Exactly what leaves your device

You can use all of HearMandarin without an account and without telling us who you are. The only moments anything leaves your device are these: you press the speech check, a page is counted anonymously, or you buy Pro. Each one is explained below.

The data controller is Shanghai Zehengce Enterprise Management Consulting Co., Ltd. (seller name Aipule, 爱普乐), registered in Shanghai, China. For anything in this policy, write to support@hearmandarin.com. A real person reads it.

• What: your placement result, review history, streak pebbles, word progress, and display choices.
• Where: in your browser's own storage, on this device. It lives there the way notes live in a notebook; it is not uploaded anywhere.
• Who touches it: only your browser. The site saves and reads it locally.
• Why: so your learning is still here when you come back.
• How long: until you clear your browser data, or forever on a device you keep using. A new device starts fresh. On the settings page you can save a backup file any time, load one back, or erase everything.

Page views are counted by Cloudflare Web Analytics. It sets no cookies and collects no personal identifiers, so the counts cannot be tied back to you.

On top of that, the site counts a fixed, short list of moments: learning milestones, such as finishing a practice game or completing the placement, and steps on the way to Pro, such as opening the Pro page, pressing a buy button or unlocking a key, plus making a share link. These counters run on our own collection point at Cloudflare. It accepts no names, no emails, no free text, and sets no cookies: only the milestone name, the day, the page, and a few numbers or short labels such as the band or the score. When a page hits a script error or a sound fails to play, the same point counts it with a short code in place of the error message. We read the totals to see which parts of the site actually get used and what breaks, never individual visitors.

• What: one short recording of your voice, made on the survival scene pages. Nothing is recorded until you press record yourself, and recordings stay on your device for playback.
• Where: only when you press the check button, and only after a heads-up you confirm, that single clip goes to our transcription service, which runs on Cloudflare using OpenAI's Whisper speech model.
• Who touches it: the transcription service, which returns only the written text of what you said. The audio is discarded right after; it is not stored, and nobody listens to it. The comparison with the model sentence then happens on your device.
• Why: to tell you whether the machine heard your line as the target sentence. It is a transcription match, not a pronunciation score.
• How long: nothing is kept. The text comes back, the clip is gone.

• What: email, name and billing details required by the payment provider. Your card number goes to them, never to us.
• Where: to Creem, who acts as the seller of record and processes the payment.
• Who touches it: Creem runs the checkout. We receive your order number, order details, and email, which is the minimum needed to deliver your key and help you if something goes wrong.
• Why: to take payment, deliver your purchase, answer support questions, and honor refunds.
• How long: we keep order records as long as needed for delivery, support, refunds, and accounting. Write to us if you want a record deleted.
• Your devices: to keep one key to 3 devices, each browser you activate is stored as an opaque id, the short label it reports (like Mac Chrome), a country code, a coarse browser family and when it was last seen. No precise location, no fingerprinting library. You can see and remove these on the Pro management page.
• Security records: unusual patterns around a key or an order (many failed attempts, one key used from many places at once, a key recovery) are written to a security log that holds only hashed identifiers, and to our own analytics store for the same purpose. Both stay with the order records.
• The slang deck: bought on its own, it follows every line above; only the product name on the receipt differs.

The site is hosted and run on Cloudflare. That covers delivering the pages and audio, the small services that check licenses and handle refunds, the order and license records, and the downloadable Pro packs. Cloudflare keeps brief, automatic server logs (your address, the time, and what was requested) to keep the site fast and block abuse; these rotate out on their own and we do not mine them.

HearMandarin is built for adult self-learners and is not directed at children. We do not knowingly collect anything from a child; if you believe a child has sent us something, write to us and we will delete it.

Your learning data never leaves your device, so you are in charge of it directly: on the settings page you can export it as a backup file or erase it completely.

For anything we hold about you, like an order record, you can ask to see it, correct it, or have it deleted: write to support@hearmandarin.com and we will sort it out.