This Privacy Policy is meant to help you understand what information we collect, why we collect it, and how you can update, manage, export, and delete your information.
We build a range of services that help millions of people daily to explore and interact with the world in new ways. Our services include：
- WEA app, website, and devices
- Platforms like the WEA online stores
- Products that are integrated into third-party apps and sites
You can use our services in a variety of ways to manage your privacy. For example, you can sign up for a WEA Account if you want to create and manage content like game sets, or purchase online courses. And you can use many WEA services when you’re signed out or without creating an account at all, like browsing the course descriptions on our website. And across our services, you can adjust your privacy settings to control what we collect and how your information is used.
To help explain things as clearly as possible, we’ve added examples and definitions for key terms. And if you have any questions about this Privacy Policy, you can contact us.
Collection of Personal Information
We collect information to provide better services to all our users — from figuring out basic stuff like which language you speak, to more complex things like which ads you’ll find most useful, the people who matter most to you online, or which classrooms or courses you might like. The information WEA collects, and how that information is used, depends on how you use our services and how you manage your privacy controls.
When you’re not signed in to a WEA Account, we store the information we collect with unique identifiers tied to the browser, application, or device you’re using. This helps us do things like maintain your language preferences across browsing sessions.
When you’re signed in, we also collect information that we store with your WEA Account, which we treat as personal information.
Your Personal Information and Content
When you create a WEA Account, you provide us with personal information that includes your name and a password. You can also choose to add a phone number or payment information to your account. Even if you aren’t signed in to a WEA Account, you might choose to provide us with information — like an email address to receive updates about our services.
We also collect the content you create, upload, or receive from others when using our services. This includes things like messages you write and receive, photos and videos you save, and game sets and courses you create.
Information About Your Apps, Browsers & Devices
We collect information about the apps, browsers, and devices you use to access WEA services, which helps us provide features like automatic product updates and dimming your screen if your battery runs low.
The information we collect includes unique identifiers, browser type and settings, device type and settings, operating system, mobile network information including carrier name and phone number, and application version number. We also collect information about the interaction of your apps, browsers, and devices with our services, including IP address, crash reports, system activity, and the date, time, and referrer URL of your request.
We collect this information when a WEA service on your device contacts our servers — for example, when you download content in WEA app or when a service checks for automatic updates. If you’re using an Android device with WEA app, your device periodically contacts WEA servers to provide information about your device and connection to our services. This information includes things like your device type, carrier name, crash reports, and which apps you've installed.
Your Activity
We collect information about your activity in our services, which we use to do things like recommend a classroom you might like. The activity information we collect may include：
- Terms you search for
- Classrooms you join
- Views and interactions with content and ads
- Voice and audio information when you use audio features
- Purchase activity
- People with whom you communicate or share content
- Activity on third-party sites and apps that use our services
You can visit your WEA Account to find and manage activity information that’s saved in your account.
Your Local Information
We collect information about your location when you use our services, which helps us offer features like automatic translations for your convenience.
Your location can be determined with varying degrees of accuracy by：
- GPS
- IP address
- Sensor data from your device
- Information about things near your device, such as Wi-Fi access points, cell towers, and Bluetooth-enabled devices
The types of location data we collect depend in part on your device and account settings. For example, you can turn your Android device’s location on or off using the device’s settings app. You can also turn on Location History if you want to create a private map of where you go with your signed-in devices.
In some circumstances, WEA may also collect information about you from trusted partners, including marketing partners who provide us with information about potential customers of our business services, and security partners who provide us with information to protect against abuse. We also receive information from advertisers to provide advertising and research services on their behalf.
We use various technologies to collect and store information, including cookies, pixel tags, local storage, such as browser web storage or application data caches, databases, and server logs.
WHY WEA COLLECTS INFORMATION
We use the information we collect from all our services for the following purposes：
Providing Better Services
We use your information to deliver our services, like processing the terms you search for in order to return results or helping you share content by suggesting recipients from your contacts.
Maintaining and Improving Our Services
We also use your information to ensure our services are working as intended, such as tracking outages or troubleshooting issues that you report to us. And we use your information to make improvements to our services — for example, understanding which search terms are most frequently misspelled helps us improve spell-check features used across our services.
Developing New Services
We use the information we collect in existing services to help us develop new ones. For example, understanding how people organized their self-created game sets helped us design and launch the Create Games feature.
Providing Personalized Services
We use the information we collect to customize our services for you, including providing recommendations, personalized content, and customized search results. For example, WEA app uses information like classrooms you’ve already joined to suggest new classrooms you might like.
Depending on your settings, we may also show you personalized ads based on your interests. For example, if you search for “English,” you may see an ad for English online courses when you’re browsing ads in Daily Reward. You can control what information we use to show you ads by visiting your Settings.
We don’t show you personalized ads based on sensitive categories, such as race, religion, sexual orientation, or health.
We don’t share information that personally identifies you with advertisers, such as your name or email, unless you ask us to. For example, if you see an ad for a nearby flower shop and select the “tap to call” button, we’ll connect your call and may share your phone number with the flower shop.
Measuring Performance
We use data for analytics and measurement to understand how our services are used. For example, we analyze data about your visits to our app to do things like optimize product design. And we also use data about the ads you interact with to help advertisers understand the performance of their ad campaigns.
Communication
We use information we collect, like your email address, to interact with you directly. For example, we may send you a notification if we detect suspicious activity, like an attempt to sign in to your WEA Account from an unusual location. Or we may let you know about upcoming changes or improvements to our services. And if you contact WEA, we’ll keep a record of your request in order to help solve any issues you might be facing.
Protecting WEA, Users and the Public
We use information to help improve the safety and reliability of our services. This includes detecting, preventing, and responding to fraud, abuse, security risks, and technical issues that could harm WEA, our users, or the public.
We use different technologies to process your information for these purposes. We use automated systems that analyze your content to provide you with things like customized search results, personalized ads, or other features tailored to how you use our services. And we analyze your content to help us detect abuse such as spam, malware, and illegal content. We also use algorithms to recognize patterns in data.
We may combine the information we collect among our services and across your devices for the purposes described above. For example, if you joined a classroom for English learning, you might see an ad for English lessons on a site that uses our ad products. Depending on your account settings, your activity on other sites and apps may be associated with your personal information in order to improve WEA’s services and the ads delivered by WEA.
If other users already have your email address or other information that identifies you, we may show them your publicly visible WEA Account information, such as your name and photo. This helps people identify an email coming from you, for example.
We’ll ask for your consent before using your information for a purpose that isn’t covered in this Privacy Policy.
YOUR PRIVACY CONTROLS
This section describes key controls for managing your privacy across our services. In addition to these tools, we also offer specific privacy settings in our products — you can learn more on our website.
Managing Your Information
When you’re signed in, you can always review and update information by visiting the services you use. For example, WEA app is designed to help you manage specific types of content you’ve saved with WEA.
When you’re signed out, you can manage information associated with your browser or device, including：
- Signed-out search personalization： Choose whether your search activity is used to offer you more relevant results and recommendations.
- Ad Settings： Manage your preferences about the ads shown to you in WEA app and on sites and apps that partner with WEA to show ads.
Deleting Your Information
You can also request to remove content from specific WEA services based on applicable law.
To delete your information, you can：
- Delete your content from specific WEA services
- Delete specific WEA products, including your information associated with those products
- Delete your entire WEA Account
There are other ways to control the information WEA collects whether or not you’re signed in to a WEA Account, including：
- Browser settings： For example, you can configure your browser to indicate when WEA has set a cookie in your browser. You can also configure your browser to block all cookies from a specific domain or all domains. But remember that our services rely on cookies to function properly, for things like remembering your language preferences.
- Device-level settings： Your device may have controls that determine what information we collect. For example, you can modify location settings on your Android device.
Sharing Your Information
Many of our services let you share information with other people, and you have control over how you share. For example, you can share photos or audio files in the instant messaging feature in WEA app. Remember, when you share information publicly, your content may become accessible through search engines.
When you’re signed in and interact with some WEA services, like liking a classroom in WEA app, your name and photo appear next to your activity. We may also display this information in ads depending on your Shared endorsements setting.
We do not share your personal information with companies, organizations, or individuals outside of WEA except in the following cases：
1. Your Consent
We’ll share personal information outside of WEA when we have your consent. We’ll ask for your explicit consent to share any sensitive personal information.
2. Domain Administrators
If you’re a student or work for an organization that uses WEA services, your domain administrator and resellers who manage your account will have access to your WEA Account.
They may be able to：
- Access and retain information stored in your account, like your email
- View statistics regarding your account, like how many apps you install
- Change your account password
- Suspend or terminate your account access
- Receive your account information in order to satisfy applicable law, regulation, legal process, or enforceable governmental request
- Restrict your ability to delete or edit your information or your privacy settings
3. External Processing
We provide personal information to our affiliates and other trusted businesses or persons to process it for us, based on our instructions and in compliance with our Privacy Policy and any other appropriate confidentiality and security measures. For example, we use service providers to help us with customer support.
4. Legal Reasons
We will share personal information outside of WEA if we have a good-faith belief that access, use, preservation, or disclosure of the information is reasonably necessary to：
- Meet any applicable law, regulation, legal process, or enforceable governmental request. We share information about the number and type of requests we receive from governments in our Transparency Report.
- Enforce applicable Terms of Service, including investigation of potential violations.
- Detect, prevent, or otherwise address fraud, security, or technical issues.
- Protect against harm to the rights, property or safety of WEA, our users, or the public as required or permitted by law.
We may share non-personally identifiable information publicly and with our partners — like publishers, advertisers, developers, or rights holders. For example, we share information publicly to show trends about the general use of our services. We also allow specific partners to collect information from your browser or device for advertising and measurement purposes using their own cookies or similar technologies.
If WEA is involved in a merger, acquisition, or sale of assets, we’ll continue to ensure the confidentiality of your personal information and give affected users notice before personal information is transferred or becomes subject to a different privacy policy.
Your Information Security
All WEA products are built with strong security features that continuously protect your information. The insights we gain from maintaining our services help us detect and automatically block security threats from ever reaching you. And if we do detect something risky that we think you should know about, we’ll notify you and help guide you through steps to stay better protected.
We work hard to protect you and WEA from unauthorized access, alteration, disclosure, or destruction of information we hold, including：
- We use encryption to keep your data private while in transit
- We offer a range of security features, like Safe Browsing, Security Checkup, and 2 Step Verification to help you protect your account
- We review our information collection, storage, and processing practices, including physical security measures, to prevent unauthorized access to our systems
- We restrict access to personal information to WEA employees, contractors, and agents who need that information in order to process it. Anyone with this access is subject to strict contractual confidentiality obligations and may be disciplined or terminated if they fail to meet these obligations.
Retaining Your Information
We retain the data we collect for different periods of time depending on what it is, how we use it, and how you configure your settings：
- Some data you can delete whenever you like, such as the content you create or upload. You can also delete activity information saved in your account, or choose to have it deleted automatically after a set period of time.
- Other data is deleted or anonymized automatically after a set period of time, such as advertising data in server logs.
- We keep some data until you delete your WEA Account, such as information about how often you use our services.
- And some data we retain for longer periods of time when necessary for legitimate business or legal purposes, such as security, fraud and abuse prevention, or financial record-keeping.
When you delete data, we follow a deletion process to make sure that your data is safely and completely removed from our servers or retained only in anonymized form. We try to ensure that our services protect information from accidental or malicious deletion. Because of this, there may be delays between when you delete something and when copies are deleted from our active and backup systems.
You can read more about WEA’s data retention periods, including how long it takes us to delete your information.
Compliance
We regularly review this Privacy Policy and make sure that we process your information in ways that comply with it.
Data transfers
We maintain servers around the world and your information may be processed on servers located outside of the country where you live. Data protection laws vary among countries, with some providing more protection than others. Regardless of where your information is processed, we apply the same protections described in this policy. We also comply with certain legal frameworks relating to the transfer of data, such as the EU-US and Swiss-US Privacy Shield Frameworks.
When we receive formal written complaints, we respond by contacting the person who made the complaint. We work with the appropriate regulatory authorities, including local data protection authorities, to resolve any complaints regarding the transfer of your data that we cannot resolve with you directly.
About This Privacy Policy
This Privacy Policy applies to all of the services offered by WEA and its affiliates, including services offered on third-party sites, such as advertising services. This Privacy Policy doesn’t apply to services that have separate privacy policies that do not incorporate this Privacy Policy.
This Privacy Policy doesn’t apply to：
- The information practices of other companies and organizations that advertise our services
- Services offered by other companies or individuals, including products or sites that may include WEA services, be displayed to you in search results, or be linked from our services
Changes and Updates of This Policy
We change and update this Privacy Policy from time to time. We always indicate the date the last changes were published.