Privacy Policy

Last updated: January 1, 2022

Hi there! Thank you for visiting https://www.speakgreektome.com.

The Speak Greek to Me website (the “Service”) is operated by Speak Greek to Me LLC (“us”, “we”, or “our”) incorporated in the United States of America. To use our Service, the User (“you”, “yourself”, or “your”) must agree to this website’s Terms and Conditions and to this Privacy Policy, which is governed by the laws of the United States of America. If you don’t agree to this Privacy Policy, you should not use our Service.

At Speak Greek to Me, your privacy is extremely important, therefore we have a few fundamental principles:

We are thoughtful about the personal information we ask you to provide and that we collect through the operation of our services.
We store personal information only for as long as we have a reason to keep it.
We aim to make it as simple as possible for you to control what information on our website is shared publicly (or kept private) and permanently deleted.
We aim for full transparency on how we gather, use, and make use of your personal information.

Below is our Privacy Policy, which incorporates and clarifies these principles. Make sure you read it and understand it before agreeing to use our Service.

1. Creative Commons ShareAlike License

We’ve decided to make this Privacy Policy available under a Creative Commons ShareAlike license. We would like to thank Automattic for their valuable contribution to the internet community by helping us create this Privacy Policy. You’re more than welcome to copy it, adapt it, and repurpose it for your own use. Just make sure to revise the language so that your Privacy Policy reflects your actual practices. If you do use it, we’d appreciate a credit and link to Speak Greek to Me somewhere on your site. No warranties are given. This policy may not cover all aspects necessary for your intended use, therefore we cannot be liable for any issues (legal or not) that may arise from your use of it. Use it under your sole responsibility.

2. Who We Are and What We Do

Speak Greek to Me was created to promote and help teach the Greek language and culture via online courses and other means. Our website address is https://www.speakgreektome.com.

3. What Personal Data We Collect and Why We Collect It

We only collect information about you if we have a reason to do so — for example, to provide our Service, to communicate with you, or to make our Service better. We collect this information from three sources: if and when you provide information to us, automatically through using our Service, and from outside sources. Let’s go over the information that we collect.

3.1 Information You Provide to Us

It’s probably no surprise that we collect information that you provide to us directly. Here are some examples:

Basic account information: We ask for basic information from you in order to set up your account. For example, we require individuals who sign up for a SpeakGreekToMe.com account to provide an email address and password, along with a username, your level of Greek, and your first and last name — and that’s it. After creating your account, you may provide us with more information — like the languages you speak, and other information you may want to share — but we don’t require that information to create a SpeakGreekToMe.com account.
Public profile information: If you have an account with us, we collect the information that you provide for your public profile. For example, if you have a SpeakGreekToMe.com account, your username is part of that public profile, along with any other information you put into your public profile, like a photo or an “About” description of yourself. Your public profile information is just that — public — so please keep that in mind when deciding what information you would like to include.
Payment and contact information: When purchasing courses, or creating and managing subscriptions on Speak Greek to Me, payments rely on secure payment tokens or ids. The payment gateway (Stripe) gives this sensitive credit card information directly to the payment processor. No credit card or other payment data is stored in our website’s database with the exception of the last 4 digits, card type, and expiration date so reminders can be triggered when credit cards are expiring on automatically recurring subscriptions. All other meaningful payment data is stored securely at the servers of the payment processor. We do keep, however, a record of the purchases you’ve made. For example, the dates you make purchases or when you cancel/pause/resume your subscriptions with us.
Comments and posts: You might provide us with information about you in draft and published content (comments, status updates, posts on our private social groups and forums, etc.) that might include further personal information about you.

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. Note that while our Service includes a private learning and social platform, blog posts specifically are public, therefore your profile picture and comment content will be publicly visible on the comment section of our blog.
Communications with us: You may also provide us with information when you respond to surveys, communicate with us about a support question, send us feedback, or sign up for a newsletter. When you communicate with us via form, email, comment, or otherwise, we store a copy of our communications. We love hearing from you and are always looking to improve our Service. When you share comments, ideas, or feedback with us, you agree that we’re free to use them without any restriction or compensation to you.

We may contact you, though, to ask you for permission to use any feedback you provide to us for use in our testimonials section of our website or wherever else we see fit in a way that identifies you as the author (from your name, photo, and other information such as your nationality). Such testimonials will be publicly displayed not only on our website but possibly also on third-party websites that advertise our Service. When asked, you have the right to refuse to give your permission to have your feedback used by us, but should you ever give us your consent, your decision is irrevocable even if you change your mind later on. We shall not be liable for any issues that may arise from your decision to give us consent to use your feedback.
Media (videos and images): Be careful of what videos and images you upload to our website. Other users of the website could download and misuse your images. Don’t upload any images with embedded location data (EXIF GPS) included as other users could download and extract location data from such images. You and only you are responsible for the consequences of the media you upload.

3.2 Information We Collect Automatically

We also collect some information automatically:

Log information: Like most online service providers, we collect information that web browsers, mobile devices, and servers typically make available, including the browser type, IP address, unique device identifiers, language preference, referring site, the date and time of access, operating system, and mobile network information. We collect log information when you use our Services — for example when you create or make changes to your account on SpeakGreekToMe.com.
Usage information: We collect information about your usage of our Services. For example, your comments, and your course progress, including completion status, quiz scores, assignments, and/or essay submissions (if any). We also collect information about the actions that site administrators and users perform on a site using our SpeakGreekToMe.com services — in other words, who did what and when (e.g., [SpeakGreekToMe.com username] deleted “[title of post]” at [time/date]). We may also collect information about what happens when you use our Services (e.g., page views) along with information about your device (e.g., screen size, name of cellular network, and mobile device manufacturer). We use this information to, for example, provide our Services to you, get insights on how people use our Services so we can make our Services better, and understand and make predictions about user retention.
Location information: We may determine the approximate location of your device from your IP address. We collect and use this information to, for example, calculate how many people visit our Services from certain geographic regions. We may also unintentionally collect information about your precise location (like when you upload an image with location information) if you allow us to do so through your mobile device operating system’s permissions. We strongly advise you not to upload any images with such sensitive information.
Stored information: We may access information stored on your mobile device. We access this stored information through your device operating system’s permissions. For example, if you give us permission to access the photographs on your mobile device’s camera roll, our Services may access the photos stored on your device when you upload a profile photo.
Speech recognition information: If you use interactive content that contains speech recognition, Google Cloud will process your voice for converting it to text. Please consult Google’s Privacy policy for details. It is our legitimate interest to use Google Cloud, because we need their services for our interactive content and would not be able to provide you with speech recognition features otherwise.
Information from cookies & other technologies: A cookie is a string of information that a website stores on a visitor’s computer, and that the visitor’s browser provides to the website each time the visitor returns. Pixel tags (also called web beacons) are small blocks of code placed on websites and emails. Speak Greek to Me uses cookies and other technologies like pixel tags to help us identify and track visitors, usage, and access preferences for our Services, as well as track and understand email campaign effectiveness. You can instruct your browser to refuse all cookies or to indicate when a cookie is being sent. However, if you do not accept cookies, some features of our website may not function properly. For more information, read our Cookie Policy.

3.3 Information We Collect from Other Sources

We may also get information about you from other sources. For example:

Third-Party Login (should there be an option): If you create or log in to your Speak Greek to Me account through another service (like Facebook) we’ll receive associated login information (e.g., a connection token, your username, your email address)
Social Sharing Services: If you choose to share content from your Speak Greek to Me account to a social media service (like Twitter) through our sharing features, we’ll receive information from that service (e.g., your username, basic profile information) via the authorization procedures for that service.

The information we receive depends on which features you use or authorize on those services and what options are available.

3.4 Children’s Information

Our Service is not intended for anyone under the age of 13 (“Child”, “Children”) in the United States or the legal age of majority where you live. If you are under such age, you may access and use our Service only under the direct supervision of your parent or legal guardian, as long as they agree to this Privacy Policy.

We do not knowingly collect personally identifiable information from Children under such age. If you are a parent or guardian and you are aware that your Child has provided us with Personal Information, please contact us. If we discover that a Child has provided us with Personal Information, we will delete such information from our servers immediately.

3.5 Do Not Track

At this time, Speak Greek to Me does not respond to “do not track” signals across our Service.

4. How and Why We Use Information

4.1 Purposes for Using Information

We use information about you for the purposes listed below:

To provide our Service. For example, to set up and maintain your account, to send password reset emails, to host your media, to save your course progress and other user data, to provide customer service, to process payments and orders, to send payment receipts or reminders, and to verify user information, among others.
To ensure quality, maintain safety, and improve our Service. For example, by monitoring and analyzing how users interact with our Service so we can create new features that we think our users will enjoy and that will help them learn Greek more efficiently or make our Service easier to use.
To market our Service and measure, gauge, and improve the effectiveness of our marketing. For example, by targeting our marketing messages to groups of our users (like those who have a particular plan with us or have been users for a certain length of time), advertising our Service, analyzing the results of our marketing campaigns (like how many people purchased a paid plan after receiving a marketing message), and understanding and forecasting user retention.
To protect our Service, our users, and the public. For example, by detecting security incidents; detecting and protecting against malicious, deceptive, fraudulent, or illegal activity; fighting spam, bullying, harassment, and hate speech; complying with our legal obligations; and protecting the rights and property of Speak Greek to Me and others, which may result in us, for example, declining a transaction, deleting a comment, or even terminating the Service.
To fix problems with our Services. For example, by monitoring, debugging, repairing, and preventing issues.
To customize the user experience. For example, to personalize your experience by serving you relevant notifications and advertisements for our Service, or by recommending to you relevant content for your learning pleasure.
To communicate with you. For example, by emailing you to ask for your feedback, share tips for getting the most out of our products, or keep you up to date on Speak Greek to Me and its content. If you don’t want to hear from us, you can opt out of marketing communications at any time. (If you opt out, we’ll still send you important updates relating to your account.)

4.2 Legal Bases for Collecting and Using Information

A note here for those in the European Union about our legal grounds for processing information about you under EU data protection laws, which is that our use of your information is based on the grounds that: (1) The use is necessary in order to fulfill our commitments to you under the applicable terms of service or other agreements with you or is necessary to administer your account — for example, in order to enable access to our website on your device or charge you for a paid plan; or (2) The use is necessary for compliance with a legal obligation; or (3) The use is necessary in order to protect your vital interests or those of another person; or (4) We have a legitimate interest in using your information — for example, to provide and update our Service; to improve our Service so that we can offer you an even better user experience; to safeguard our Service; to communicate with you; to measure, gauge, and improve the effectiveness of our advertising; and to understand our user retention and attrition; to monitor and prevent any problems with our Service; and to personalize your experience; or (5) You have given us your consent — for example before we place certain cookies on your device and access and analyze them later on, as described in our Cookie Policy.

5. Sharing Information

5.1 How We Share Information

We have a long-standing policy that we do not sell our users’ personal information. We aren’t a data broker, we don’t sell your personal information to data brokers, and we don’t sell your information to other companies that want to spam you with marketing emails. We also don’t show any ads (personalized or not) on our website, because we believe your user experience should be free from unnecessary visual distractions.

Registered users may request to export and view their data at any time by logging in to our website and then navigating to “Export Data” from the menu option “Settings.”

We may share information about you in limited circumstances to provide you with services you have requested when we have your permission, or under the circumstances spelled out below and with appropriate safeguards on your privacy:

Independent contractors: Occasionally, user information might be accessible to independent contractors (e.g. web developers) that we hire to help us provide or improve our Service or process the information on our behalf. We require our independent contractors to keep that information confidential and follow this Privacy Policy for any personal information that we share with them.
Third-party services: We may share information about you with third-party services who need the information in order to provide their services to us, or to provide their services to you. This includes payment providers such as Stripe, which powers our payments and processes your credit and debit card information, fraud prevention services that allow us to analyze fraudulent payment transactions, cloud storage services, web push notification services, email delivery services that help us stay in touch with you, or any customer chat and email support services that help us communicate with you); those that assist us with our marketing efforts (e.g., by providing tools for identifying a specific marketing target group or improving our marketing campaigns); those that help us understand and enhance our Service (like Google Analytics); and those that make tools to help us run our operations (like software that helps us with email and other communications).
Legal and regulatory requirements: We may disclose information about you in response to a subpoena, court order, or other governmental requests.
To protect rights, property, and others: We may disclose information about you when we believe in good faith that disclosure is reasonably necessary to protect the property or rights of Speak Greek to Me, third parties, or the public at large. For example, if we have a good faith belief that there is an imminent danger of death or serious physical injury.
Business transfers: In connection with any merger, sale of company assets, or acquisition of all or a portion of our business by another company, or in the unlikely event that Speak Greek to Me goes out of business or enters bankruptcy, user information would likely be one of the assets that are transferred or acquired by a third party. If any of these events were to happen, this Privacy Policy would continue to apply to your information and the party receiving your information may continue to use your information, but only consistent with this Privacy Policy.
With your consent: We may share and disclose information with your consent or at your direction. For example, we may share information in the form of testimonials that may show up on our website or third-party websites.
Aggregated or de-identified information: We may share information that has been aggregated or de-identified so that it can no longer reasonably be used to identify you. For instance, we may publish aggregate statistics about the use of our Service.

5.2 Information Shared Publicly

Information that you choose to make public is — you guessed it — disclosed publicly. That means information like your profile photo or Gravatar, “About” information, or other content that you make public on our website will be visible to other members. Your Gravatar and public profile information may also display with your comments, “Likes,” and other interactions on our website. Such public information may also be indexed by search engines or used by third parties. Please keep all of this in mind when deciding what you would like to share publicly.

6. How Long We Keep Information

When a user registers on our website, we store the personal information they provided in their user profile indefinitely. All users are able to view, edit, or delete their personal information at any time (except they cannot change their username). Website administrators can also see, edit, and delete that information. Comments, posts, and other information that derives from the user’s interaction with our website are also stored indefinitely.

Registered users may permanently delete their account at any time by logging in to our website and then navigating to “Delete Account” from the menu option “Settings.”

We generally discard information about you when it’s no longer needed for the purposes for which we collect it and use it — as described in the section above on How and Why We Use Information — and we’re not legally required to keep it. For example, web server logs with information such as the visitor’s IP address, browser type, and operating system. We only retain logs for the period of time that is needed in order to, among other things, analyze website traffic and investigate any technical issues that may arise. As another example, information that we discard may be deleted comments, and posts, among others.

7. Security

While no online service is 100% secure, including encryption and security systems, we take precautions to protect information about you against unauthorized access, use, alteration, or destruction and take reasonable measures to do so. We monitor our Service for potential vulnerabilities and attacks. To enhance the security of your account, we encourage you to keep your account information such as your username and password safe.

7.1 How We Protect Your Data

We use various security measures to ensure your personal information is kept safe when you use our Service. We offer a secure server. All payments are processed via Secure Socket Layer (SSL) technology. All sensitive credit card information that you supply is encrypted and sent to our Payment gateway provider (Stripe) and processors. No credit card or other payment data is stored in our website’s database with the exception of the last 4 digits, card type, and expiration date so reminders can be triggered when credit cards are expiring on automatically recurring subscriptions.

8. Use of Links to Other Websites

Our website may contain links to other websites that we do not operate or control. Therefore, we cannot be responsible for or guarantee the accuracy of the information found on any of those linked websites. Such links do not constitute an endorsement by Speak Greek to Me, or any of its employees, of the owners of these sites, products, opinions, or information presented therein. This Privacy Policy applies only to our Service. By using a link to go from our website to another website, you are subject to that website’s Privacy Policy and not ours.

These websites may collect data about you using cookies, additional third-party tracking, and monitoring your interaction with their content, including tracking your interaction with their content if you have an account and are logged in to that website.

8.1 Embedded Content from Other Websites

Pages on this site may include embedded content (e.g. videos, images, articles, etc.). Embedded content from other websites behaves in the exact same way as if the visitor has visited the other website.

9. Choices

You have several choices available when it comes to information about you:

Limit the information that you provide: If you have an account with us, you can choose not to provide optional information such as extra profile information. Please keep in mind that if you do not provide this information, certain features of our Services may not be accessible.
Opt out of marketing communications: You may opt out of receiving promotional communications from us. Just follow the instructions in those communications or let us know. If you opt out of promotional communications, we may still send you other important communications, like those about your account and legal notices.
Set your browser to reject cookies: At this time, Speak Greek to Me does not respond to “do not track” signals across our Service. However, you can usually choose to set your browser to remove or reject browser cookies before using this website, with the drawback that certain features of the Speak Greek to Me website may not function properly without the aid of cookies.
Delete your account: While we’d be very sad to see you go, you can delete your account if you no longer want to use our Service. Simply log in to your account and navigate to “Delete Account” from the menu option “Settings.” Please keep in mind that this action is completely irrecoverable, so all data will be lost. This does not include any data we are obliged to keep for administrative, legal, or security purposes. That means that we may continue to retain information related to you (such as purchase history or invoices) after closing your account when that information is reasonably needed to comply with (or demonstrate our compliance with) legal or financial obligations such as law enforcement requests or tax declarations.

10. Your Rights

If you are located in certain parts of the world, including California and countries that fall under the scope of the European General Data Protection Regulation (aka the “GDPR”), you may have certain rights regarding your personal information, like the right to request access to or deletion of your data.

10.1 European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)

If you are located in a country that falls under the scope of the GDPR, data protection laws give you certain rights with respect to your personal data, subject to any exemptions provided by the law, including the rights to:

Request access to your personal data;
Request correction or deletion of your personal data;
Object to our use and processing of your personal data;
Request that we limit our use and processing of your personal data; and
Request portability of your personal data.

You also have the right to make a complaint to a government supervisory authority.

10.2 California Residents

We are required to provide California residents with some additional information about the categories of personal information we collect and share, where we get that personal information, and how and why we use it. Below we provide a list of the “categories” of personal information we collect, depending on the Services used:

Identifiers (like your name, contact information, and device and online identifiers);
Commercial information (your billing information and purchase history, for example);
Characteristics protected by law (for example, you might provide your gender as part of your profile or a research survey for us);
Internet or other electronic network activity information (such as your usage of our Service);
Geolocation data (such as your location based on your IP address);
Audio, electronic, visual, or similar information (such as your profile picture, if you uploaded one); and
Inferences we make (such as the likelihood of retention or attrition).

You can find more information about what we collect and the sources of that information in the What Personal Data We Collect and Why We Collect It section above. We collect personal information for the business and commercial purposes described in the How and Why We Use Information section. And we share this information with the categories of third parties described in the Sharing Information section.

If you are a California resident, you have additional rights subject to any exemptions provided by the law, including the right to:

Request to know the categories of personal information we collect, the specific pieces of information we collect about you, the purpose for collecting and using that personal information, where the information came from, whether it is being disclosed or sold, and to whom it is being disclosed or sold;
Request, with some exceptions, deletion of personal information we collect or maintain;
Opt out of any sale of personal information; and
Not receive discriminatory treatment for exercising your rights.

10.3 Contacting Us About These Rights

You can usually access, edit, or delete your personal data using your account settings and tools that we offer, but if you aren’t able to or you’d like to contact us about one of the other rights, scroll down to “How to Reach Us” to, well, find out how to reach us. When you contact us about one of your rights under this section, we’ll need to verify that you are the right person before we disclose or delete anything. For example, if you are a user, we will need you to contact us from the email address associated with your account. You can also designate an authorized agent to make a request on your behalf by giving us written authorization. We may still require you to verify your identity with us.

11. How to Reach Us

If you have a question about this Privacy Policy, or you would like to contact us about any of the rights mentioned in the Your Rights section above, please contact us through our contact form.

12. Other Things You Should Know

12.1 Transferring Information

Because our Service is offered worldwide, the information about you that we process when you use the Service in the EU may be used, stored, and/or accessed by individuals operating outside the European Economic Area (EEA) who work for us, or third-party data processors. This is required for the purposes listed in the How and Why We Use Information section above. When providing information about you to entities outside the EEA, we will take appropriate measures to ensure that the recipient protects your personal information adequately in accordance with this Privacy Policy as required by applicable law. These measures include entering into European Commission-approved standard contractual arrangements with entities based in countries outside the EEA. You can ask us for more information about the steps we take to protect your personal information when transferring it from the EU.

12.2 Analytics Services

We have integrated Google Analytics on this website (with the anonymization function) as a third-party data processor. Google Analytics uses tracking technologies (like cookies) to collect information about your use of our Service. These technologies allow the analytics provider to recognize your device to compile information regarding how you (or others who use your device) use our website. This anonymous information allows us to, among other things, analyze and track usage, and determine the popularity of certain content. Rest assured that your privacy is extremely important to us, therefore we use privacy-friendly settings that prohibit Google from using this data. Please note this Privacy Policy only covers the collection of information by Speak Greek to Me and does not cover the collection of information by Google. For more information on Google’s privacy policy, please visit the following page: https://policies.google.com/privacy.

12.3 Intellectual Property Rights

Speak Greek to Me is the sole owner of all content, copyrights, trademarks, patents, innovations, and other intellectual property rights in and on this website. All this content and intellectual property are protected by applicable copyright and trademark law. Their use is strictly forbidden without written consent from Speak Greek to Me. Without such written consent, you are forbidden to:

Redistribute, republish, sell, or rent content from our website, including onto another website.
Exploit content from our website through reproduction, duplication, creative derivation, or other methods for any purpose.

13. Disclaimer and Limitation of Liability

Speak Greek to Me gives no warranties or assurances regarding the accuracy or currency of the content of our website or any sites linked to this site.

All the content and learning materials on this site are provided ‘as is’ without any expressed or implied warranty of any kind, including warranties of non-infringement of intellectual property or fitness for any particular purpose. Under no circumstance shall Speak Greek to me or its employees be liable for any damages whatsoever (including, but not limited to, profit or information loss, business interruption, injury, or death) as the result of the use of or inability to use the materials, even if Speak Greek to Me has been advised of the possibility of such loss or damages.

We are not responsible for any of the opinions or comments posted on https://www.speakgreektome.com.

Testimonials regarding our Service represent the views and opinions of the testimonial source only. Speak Greek to Me does not share such opinions. The testimonials are never intended to make claims that our content and/or services can be used to diagnose, treat, cure, mitigate or prevent any disease. Any such claims, implicit or explicit, in any shape or form, have not been tested or evaluated in a clinical environment.

14. Privacy Policy Changes

Although most changes are likely to be minor, Speak Greek to Me may update its Privacy Policy from time to time in order to reflect, for example, changes to our practices or for other operational, legal, or regulatory reasons. Speak Greek to Me encourages visitors to frequently check this page for any changes to its Privacy Policy. If we make changes, we will notify you by revising the change log below, and, in some cases, we may provide additional notice (like adding a notification banner on our website or sending you a notification through email). Your further use of the Service after a change to our Privacy Policy will be subject to the updated policy.

That’s it! Thank you for reading.

Change Log

January 1, 2022: Creation of this Privacy Policy.