Privacy Policy

FluencyClock is run by one person — Kevin Fan — and is free to use. There is nothing to sign up for and nothing to buy from this site, which removes most of the reasons a website normally collects data.

This page says what is actually stored. It is short because the answer is short.

What this site does not do

• No accounts. There is no sign-up, no password, no login, and FluencyClock does not build an account profile about you.
• No payments reach us. Nothing is sold here. There is a voluntary tip link to Buy Me a Coffee, which is a separate company: they hold the account, take the payment and see the payer's details. No card information ever touches this site, and we are told a name and an amount at most.
• No session recording or social-media pixel. FluencyClock does not run session-replay tools or a Meta pixel. Google AdSense is described separately below.
• No IP addresses are stored in FluencyClock's database. Google and its advertising partners may process an IP address while serving or measuring ads; see below.

What is stored

Outbound clicks. When you click a link to a course or app, the click is recorded before you are redirected. The record holds: which merchant, which page you clicked from, the calculator settings you had entered (language, target level, method, budget band), the referring URL if your browser sent one, a coarse traffic source derived from it, your language setting, a two-letter country code supplied by the CDN, and the time.

It does not hold your IP address. The country code is deliberately as far as this goes — enough to tell whether recommendations work outside the US, not enough to identify anyone.

Why keep this at all: the whole site rests on a claim that its recommendations are matched to your situation rather than to commission rates. Knowing which recommendations people actually act on is how that gets checked.

Your email address, if you give it. The mailing list stores your address, the page you signed up from, your language setting, and the dates you subscribed and unsubscribed. Nothing else. Every email carries a one-click unsubscribe link.

If you unsubscribe, the row is kept with an unsubscribed flag rather than deleted. That is on purpose: a deleted row can be re-added by a later import and you would be mailed again. The flag makes that impossible. If you would rather the record were erased entirely, ask and it will be.

Advertising and Google AdSense

FluencyClock retains Google AdSense ownership verification, but ad serving is currently disabled on this site while consent handling and ad placement are being verified. The ownership meta tag and ads.txt file do not themselves load advertising code.

Third-party vendors, including Google, use cookies to serve ads based on a user's prior visits to this website or other websites when advertising is enabled. Google's advertising cookies enable Google and its partners to serve ads based on visits to this site and/or other sites on the Internet. These third parties may also use IP addresses, browser or device identifiers, web beacons and similar technologies to serve, secure and measure ads. Depending on your location, consent choices and Google settings, those ads may be personalised, non-personalised or limited.

Before enabling advertising for visitors in the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom and Switzerland, we must configure and verify a Google-certified consent platform and the required consent choices, including a way to revisit them. This is a prerequisite, not a claim that a consent banner is already active. You can opt out of personalised advertising through Google's Ads Settings and learn about other vendors' choices at aboutads.info.

Google explains how it handles information from sites that use its services on its Business Data Responsibility page. FluencyClock does not receive the identity, IP address, browser identifier or browsing history that Google and its partners may process for advertising.

Cookies and browser storage

FluencyClock itself uses two preference values, neither for cross-site tracking:

• PARAGLIDE_LOCALE — a cookie remembering whether you are reading in English or Chinese.
• theme — a local-storage entry remembering light or dark mode.

When AdSense is enabled, Google and its advertising partners may also set or read advertising and measurement cookies on Google or DoubleClick domains. The exact names and lifetimes can vary by location, consent choice, browser and advertising vendor. The consent controls must identify the applicable purposes and vendors before advertising is activated. No advertising consent controls are claimed to be active during the current ad-disabled period.

What happens after you click through to a merchant

This is the part worth reading carefully.

Once you click through to a course or app, you are on their site under their rules, and the affiliate networks they use — Impact, Awin, ShareASale and similar — set their own cookies to credit the referral. Those cookies are theirs, not ours, and they typically persist for 30 to 60 days. What they collect is governed by that merchant's and that network's privacy policies, which you should read if it matters to you.

We receive no personal data back from them. What comes back is a commission report: how many referrals converted, and for how much. It contains no names, addresses or payment details.

Affiliate disclosure

Some outbound links on this site earn a commission if you buy something. Others — Anki and Language Reactor among them — earn nothing and are recommended anyway. The calculator itself contains no affiliate links at all.

Recommendations are produced by matching rules written before the merchant list existed, and the code that ranks them cannot read commission rates. That is enforced by a test, not by good intentions. How this site is built and paid for sets it out in full.

Sharing

The click and mailing-list records described above are not sold, rented or shared for marketing. The service providers that host the site and send the newsletter process only what they need to provide those services. Google and its advertising partners process advertising data as described in the AdSense section; FluencyClock does not sell that data or receive it in identifiable form.

Data may be disclosed if required by law.

Your rights

Depending on where you live, you may have the right to see what is held about you, correct it, or have it deleted. Given the above, in practice that means your email address, so:

• Unsubscribing takes one click from any email.
• Deletion — ask, and the record goes.

Click records are not linked to any identity, so there is nothing in them to look up by name.

Changes

If this changes, the date at the top changes with it.

Contact

Questions about this policy, or a request to see or delete what is held about you: kevin.fan@large.net.

This is one person's inbox rather than a department, so a reply may take a few days. A deletion request is acted on when it arrives, whether or not it gets a reply first. The same address is on the about page.