Privacy notice

Wise Arabic is a vocabulary-learning service at www.wisearabic.com. It is operated by Moustafa Sabry, a sole trader trading as Wise Arabic in the United Kingdom. This notice explains what personal data it handles and why. For anything in this notice, or any question about your data, email privacy@wisearabic.com.

You can change the analytics choices recorded for your account or this browser at any time on the privacy choices page — with or without an active membership.

What we collect

We collect as little as we can while still running the service.

• If you visit the site. Our hosting and security systems record request logs: your IP address, browser and device information, the pages requested, and timestamps. Anonymous, aggregate analytics also records page views and interactions without identifying you — see Cookies and storage.
• If you join the waitlist. Your email address and when you joined. We use it to respond to that request: acknowledging it and inviting you when a place opens. Joining the waitlist does not sign you up to a newsletter.
• If you create an account. Your email address, your name if you provide one, and the sign-in and session data needed to keep the account secure.
• If you use the service. Your learning activity: the words you save, your review history and ratings, review schedules, bookmarks, notes and flags you write, settings (such as timezone, display, and review-load preferences), and progress. This is the core of the product — it is what lets your study pick up where it left off. Notes and flags are free text stored with your learning data, so keep personal information out of them where you can.
• If you start a trial or buy Membership. Paddle collects the details needed to sell and manage the subscription, which may include your name, email address, billing address, payment details, transaction and subscription information, tax-location evidence, and fraud or risk signals. Full card details are entered into Paddle's checkout and do not pass through Wise Arabic's servers. We receive and store the name and email address on your Paddle customer record; Paddle customer, transaction and subscription identifiers and statuses; plan and billing-period details; relevant dates; and verified payment, refund or dispute events. We also keep a record of each verified event Paddle sends us — which can include billing details such as a billing address — as an audit trail for reconciling payments and investigating faults. We use these records to grant access, provide support, reconcile payments and meet legal and accounting duties.
• If you email us. Your email address and the contents of your message.

Why we use it

UK data protection law requires a lawful basis for each use.

Study recommendations are worked out from your own review history and settings. They only affect what the app suggests you study next; they have no legal or similarly significant effect on you.

Who we share it with

We do not sell personal data, and we do not share it with advertisers. A small number of service providers process data on our behalf under their data-processing terms:

We would also disclose data where the law requires it.

Paddle has a separate role. As merchant of record and authorised reseller, it is the seller for Membership transactions and independently determines how it handles buyer data for checkout, payments, transaction taxes, subscriptions, receipts, fraud prevention, buyer support and refunds. We share the account and plan details needed to start and link a checkout, and Paddle sends us the customer, transaction and subscription events needed to provide access and support. Paddle handles buyer data under its own privacy notice. Wise Arabic remains responsible for the learning service and for the billing identifiers and events we receive and use in our own systems.

International transfers

Some of these providers process data outside the UK, including in the United States. Where that happens, we rely on the safeguards in their data-processing agreements — UK adequacy decisions, the UK Extension to approved frameworks, or the UK's approved transfer clauses. Email us if you would like details of the safeguard a particular provider relies on, or a copy of the relevant clauses.

How long we keep it

• Account and learning data: for as long as your account is active.
• If you ask us to delete your account (email privacy@wisearabic.com): deletion is currently a manual process carried out by the operator. We will remove or irreversibly anonymise your data across our systems within 30 days of your request and confirm once it is done — apart from the Membership and transaction records described below, which are kept for the periods set out there. Backup copies are not used for anything in the meantime and expire automatically on a rolling schedule.
• Waitlist entries: deleted within six months of the relevant invitation round closing, unless you ask to stay on the list.
• Request and security logs: short-lived, normally no more than 90 days unless we are investigating an incident.
• Support email: up to two years after the matter is resolved.
• Membership and transaction records held by Wise Arabic: normally for six years after the subscription or transaction ends, or longer where needed to comply with tax, accounting or legal duties, resolve a dispute, or prevent fraud. Closing your Wise Arabic account does not require us to erase records that must be retained for those purposes; we restrict their use to those purposes.
• Buyer and payment records held by Paddle: retained by Paddle under its own privacy notice and retention rules for legal obligations, limitation periods, claims, investigations and disputes.
• Analytics data: kept only while it is genuinely useful for understanding how the early product is used. Account-linked analytics is deleted when you withdraw consent, and you can ask us at any time to delete analytics data about your browser or account. We will publish a fixed retention period once we have a verified way to enforce it, rather than promising a number we cannot yet guarantee.

Your rights

You can ask us to access, correct, delete, or export your data, to restrict how we use it, and to withdraw consent where consent is the basis. Email privacy@wisearabic.com and we will respond without undue delay and normally within one month; if a request is complex we may take up to two further months, and we will tell you within the first month if so. Complaints are acknowledged within 30 days.

Your right to object. Where we rely on legitimate interests — security, abuse prevention, fault-fixing, and support records — you can object at any time, based on your particular situation, by emailing the same address. We will stop unless we can show compelling legitimate grounds that override your interests and rights.

If you are unhappy with our answer, you can complain to the Information Commissioner's Office at ico.org.uk. We would appreciate the chance to resolve it directly first.

Under-18s

Wise Arabic is for adults. You must be 18 or over to join the waitlist or hold an account.

Cookies and storage

Wise Arabic stores three kinds of things in your browser.

Essential sign-in cookies

Clerk, our sign-in provider, sets cookies such as __session and __client_uat (plus related Clerk cookies and browser storage) to keep you signed in and protect your account against forged requests. Their lifetimes are set by Clerk and range from the length of a browsing session up to about a year. The signed-in service cannot work without them, and they are not used to track you across other sites.

Preferences stored on your device

These live in your browser's local storage and stay until you clear your browser data:

A sidebar_state cookie (kept for 7 days) also remembers whether you left the navigation sidebar open on pages that have one.

Analytics

We use PostHog, hosted in the EU, for two clearly separated kinds of analytics. The rule is simple: aggregate statistics always, identity only with your consent.

Anonymous, aggregate statistics. Pages viewed and product interactions (for example, that a review session was completed, or a call-to-action was clicked) are recorded for every visitor so we can see what serves learners overall. This lane is deliberately built so it cannot identify you: it stores nothing in your browser — the random identifier it uses is held in memory only and is discarded when you leave — it is never connected to your account, and the events carry no names, email addresses, or content you write. A few aggregate counters are recorded by our own servers in the same unlinked way (for example, that someone joined the waitlist), using reference numbers that analytics cannot connect to a person. You can turn the browser side of this off here:

Analytics linked to your account. If you have an account, we separately ask — once, in the app — whether we may link your usage to your account so we can understand how the product works for you as one learner across devices. This does nothing until you agree. If you agree, PostHog stores a cookie and browser storage on your device (names starting ph_, kept for up to a year), your activity is linked to a stable user ID together with your account creation date — never your email address or name — and a small number of account events recorded by our own servers (such as study-plan changes and subscription status) are included too. Activity from before you agreed stays anonymous; it is not linked to you retroactively.

You can change your mind at any time under Settings → Other, or — whether or not your membership is still active — on the privacy choices page. Withdrawing consent stops account-linked analytics everywhere at once and we then delete the analytics data that was collected while consent was in place. If any of that deletion fails on our side, we fix it by hand — and you can always email privacy@wisearabic.com to have analytics data about your browser or account deleted, whether or not you ever consented.

Error reports are separate from both lanes: when something breaks, the failing state (counts, identifiers, truncated diagnostics — not the content you write) is recorded so we can fix it, under our legitimate interest in running a working service.

Paddle checkout

The embedded checkout is provided by Paddle. Paddle may use cookies or similar browser technologies that are necessary to secure the checkout, prevent fraud, remember transaction state and complete payment. Payment details are submitted directly to Paddle, not stored in Wise Arabic's browser storage or sent through our servers. Paddle explains its processing and choices in its privacy notice.

The consent machinery itself uses two small cookies: wa_analytics_consent remembers your account-level choice in this browser (kept for 6 months), and wa_analytics_optout remembers your choice for the anonymous lane so it can be honoured on your next visit.

Changes to this notice

The date at the top shows when this notice last changed. If we change it in a way that matters — new data, new purposes, or new providers — we will flag it on the site rather than update the page silently.

Operator details

Wise Arabic is operated by Moustafa Sabry, a sole trader trading as Wise Arabic, who is the data controller for the Wise Arabic processing described in this notice.

Business correspondence address: Wise Arabic, BA 701, Nexus Connect, Esh, Durham, DH7 9QR, United Kingdom.

Contact

For anything in this notice, or any question about your data: privacy@wisearabic.com. For general enquiries, use the contact page.