hours; both can only be used once. An account whose email address is never confirmed and which is never used is removed after 30 days.
This site is intended for a general audience and is not directed at children. We do not knowingly collect personal data from children. If you believe a child has provided personal data, please contact us and we will address it.
We may update this policy as the site or the services it uses change. When we do, we will revise the "Last updated" date shown at the top of this page. Significant changes will be reflected here.
For any privacy question or request, contact: devisv505@gmail.com.