Privacy Policy

PollyStop is a language learning app for adults and teens, built and owned by Lanier Web Development, based in Georgia, United States. This policy covers the PollyStop apps for iOS and Android and the PollyStop pages on tyb.ai and pollystop.com. It explains what we collect, why, who processes it, and how to get rid of it. We have tried to write it the way we would want to read it: specific and short.

Questions about any of it: email daniel@tyb.ai.

What we collect

Account details

Your email address, a password (stored only as a secure hash, we cannot read it), an optional first name and username, your native language, the languages you are learning, and answers you give during onboarding such as your learning goals and how you heard about us. If you sign in with Google or Apple, we receive your email address and name from them. Apple's "Hide My Email" relay addresses work fine.

Learning activity

Which exercises you do, on which days, and how long you spend. Your streak. The phrases and words you save. Your answers to quizzes, verb practice, picture match and comprehension checks. The text of your retell and recall practice, including the scores and feedback you received. This is the data that makes the app adapt to you, and it is what powers your stats and streak screens.

Speaking practice

When you speak to PollyStop, your speech is converted to text by your device's built-in speech recognition (Apple's on iOS, Google's on Android). Your voice audio is never uploaded to our servers and we never store recordings. We only receive the resulting text. Depending on your device settings, your operating system may process that audio on Apple's or Google's servers as part of its speech recognition service.

Avatar photo

Only if you choose to upload one. See "Who processes your data" for what happens to it. You can always pick a preset animal instead and upload nothing.

Focus mode (app blocking)

If you use PollyStop to block distracting apps, the list of apps you block is stored on your device only and never reaches our servers. Our servers store just two things: when to send your device a reminder to re-lock, and a count of how often you skipped the shield.

Payments

Handled by payment processors (see below). We never see or store full card numbers.

Technical data

Crash reports if the app crashes, a push notification token if you turn notifications on, and on our website standard web logs plus our own first-party analytics (IP address, browser type, pages visited). The mobile app contains no third-party analytics or advertising SDKs.

What we use it for

• Running PollyStop: your lessons, stories, streaks and progress.
• Adapting difficulty and picking what you practice next.
• Social features you opt into, such as leaderboards and following other learners.
• Sending you the emails a product needs to send: receipts, password resets, and occasional product updates you can unsubscribe from.
• Fixing crashes and keeping the service secure.
• Measuring, on our website only, whether our advertising works.

Who processes your data

We use a small set of service providers. Each one receives only what its job requires.

• Amazon Web Services (AWS): hosts our servers, database and file storage, in the United States.
• Anthropic (Claude): evaluates your practice text, for example a retell of a story or a spoken answer converted to text. It receives the exercise text and the story it refers to, never your name, email or account identity.
• OpenAI: generates learning content such as stories, quiz questions and word explanations. When you tap a word or sentence for an explanation, the tapped text and the story context are sent, along with your level and native language, never your identity.
• Google AI (Gemini): if you upload an avatar photo, it is sent once to Google's image model to draw the cartoon version we actually display. If the model declines the photo, we discard it and assign a preset instead. The raw photo is never published.
• ElevenLabs: generates the audio narration of our own story and lesson content. No user data is sent, only our content text.
• Stripe: payments made on our website. Stripe receives your email to create the customer record and handles your card details itself.
• RevenueCat, Apple App Store and Google Play: subscriptions bought inside the mobile app. Apple and Google handle the payment; RevenueCat tells us which subscription is active for your account.
• Postmark: delivers our transactional email.
• MailerLite: our mailing list. Receives your email address and first name when you create an account. Every email has an unsubscribe link.
• Bugsnag (SmartBear): receives crash reports from the app so we can fix bugs.
• Expo: delivers push notifications to your device if you enable them.
• Meta: on our public website only, we use the Meta Pixel and server-side events to measure advertising. The server events identify you only by a SHA-256 hash of your email. Nothing inside the mobile app talks to Meta.
• Google Analytics: on our public website only, standard visit analytics. Not present in the mobile app.
• PromoteKit: on our public website only, tracks whether you arrived through one of our affiliate partners so the partner gets credited. Not present in the mobile app.

Our AI providers are used through their business APIs, which under their current terms do not use customer API data to train their models.

What we never do

• We never sell your data. To anyone, for anything.
• No advertising inside the app, and no advertising SDKs in it either.
• We never share your data with data brokers.
• We never store recordings of your voice.
• We never show other users your last name, your email address, or your practice text.

What other learners can see

PollyStop has opt-in social features: leaderboards, following, and cheering each other's progress. If you appear on a leaderboard, other users can see your username, first name, avatar, the languages you are learning, and stats such as streak days, minutes practiced and follower counts. They can never see your last name, email, or what you wrote in practice. If you would rather not appear, contact us and we will sort it out.

Retention and deletion

We keep your data for as long as your account exists. Delete your account any time, right in the app (Profile, then Delete account) or by emailing daniel@tyb.ai. Deletion is immediate and permanent: your account, learning activity, saved phrases, practice text, avatar and subscription records are all removed. Copies in our server backups are kept only for disaster recovery and rotate out on the normal backup cycle.

Your rights

If you are in the EU or UK, the GDPR applies and we honor it for everyone else too. Our legal bases are: performance of our contract with you (running the app), legitimate interests (security, crash fixing, first-party analytics, ad measurement on the web, product email), and consent where the law requires it (for example push notifications and your avatar photo).

You have the right to:

• Access a copy of the data we hold about you.
• Correct anything that is wrong.
• Delete your data (see above, you do not need to ask permission).
• Receive your data in a portable format.
• Restrict or object to certain processing.
• Withdraw consent at any time where processing is based on consent.
• Complain to your local data protection authority.

To exercise any of these, email daniel@tyb.ai. We respond within 30 days.

Because our servers are in the United States, using PollyStop from the EU means your data is transferred there. We rely on our processors' standard contractual clauses for those transfers.

Age

PollyStop is for people aged 13 and up. It is not directed at children under 13 and we do not knowingly collect data from them. If you believe a child under 13 has created an account, email us and we will delete it.

Changes to this policy

If we change this policy in a way that matters, we will update the effective date at the top and, for significant changes, tell you in the app or by email. The current version always lives at this address.