Privacy policy

1. Who is responsible?

The website easyswissgerman.ch (“Easy Swiss German”) is published by Kevin Bourgeois and Christopher Frick, in a personal capacity (the “publishers”). They are responsible for the data processing described here.

For any question about data protection: info@easyswissgerman.ch.

This policy is written in accordance with the Swiss Federal Act on Data Protection (FADP) and, where it applies, the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

2. In short

• No tracking cookies, no advertising, no cookie banner: we don’t need one.
• Our audience measurement cannot identify visitors. On lesson pages, we also measure, without cookies, how the flashcards and transcript are used (section 3.2).
• No third-party content loads without your say-so: videos (home page and lessons) load from YouTube only if you click play, and TikTok, Instagram, Spotify and Discord are plain links.
• The contact form doesn’t transmit anything by itself: it opens your mail app.
• Filmed people sign a single authorisation, which also covers the reuse of their recordings for AI and apps; their names never appear (section 4).

3. What we process, why, and on what basis

3.1 Hosting and technical logs

The site is hosted by Vercel Inc. (United States). Each time you visit, the host technically processes your IP address, the date and time, the requested page and information about your browser, in order to deliver the site and keep it secure. Basis: our legitimate interest in providing a safe and working website. The host keeps these logs for a limited period.

Vercel is certified under the EU-U.S. Data Privacy Framework and the Swiss-U.S. Data Privacy Framework, and relies on standard contractual clauses where necessary.

3.2 Audience measurement

We measure traffic with Vercel Web Analytics. This tool uses no cookies and stores no information that could identify you or follow you from one site to another: visits are told apart by a temporary (hashed) code computed from technical request data, valid for 24 hours and then erased. We only see aggregated statistics (page views, country, device type, referrer). Basis: our legitimate interest in understanding how the site is used in order to improve it.

On lesson pages only, we also measure how the flashcards and the transcript are used, to find out whether this format really helps people learn: lesson opened, card flipped, card rated “I knew it” or “again”, deck finished, audio played, transcript opened, coming back to a lesson on another day. Each event records the lesson, the page language and, where relevant, the deck and the practice direction. For this we use OpenPanel, without cookies or identifiers, hosted in Switzerland by Let’s Link on behalf of Easy Swiss German (Let’s Link is the company of Christopher Frick, one of the publishers). Events go through our own site first, which forwards them with your IP address and browser type: OpenPanel uses these to work out the country and to tell visits apart with a hashed code that changes every day. The OpenPanel server is protected by Cloudflare Inc. (United States), through which the requests pass. The data is kept for 12 months. Basis: our legitimate interest in knowing whether the lessons are useful, to decide whether to develop them.

3.3 Language cookie

If you choose a language with the site’s language switcher (FR, EN, DE, IT), a cookie named lang remembers this choice for one year so the site opens in the language you want. It contains no personal identifier and is not used for anything else. It is never set automatically: without a choice on your part, the site simply reads the language your browser announces, without storing it. You can delete this cookie at any time in your browser settings.

3.4 Contact by email

The contact form sends no data to our servers: it opens your mail application with a pre-filled message that you are free to edit or not to send. If you write to us, we receive your email address, your name if you give it, and the content of your message, which we use only to reply to you. Basis: your request, and our legitimate interest in replying. Retention: at most 12 months after the last exchange, unless the law requires us to keep it longer. Your messages pass through the servers of your email provider and ours.

3.5 Links to social networks

The site contains links to our YouTube (Google), TikTok, Instagram (Meta) and Spotify (our podcast) accounts, and to our Discord server. These links load no content from those services until you click them. After the click, you leave our site and the privacy policy of the relevant service applies.

3.6 Videos (YouTube)

The home page and the lesson pages show videos hosted on YouTube (Google). Until you click play, you only see an image hosted by us and no data is sent to Google. When you click, the player loads from youtube-nocookie.com: Google then receives, among other things, your IP address, information about your browser and the page you are on, and may set cookies or similar data during playback. Google is responsible for this processing, under its own privacy policy (policies.google.com/privacy); it may take place in the United States, under the Data Privacy Framework to which Google is certified. Basis: your click, which expresses your choice to watch the video. You can also watch our videos directly on YouTube instead.

3.7 Fonts and resources

The site’s fonts, images and lesson audio clips are hosted with the site itself: no external font service or library is called from your browser.

3.8 Lesson progress

On lesson pages, the cards you already know and the date of your last visit are saved in your browser’s local storage (localStorage), so you can pick up where you left off. This data stays on your device and is never sent to us; only the fact that a visit is a return visit is counted, without any identifier (section 3.2). You can erase it with the “Restart this deck” button or by clearing the site’s data in your browser.

4. People filmed for our videos

People we film sign a recording and publication authorisation (image and voice rights) on a DocuSeal instance that we operate (sign.letslink.ch). The information processed in this context — surname, first name, signature, date, ticked boxes and technical signature data (IP address, browser, timestamp) — is used only to prove consent. It is kept for as long as the relevant videos are published, then for at most ten years to establish or defend legal claims, and is shared with no one else, unless required by law.

Reuse of the recordings. The authorisation, signed once for all shoots, also covers the use of the recordings (image, voice, words and transcripts) by us and by our partners to train and evaluate artificial intelligence and language models, and to develop language-learning applications. Our partners are bound to us by a written agreement requiring them to respect the authorisation, to protect the recordings and to use them only for these purposes; they may be located outside Switzerland and the European Union, with appropriate contractual safeguards. We do not use the recordings to imitate a person’s voice or image, nor to identify them, and we do not publish the raw recordings as an open dataset. The names of filmed people never appear in our videos. The authorisation can be withdrawn at any time for the future: within 30 days, we then blur the person’s face in published videos, or take them down if the person remains recognisable, and have our partners delete their recordings; a model that has already been trained generally cannot “unlearn”. The details are set out in the authorisation itself.

5. Disclosure to third parties and abroad

We neither sell nor rent the personal data of our visitors. It is accessible only to us and to the technical providers needed to run the site (host, email provider, lesson measurement tool and Cloudflare). Some are located outside Switzerland and the European Union, notably in the United States (see sections 3.1 and 3.2). Recordings of filmed people are shared with partners only in the case described in section 4.

6. Your rights

Depending on the applicable law, you may request access to your data, its rectification or erasure, restriction of its processing, object to a processing, ask for it in a commonly used format, and withdraw a consent at any time (without affecting what happened before the withdrawal).

Write to us at info@easyswissgerman.ch. We reply within 30 days and may ask for proof of identity to make sure it is really you.

You may also lodge a complaint with the Swiss Federal Data Protection and Information Commissioner (FDPIC, www.edoeb.admin.ch) or, in the European Union, with the data protection authority of your place of residence.

7. Security

The site is served over HTTPS. We limit the data collected to what is strictly necessary, which also reduces risk. No transmission over the Internet is, however, 100% secure.

8. Changes

We may update this policy, for example if we add a service. The version in force is always the one on this page, with its update date.