Privacy Policy

PollyStop is a language learning app for people aged 16 and up, 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.

The short version of the part people ask about most: calls with Polly, our AI tutor, are recorded and transcribed. People on our team and automated tools review them to improve your lessons and to catch abuse. The details are in "Calls with Polly" below.

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. What you say to the people in the game. This is the data that makes the app adapt to you, and it is what powers your stats and streak screens.

Calls with Polly

The recording and the written transcript of each call with Polly, how long it lasted, and what Polly learned about you during it (for example your level, your interests and the words you find hard). See "Calls with Polly" below.

Speaking practice outside calls

When you speak an answer in an exercise or in the game on your phone, your speech is converted to text by your device's built-in speech recognition (Apple's on iOS, Google's on Android). That audio is not uploaded to our servers. 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. On a VR headset, which has no built-in recognition, a short clip of what you say is sent to our voice provider to be turned into text; we keep the text, not the clip.

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, the IP address you last signed in from, 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.

Calls with Polly

Polly is an AI tutor you talk to out loud. Here is exactly what happens to a call.

• During the call, your voice streams to our voice provider, which turns it into text, passes it to the AI model that writes Polly's replies, and speaks those replies in Polly's voice. To make the call about you, we give the model your first name or username, your level, your languages and the short notes Polly kept from your earlier calls. We never give it your email, your last name or your payment details.
• Every call is recorded and transcribed. Our voice provider keeps the recording and the transcript for 30 days and then deletes them. We keep our own copy of the transcript, never the recording, for 12 months. After that we delete the words of the conversation and keep only what we learned from it, as described in the next point.
• After the call, an AI model reads the transcript and pulls out what is useful for your next lesson: phrases and flashcards for you, your level, your interests, and the things you find hard. It is told to leave out sensitive details such as health, religion, politics or contact information. Those notes stay for as long as your account exists, so Polly remembers you. Email us and we will show you or delete them.
• Who reviews calls, and why. People on our small team and automated tools review transcripts, and occasionally recordings, for two reasons: to improve Polly as a tutor (for example, checking her corrections were right and her replies were the right length), and to keep the service safe (to find calls that break our acceptable use rules, such as harassment, sexual content or attempts to misuse the AI). A call that is flagged can be kept longer than the periods above while we look into it, and only as long as we need to.
• What we never do with calls: sell them, use them for advertising, or let our providers train their own models on them. We may use what we learn from calls to improve PollyStop itself, for example the instructions we give Polly. Before using an excerpt as an example outside the review (in a test of a new version of Polly, say), we remove anything that identifies you.
• Your choice. Calls are optional. Everything else in PollyStop works without them. If you would rather not be recorded, do not start a call. You can delete any or all of your calls by emailing us, or delete your account, which deletes them all, including the copies our voice provider holds.

Please do not share things on a call you would not want a reviewer to read, such as passwords, financial details or other people's private information. Polly is a language tutor, not a therapist, doctor or lawyer.

What we use it for

• Running PollyStop: your lessons, calls, stories, streaks and progress.
• Adapting difficulty and picking what you practice next, including what Polly brings to your next call.
• Improving PollyStop and Polly as a tutor, by reviewing how lessons and calls actually go.
• Keeping the service safe: catching abuse of the AI tutor and of other learners, and enforcing our terms.
• 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. We list them by what they do rather than by name, because the companies behind a job can change while the job, and what we send for it, stays the same. Email us and we will tell you who they are today.

• Hosting: our servers, database and file storage, in the United States.
• Our voice provider: runs the calls with Polly (your live voice, speech to text, Polly's voice) and keeps each call's recording and transcript for 30 days. On a VR headset it also turns your spoken answers into text. It also makes the audio narration of our own story and lesson content.
• The AI model providers we use: the models behind Polly's replies during a call, the notes and phrases made from a call afterwards, the people you talk to in the game, the feedback on your practice text, and our learning content such as stories, quiz questions and word explanations. Each request carries the conversation or exercise text plus what the task needs: your first name or username and your notes for a call; your level and native language when you tap a word for an explanation; never your email or payment details. Phrases you save are also checked by an automated tool for harmful content.
• An AI image model: if you upload an avatar photo, it is sent once 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.
• Payments: on our website, a payment processor receives your email to create the customer record and handles your card details itself. Inside the mobile app, Apple's App Store or Google Play handles the payment, and a subscription service tells us which plan is active for your account.
• Email: one provider delivers our transactional email (receipts, password resets). Another runs our mailing list and receives your email address and name when you create an account. Every list email has an unsubscribe link.
• Crash reports and server monitoring: crash reports from the app, and our servers' performance. They see technical data, not your lessons or calls.
• Push notifications: delivers them to your device if you turn them on.
• On our public website only: visit analytics; session replay, which records how pages are used (clicks, scrolling, what is on screen) so we can find bugs and confusing spots; a pixel and server-side events from the advertising platforms we run ads on, so we can tell whether an ad worked (the server events identify you only by a one-way hash of your email); affiliate tracking, so a partner who sent you gets credited; and our voice provider's audio player, which plays narrated content on our pages. None of these are in the mobile app.

We use our AI and voice providers through their business services, under terms that do not let them train their own models on your data.

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 let our AI providers train their models on your calls or your practice.
• We never show other users your last name, your email address, your practice text, your phrases or your calls.

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, what you wrote in practice, your phrases, or anything from your calls with Polly. If you would rather not appear, contact us and we will sort it out.

Retention and deletion

• Call recordings and transcripts at our voice provider: 30 days.
• Our copy of call transcripts: 12 months.
• What you say to the people in the game: 12 months.
• After those 12 months we keep only what we learned from the conversation: your level, your minutes, the words and phrases you saved, and Polly's notes about you.
• Everything else, including Polly's notes about you, your phrases and your progress: for as long as your account exists.
• Anything flagged in a safety review: only as long as the review, and any action we take because of it, needs.

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, calls, Polly's notes about you, avatar and subscription records are removed from our servers, and we ask our voice provider to delete your call recordings and transcripts at the same time. You are also removed from our mailing list, and our mailing list provider deletes your details within 30 days. Copies in our server backups are kept only for disaster recovery and rotate out on the normal backup cycle.

Deleting your account does not cancel a subscription you bought in the App Store or Google Play, because Apple and Google run those. Cancel it in your phone's subscription settings first.

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:

• Our contract with you: running the app, including your calls with Polly and the notes that make the next lesson about you.
• Our legitimate interests: recording and reviewing calls to improve the tutor and to keep the service safe, security, crash fixing, first-party analytics, ad measurement on the web, and product email. You can object to any of these (see below).
• Your 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, including your call transcripts and Polly's notes 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 (we send it as a file you can open).
• Restrict or object to certain processing, including the review of your calls.
• 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 providers' standard contractual clauses for those transfers.

Age

PollyStop is for people aged 16 and up. You must be at least 16 to create an account. It is not directed at anyone under 16 and we do not knowingly collect data from them. If you believe someone under 16 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.