Privacy Policy

The short version

• An account is free, and it's what keeps your learning safe. It takes an email address and a password - nothing else. Without one you can still use the site, but your progress lives only in the browser you're using, and clearing your data or switching device loses it.
• We confirm your email before anything is stored under your name. Until you click the link we send, nothing syncs to our servers and no profile can be created - your learning simply stays in your browser, exactly as it does for signed-out visitors.
• Your progress stays with you. Lesson progress and quiz stats are saved in your browser on your device. Once your email is confirmed, they also sync to your account so you can pick up on any device.
• Profiles are optional and are not public. If you set one up, only other signed-in learners can see it. Profiles and posts are excluded from search engines.
• One thing is public: a dedication, if you choose to leave one. Supporters can dedicate a page to someone in a single line. We read it first, you pick the name shown or stay anonymous, and you can remove it whenever you like.
• We measure traffic, not people. We use Google Analytics to see which pages are popular and how visitors find us.
• A few sponsor slots, no ad network. Some pages carry a small hand-picked sponsor strip. Nothing about you is used to choose what appears, and it never sits beside a lesson or a quiz.
• We don't sell your data. Ever.

Who we are

Learn Punjabi ("we", "us", "the site") is a free educational website and Android app at learnpunjabi.net, teaching the Punjabi language and Gurmukhi script for the global diaspora. The Android app is the same website presented as an installable app, so this policy covers both.

Information stored on your device

When you learn on the site, we save small amounts of data locally in your browser (using localStorage) so your experience carries over between visits. This includes:

• Which lessons you've marked complete and your overall course progress.
• Quiz statistics, streaks, and which words you find hardest (so the flashcards can focus on them).

If you haven't signed in - or if you have but haven't yet confirmed your email address - this information never leaves your device and is not sent to us or anyone else. You can erase it at any time by clearing your browser's site data for learnpunjabi.net, or by using your device's "clear data" option for the app. Doing so simply resets your progress.

It's worth being clear about what that means in practice, because it cuts both ways. Nothing about your learning is on our servers unless you've asked for it - but it is also tied to this browser on this device. Clearing your site data, using private browsing, or picking up a different phone starts you from scratch. That is the only real reason to make an account, and it's why you'll occasionally see us mention one after you've built up a streak or a list of saved words.

Your account

An account is free and takes an email address and a password of your choosing. It is what makes your progress yours: synced to you rather than stranded in one browser, and available on any device you sign in on. It is also what unlocks the parts of the site that store something for you - a profile, posting, and suggesting corrections. You are not obliged to have one, and the lessons, quizzes and stories work signed out; what you give up is the safety net, as described above. We store that password only as a salted cryptographic hash - a one-way scrambling that means we cannot see or recover it, which is why a forgotten password is reset through a one-time link we email you rather than by us "looking it up".

Confirming your email comes first. When you sign up we email you a one-time link. Until you click it, your account exists but nothing is stored under it: progress does not sync, no profile can be created, nothing can be posted, and a patron badge cannot attach. You can keep learning throughout - your work simply stays in your browser, exactly as it does for a signed-out visitor. We do it this way for your benefit as much as ours. It means an account is always reachable by the person who owns it, a mistyped address can never quietly accumulate somebody's learning history, and nobody can put words on the site behind an address that isn't theirs.

Once your email is confirmed, here is everything we hold:

• Your email address - so we know which progress is yours and can send you confirmation and password-reset links.
• A salted hash of your password - never the password itself, which is never stored in plain text and cannot be recovered by us or anyone else.
• Your learning progress - lesson completions, quiz stats, your streak, your saved words and their review schedule, so they sync across your devices.
• Anything you add to a profile - all optional, and described in the next section.
• The dates you signed up and last signed in - ordinary account housekeeping.

If you've ever supported the site with a donation, your account also carries a patron badge - a small thank-you, nothing more. The badge attaches only once your email address is confirmed, so nobody can claim a donor's badge just by typing in their email. It is recognition, not access - it never unlocks anything a learner who hasn't donated can't have. For donations we keep the donation record itself (your email, the amount, and the Stripe session reference) as our financial trail, and that record is retained even if you later delete your account.

You can delete your account at any time on your account page. We ask for your password first, so that nobody who borrows your unlocked device can do it for you. Deleting removes your email address, synced progress, profile, picture and posts from our servers, and it reaches into everything else you have sent us: suggested edits still in our queue, dedications not yet published, and any voice recording you submitted - including the audio itself. It also signs out every other browser still holding your account. Whatever is saved in your browser stays on your device, as before.

Two things deliberately outlive the account, and neither names you afterwards. A correction of ours that you suggested and we have already published is part of the page now, so the text stays and your name and email come off it. A dedication already published on a story page also stays - it is usually written for somebody else, and quietly deleting a memorial because its author closed an account is not what anyone is asking for - but the account behind it is erased, and you can always email privacy@learnpunjabi.net to have the line taken down as well.

Your profile and your posts (also optional)

Signed-in learners with a confirmed email can set up a profile. Everything on it is optional except a handle - the short name that gives your profile its address - and you can leave the rest blank forever without losing anything. If you fill it in, you may give us:

• A handle and display name, and a profile picture if you upload one. Pictures are resized to 256 × 256 pixels in your own browser before being sent, so the original photo never leaves your device - only the small square copy does.
• A short bio, and a country and city if you choose to say where you are.
• Your connection to Punjabi, what you're aiming for, and roughly where you're starting - so we can understand who the site is actually reaching, and eventually tailor what we build.
• An age range, if you give one. This is never shown to anyone else. It exists so we know the shape of our audience and can keep the site appropriate for it.
• Anything you post on your own wall - plain text, written by you, stored as you wrote it.

None of this is public. Profiles and posts can only be seen by people signed in to Learn Punjabi with a confirmed email address. They are not visible to the open web, they carry a noindex instruction, and they are excluded in our robots.txt - so they don't appear in Google or any other search engine. You can also untick "let other signed-in learners see my profile" to hide it from everyone while keeping what you've written, delete any individual post at any time, or remove your picture on its own.

Two things are never shown to other learners, whatever your settings: your email address and your age range. Please treat your wall as you would any online space - don't post anything you wouldn't want another learner to read. If you ever see something on the site that shouldn't be there, email privacy@learnpunjabi.net and we'll deal with it.

Dedications

There is one thing you can write that is public, and because it is the exception we want to be plain about it. If you've supported the site, you can dedicate a story or culture page to someone - a single line, shown on that page and gathered on our dedications page.

• It is public. Anyone can read it, signed in or not. Please don't include anything you wouldn't want a stranger to see - a first name and a place is plenty, and a full address or a living person's private details is not.
• You choose the name shown, or leave it blank and stay anonymous. Your email address is never shown.
• A person reads it before it appears. Nothing you write is published automatically, and we may tidy the wording. If we can't publish something, we'll say so rather than silently drop it.
• You can take it down whenever you like, from the patron area, with no explanation needed. Many dedications are memorials, and we understand that what felt right one month may not the next.
• Under-16 accounts can't add one, for the same reason posting is switched off - see below. Everything else in the patron area still works.

Dedications are the only thing on this site written by a visitor that we show publicly. Profiles, posts and suggested corrections all stay behind a sign-in, as described above.

Information collected automatically (analytics)

We use Google Analytics to understand how the site is used - for example, which lessons are most popular and whether visitors arrive from a search engine. To do this, Google Analytics collects standard, largely anonymous technical information through cookies and similar technologies, including:

• Pages you visit, how long you stay, and links you click.
• Approximate location (typically country or city level), derived from your IP address.
• Device, browser, operating system, and screen size.
• How you reached the site (e.g. a Google search, a direct link, or social media).

This data is aggregated and used only to improve the site. We do not use it to identify you personally, and we do not combine it with any other information. Google processes this data under its own privacy policy. You can learn how Google uses data from sites that use its services here.

Sponsor slots

Some pages carry a small number of sponsor slots — a name, an icon and a line of text, in a column beside the page on a wide screen or a strip along the bottom on a phone. They are worth being precise about, because "ads" usually means something much worse than this:

• There is no ad network. The slots come from a single small file we edit by hand. No third-party advertising script runs on this site.
• Nothing about you is used to choose them. Every visitor sees the same slots in the same order. There is no targeting, no profiling, no auction, and no bidding on your attention.
• No tracking pixels, and no cookies from them. Sponsors cannot see who you are, what you have learned, or that you visited at all — unless you choose to click through to them, which is an ordinary link to another website.
• They never appear beside your learning. No slot is shown on a lesson, the quiz, the games, your review deck, or any account, profile or policy page.

If you click a sponsor link you leave our site, and whatever happens next is covered by that company's own privacy policy — the same as any other outbound link.

Third-party services

A few external services help the site run. Each has its own privacy policy:

• Google Analytics - website traffic measurement (described above).
• Google Fonts - the site loads fonts from Google's servers, which may receive your IP address as part of serving those fonts.
• Google Play - if you install the Android app, your use of it is also subject to Google Play's terms and privacy policy.
• Our hosting provider - like all websites, our host processes basic server request logs (such as IP addresses) to deliver pages and keep the service secure.

Cookies

The site itself does not use cookies to track you. If you sign in, we set one first-party session cookie so you stay signed in between visits - it's purely functional and does no tracking. Beyond that, the only cookies set are those used by Google Analytics to measure traffic, as described above. You can block or delete cookies in your browser settings at any time; the site will continue to work normally (you'll simply be signed out).

Children's privacy

Learn Punjabi is a family-friendly educational resource that people of all ages use to learn Punjabi, and the learning itself is open to everyone. We never require anyone - child or adult - to hand over personal details in order to learn: the lessons, quizzes and stories need no account. The parts that do need one are the parts that store something for you, and they are described above.

The social side is different, and we've drawn a deliberate line there. If an account tells us it belongs to someone under 16, that account keeps every learning feature, but its profile stays private, posting is switched off, and it cannot add a public dedication. Lessons, quizzes, streaks, saved words and progress sync all continue to work normally. We'd rather narrow what a young learner can broadcast than moderate our way out of it afterwards.

We do not knowingly collect personal information from children beyond this. If you believe a child has provided us with personal information, email privacy@learnpunjabi.net and we will remove it.

Your rights and choices

We don't build a profile of you for advertising. If you never sign in, nothing is stored under your name on our servers - only the analytics and server-log data described above, which we don't use to identify you. If you do have an account, we hold your email address, a salted hash of your password, your learning progress, and whatever you have chosen to put on a profile. Depending on where you live (for example under the UK/EU GDPR or California's CCPA), you may have rights to access, correct, or delete personal data, and to opt out of analytics:

• Opt out of Google Analytics across all sites with Google's official browser opt-out add-on.
• Correct anything on your profile whenever you like on your profile page, including removing your picture or clearing a field back to blank.
• Hide your profile from other learners with a single tickbox, without deleting what you've written.
• Delete individual posts from your wall at any time.
• Delete your account at any time on your account page, which removes your email, synced progress, profile, picture, posts and anything you have sent us from our servers.
• Clear your on-device data at any time through your browser or app settings.
• Use browser privacy controls such as "Do Not Track" or blocking third-party cookies.

To make any request or ask a question about your data, email us at privacy@learnpunjabi.net.

Data security and retention

We keep our attack surface small by design. Passwords are never stored in plain text - only as salted cryptographic hashes that cannot be reversed. One-time email links exist solely for confirming your address and resetting a forgotten password; only a hash of each link is stored, they expire within an hour, and they work exactly once. Sign-in attempts are rate limited per account and per network, so a password cannot be guessed at speed. Our account database holds email addresses, password hashes, learning progress and optional profile details - and nothing else - so there is still very little sensitive data to protect.

Account data, including your profile, your posts and anything you have contributed, is kept until you delete your account, at which point it is removed. Donation records are the one exception and are kept as our financial trail; the two published contributions described above stay on the page, with nothing identifying you attached to them. Analytics data is retained by Google according to the retention settings on our account and Google's own policies. Data stored on your device stays there until you choose to clear it.

International visitors

Learn Punjabi serves a global audience, including the Punjabi diaspora in the United Kingdom, Canada, the United States, India, and beyond. By using the site, you understand that analytics and hosting providers may process technical data in countries other than your own, under the safeguards described in their respective privacy policies.

Changes to this policy

If our practices change we will update this page and revise the "last updated" date above, as we did when optional accounts arrived in August 2026, when optional profiles followed later that month, and when the sponsor slots described above were added, and again when this page was rewritten for clarity. Significant changes will be made clear on the site.

Contact us

Questions about this policy or your privacy? Email privacy@learnpunjabi.net and we'll be glad to help.