Privacy Policy

PaiThai is a Thai-language learning app made by Griffin Budreau, sole proprietor. This policy explains what data PaiThai collects, why, where it goes, and the controls you have. We’ve written it in plain language on purpose — if anything is unclear, email us and we’ll explain it like a human.

The short version

• We collect the minimum needed to run a learning app: your account email, your learning progress, and anonymous-style usage analytics that we run ourselves.
• We don’t sell your data. We don’t show ads. We don’t use third-party advertising or tracking SDKs. We don’t collect your location.
• Your card details never touch our servers — payments happen entirely inside Apple, Google, or Stripe’s own systems.
• Speech recordings and writing-practice answers are sent to AI services (Microsoft, Anthropic) to be scored, and we don’t keep the recordings or answers afterwards — only a count of how many checks you’ve used.
• Guest mode keeps everything on your device. No account, nothing on our servers.
• You can delete your account and every piece of data attached to it, yourself, in the app, at any time: Profile → Delete account.

What we collect and why

Account data — if you create an account: your email address and password (handled by our authentication provider, Supabase — we never see your password itself), or your Google/Apple sign-in identifier if you use social sign-in. Used to sign you in, sync your progress across devices, and send account emails (confirmation, password reset). If you use guest mode, none of this exists — your progress lives only on your device.

Profile choices — display name, daily goal, audio speed, romanization preference, voice preference, and an optional gender selection. The gender selection exists for exactly one reason: Thai politeness particles (ครับ/ค่ะ) differ by speaker, and the app teaches you the right ones. You can choose “prefer not to say” or change it at any time. It is never used for advertising, profiling, or anything else.

Learning data— which lessons you’ve completed, XP, streaks, and your vocabulary review schedule. This is the product: it’s how your progress follows you between your phone and the web app. Your display name and weekly XP appear on the in-app leaderboard, visible to other learners; pick any display name you like.

Speech recordings (pronunciation practice) — when you use a speaking exercise, your short audio recording is sent through our server to Microsoft Azure AI Speech, which transcribes it and scores your pronunciation. PaiThai does not store your recording — after scoring, we keep only a usage count (which day, how many checks) to enforce fair-use limits. Microsoft processes the audio as our service provider.

Writing-practice answers (free-response grading) — in advanced lessons, you can write open answers in Thai. Your answer, together with the exercise prompt and grading rubric, is sent through our server to Anthropic (the maker of the Claude AI models), which grades it and returns feedback. PaiThai does not store your answer— we keep only a usage count (which exercise, which day). Anthropic processes the text as our service provider; under Anthropic’s commercial API terms, API inputs are not used to train their models.

Usage analytics— the app records first-party events (things like “lesson started”, “exercise answered”) into our own database so we can see where learners get stuck and improve the course. This is our own analytics, not a third-party tracker: no advertising identifiers, no cross-app tracking, no data sharing. Raw event rows are automatically deleted after 180 days; only aggregate statistics (daily counts) are kept longer.

Crash and error reports — if the app crashes, a technical report (stack trace, device model, OS version) is sent to Sentryso we can fix the bug. Crash reports are about the app’s failure, not your learning content.

Support messages and feedback — if you use the in-app contact form or flag a piece of content, we store your message along with basic device/app-version context so we can actually help.

Beta program applications — if you apply to be a tester on our website, we store the email address you submit, and use it only to send your invite.

Payments — what we never see

Subscriptions are processed by the Apple App Store, Google Play, or Stripe (for web purchases), coordinated by RevenueCat. Your card number, billing address, and bank details are entered only into those companies’ own payment screens. They never reach PaiThai’s app, servers, or database. The only thing we store is the entitlement fact: whether your account has premium access and until when. We never store transaction amounts, invoices, or receipts per user.

Who your data is shared with (our service providers)

We share data only with the services that make the app work, only for the purpose described, and never for their advertising:

We do not sell personal data, and we do not share it with data brokers or advertisers. If PaiThai is ever acquired or merges, user data would transfer as part of that business under this policy’s protections, and we’d notify you.

Where your data lives

Our servers and providers are hosted primarily in the United States. Wherever you use PaiThai from, your data is processed on those servers. We rely on our providers’ standard contractual safeguards for international transfers.

How long we keep things

Your rights and controls

• Delete everything, yourself: Profile → Delete account. This permanently deletes your account and every row of data attached to it (progress, analytics, support messages — everything). It is immediate and irreversible. No account? Guest-mode data lives only on your device — uninstalling the app removes it.
• Export your data:email us and we’ll send you a copy of the data we hold about you.
• Correct or change: display name, gender selection, and preferences are editable in the app at any time.
• Use the app with no account at all: guest mode.

If you’re in a jurisdiction with formal data-protection rights (the EU/UK GDPR, Thailand’s PDPA, California’s CCPA, and similar), the rights above are how we honor access, deletion, portability, and correction requests — and you can also email us to exercise them. We don’t discriminate against anyone for exercising their rights, and we don’t sell data, so there’s nothing to opt out of selling.

Cookies and local storage

The web app uses local storage for one essential purpose: keeping you signed in and keeping your settings. Beyond that, PaiThai sets exactly two first-party cookies, both functional:

• pai_authed — a yes/no “someone is signed in” flag shared between paithai.app and app.paithai.app, so the website header can greet you instead of showing “Log in”. It contains no identity, no token, and nothing readable about you — literally the value 1.
• pai_via — if you arrive through a partner’s referral link, this remembers the referral code (up to 60 days) so the partner gets credit if you sign up. First-touch only; it contains just the code from the link you clicked.

There are no advertising or third-party analytics cookies on paithai.app or app.paithai.app — and that’s why you won’t see a cookie-consent banner: both cookies above are functional, we run no trackers, and there’s nothing to opt out of. If that ever changes, this policy changes first.

Children

PaiThai accounts require you to be at least 13 years old. We don’t knowingly collect data from children under 13; if we learn we have, we’ll delete it.

Security

Data is encrypted in transit (TLS everywhere). Database access is enforced with row-level security (each user can read only their own rows). Payment credentials never enter our systems at all. API keys for the AI services live server-side only and are never shipped inside the app. No system is perfectly secure, but the design principle throughout is that the most sensitive data (cards, recordings, answers) is either never stored or never received.

Changes to this policy

If we change this policy in a way that matters, we’ll update the date at the top and tell you in the app before the change takes effect. We won’t retroactively reduce your rights over data we already collected without asking.

Contact

Questions, requests, complaints: privacy@paithai.app. Questions about the service itself belong to the Terms of Service.