Privacy Policy

Last updated: 8 September 2026

Who is responsible for your data

The data controller is Victoria Borovskikh, trading as Sound Russian Academy, reachable at Vicky.boro.rus@gmail.com.

What we collect

• Account data — your email address and name. Your password is never stored in readable form; only a one-way hash of it is kept.
• Learning data — which lessons you opened and completed, your exercise answers, quiz results, the words you saved to your vocabulary, and your writing assignments.
• Messages you send — text and voice messages to your teacher, and comments you leave under lessons.
• Waitlist and contact requests — the name and email you type into those forms.
• Reviews you send us — the name, country, text and optional photo you submit through the review form on our reviews page.
• Your consent record — when you tick a consent box we store the moment you ticked it and the version of these documents you agreed to. We keep this so we can show, if asked, that the consent was actually given. We do not store your IP address with it.
• Visit statistics — which pages were opened, which buttons were clicked, the device type, the browser language and the site you arrived from. This is counted by us on our own server, never by an advertising or analytics company. It carries a random visit identifier, not your IP address; it is tied to you only if you are signed in or you type your email into a form yourself.
• Server logs — your IP address and browser user-agent, recorded by the web server for security and troubleshooting.

Our legal grounds for using it

• Performing our contract with you — running your account, giving access to the course you bought, saving your progress, grading your work, and sending you the email that belongs to a purchase (receipt, access details, password resets).
• Your consent— marketing email if you joined the waitlist, and publishing your name, country and photo if you sent us a review. You can withdraw either at any time (see “Your rights”), and withdrawing does not affect anything done before.
• Our legitimate interests— keeping the service secure, preventing abuse of the forms, troubleshooting faults, and counting our own visit statistics so we can see which parts of the site are useful. You can switch the counting off with your browser’s Do Not Track or Global Privacy Control setting.
• Legal obligation — keeping records of purchases for as long as tax and accounting rules require.

We do not ask for, and the site does not store, your payment card details — see “Payments” below.

Why we use it

• To give you access to the courses you enrolled in, and to save your progress.
• To let your teacher read, grade and reply to your work.
• To send you account email: access details, password resets, purchase receipts.
• To keep the service secure and to fix faults.
• To see which pages and lessons people actually use, and improve the ones they do not.

What other students can see

Comments you leave under a lesson are visible to other students taking that course, and they are shown with the name in your profile. Your progress, your exercise answers, your writing assignments and your messages to the teacher are not shown to other students. A review is published only if you ticked the box asking us to publish it, and only after we have checked it.

Where your data lives

The site runs on our own server in the European Union, and the database is self-hosted on that same server. Your learning data is not sold, rented or shared with advertisers. We do not run advertising or behavioural-tracking scripts.

Fonts, images and scripts are served from this same server. Opening a page here does not make your browser contact Google, a font service or a content-delivery network, so no third party learns your IP address just because you read the site.

Who else processes it

• PayPal— processes payments. Your card details go to PayPal directly and never reach our server; we only receive confirmation that an order was paid. See PayPal’s own privacy statement.
• Resend — delivers our account email. It receives your email address and the content of the message being sent to you.
• A machine-translation provider — if you use the vocabulary translation feature, the single word or phrase you tapped is sent for translation. Your identity is not sent with it.

Cookies and what we keep in your browser

We do not use advertising or third-party tracking cookies, and nothing here follows you to other websites. Our own visit statistics are counted on our own server — no Google Analytics, no advertising pixels, no data sent to anyone else. We do not record your IP address, and if your browser sends a Do Not Track or Global Privacy Control signal we count nothing at all. That is why this site does not ask you to accept cookies: there is nothing to accept beyond what the site needs to work.

• Session cookie — keeps you signed in so you do not re-enter your password on every page. Clearing it signs you out.
• Interface language — remembers whether you chose English or Russian.
• Local storage — if you try a free demo lesson without an account, your answers are kept in your own browser so you can pick up where you left off. It never reaches our server, and clearing your browser data removes it.
• A visit identifier — a random string kept in your browser so that several pages opened one after another are counted as one visit rather than several strangers. It is not a name, it is not linked to you unless you sign in or type your email into a form yourself, and clearing your browser data removes it.

How long we keep it

Account and learning data are kept for as long as your account exists, because your courses are sold with lifetime access. Server logs are rotated and discarded within weeks. If you ask us to delete your account, we remove your personal data except for what we must keep as a record of a purchase.

Your rights

Write to Vicky.boro.rus@gmail.com from the address your account uses, and we will action any of the following. We answer within one month.

• See your data — ask for a copy of everything we hold about you.
• Correct it — anything wrong in your name, email or profile.
• Delete it — ask us to close your account and remove your personal data. We keep only what a record of a purchase legally requires.
• Take it with you — ask for your data in a machine-readable file.
• Withdraw consent — unsubscribe from our email using the link in any message, or ask us to take your published review down. Neither affects access to a course you have paid for.
• Object or restrict — ask us to stop or pause a particular use of your data.

If you are in the EU or UK you also have the right to complain to your national data-protection authority.

Children

The courses are sold to adults. We do not knowingly create accounts for children under 16 without a parent or guardian.

Changes

If this policy changes materially we will update the date at the top of this page and, where the change affects you, tell you by email.