Effective date: 2026-05-01
At Issen, we take your privacy seriously. Please read this Privacy Policy to learn how we treat your personal data. By using or accessing our Services in any manner, you acknowledge that you accept the practices and policies outlined below, and you hereby consent to our collection, use and disclosure of your Personal Data as described in this Privacy Policy.
Remember that your use of Issen’s Services is at all times subject to our Terms of Use, which incorporates this Privacy Policy. Any terms we use in this Policy without defining them have the definitions given to them in the Terms of Use.
You may print a copy of this Privacy Policy.
As we continually work to improve our Services, we may need to change this Privacy Policy from time to time. We will alert you of material changes by placing a notice on our website, by sending you an email and/or by some other means. Please note that if you’ve opted not to receive legal notice emails from us (or you haven’t provided us with your email address), those legal notices will still govern your use of the Services, and you are still responsible for reading and understanding them. If you use the Services after any changes to the Privacy Policy have been posted, that means you agree to all of the changes.
What This Privacy Policy Covers
This Privacy Policy covers how Issen collects and processes data that identifies or relates to you (“Personal Data”) This Privacy Policy does not cover the practices of companies we don’t own or control or people we don’t manage.
Personal Data We May Collect
Device or Web Data. If you interact with us online (e.g., by visiting our website or using our web-based Services), we may collect information about your device and/or browser such as your IP address, IP address-based location data (country or region), device ID, and type of device or operating system used to connect with us. We use IP addresses and device information to keep the Services secure, to prevent and investigate fraud and abuse (including enforcing account suspensions under our Terms of Use), to limit request rates, to determine your country for regional pricing and availability, and to diagnose problems.
Contact Data. If you sign up for a demo, subscribe to our newsletters or other communications, or otherwise sign up for our Services, we may collect your contact information such as your name, email, phone number, employer, and job title.
Account Data. If you create an account to use our Services, we collect login credentials like email and other profile data like call transcripts, lesson records, etc. If you are using a paid Service, our payment processors, our payment processing partners Stripe, Inc. (“Stripe”), Google Payment Corp. (“Google Pay”), and Apple Payment Services LLC (“Apple Pay”), as applicable, may collect your payment data including your payment card and billing information. Please note that we only have access to the last 4 digits of your payment card number.
Sensory Data. When you engage with our voice or chat features, we will collect recordings and store transcripts of such communications.
Photos. If you choose to send a photo during a session, we store it with that session and our AI providers process it to generate the tutor’s reply. Photos are kept until you delete your account.
Third-Party AI Data. Our main speech recognition providers, Soniox, AssemblyAI, Sprag and xAI, receive voice audio to transcribe it. OpenAI may handle transcription for languages not supported by Sprag, and ElevenLabs may transcribe Cantonese. Microsoft Azure and Amazon Bedrock process transcripts, typed or shared text, photos you send, conversation history, and relevant learning profile information (such as your name, languages, proficiency, goals, and interests) to generate tutoring responses, corrections, translations, and personalized lessons. These services host OpenAI and Google models; hosting a model does not mean your microphone audio is sent to its developer. OpenAI also provides backup tutoring, and Google processes text for certain exercises. ElevenLabs is our default speech synthesis provider and receives tutor response text to generate spoken replies; the selected tutor may instead use OpenAI, Google, xAI, MiniMax, or Fish Audio. These speech synthesis services do not receive your microphone audio through speech synthesis. The providers used depend on your language, selected tutor, feature, and service availability. Daily and LiveKit transport call audio. In the iOS app, we ask for your explicit permission before enabling these AI features; leaving the agreement unaccepted keeps them off. You can withdraw this permission at any time by contacting us at contact@issen.com; the AI features then stay off. Microphone permission is separate from permission to share data with AI providers. We require third parties that receive personal data to provide the same or equal protection as described in this policy, process data only for the authorized services, and apply appropriate security safeguards. Some providers may keep data for a limited time to monitor for abuse, under their own terms. We do not sell your voice recordings. You may request deletion of your data by contacting us at contact@issen.com.
Other Personal Data. We may collect other Personal Data that you make available through Services or to us, such as in emails, letters, texts, or other communications you send us.
Sources of Personal Data
From You. We collect Personal Data when you provide it directly to us (e.g., you create an account or contact us). We also collect certain Personal Data (such as Device or Web Data) automatically when you use our Services (e.g., through Cookies – as defined in the “Cookies” section below), or if you download or install an application as part of our Services.
Third Parties. We may collect Personal Data from such as:
- Vendors that provide analytics on how you interact an engage with our Services or that help provide you with customer support. We may also use Vendors to help generate leads.
- Advertising Partners who may assist us with marketing or promotional services related to how you interact with our websites, applications, products, Services, advertisements or communications.
- Third Party Credentials that you provide to us or use to sign-in to the Services, such as your social network account credentials, to us or otherwise sign in to the Services through a third-party site or service, some content and/or information in those accounts may be transmitted into your account with us.
Purpose for Collection and Processing Personal Data
To Provide, Customize, and Improve our Services.
- Creating and managing your account or other user profiles.
- Processing orders or other transactions; billing.
- Providing you with the products, services or information you request.
- Meeting or fulfilling the reason you provided the information to us.
- Providing support and assistance for the Services.
- Improving the Services, including testing, research, internal analytics and product development.
- Personalizing the Services, website content and communications based on your preferences.
- Doing fraud protection, security and debugging.
Marketing our Services
- Marketing and selling the Services.
- Showing you advertisements, including targeted advertising.
Corresponding with You
- Responding to correspondence that we receive from you, contacting you when necessary or requested, and sending you information about the Company or the Services.
- Sending emails and other communications according to your preferences.
Legal or Security
- Meeting legal requirements and enforcing legal terms.
- Preventing, detecting and investigating security incidents and potentially illegal or prohibited activities.
- Protecting the rights, property or safety of you, Issen or another party.
- Enforcing any agreements with you; responding to claims that any posting or other content violates third-party rights; and resolving disputes.
Who We May Share Personal Data With
Service Providers. These parties help us provide the Services or perform business functions on our behalf. They may include: hosting, technology and communication providers; third-party AI providers that process voice recordings and transcripts to power speech recognition, tutor replies, and voice playback, including Microsoft, OpenAI, Google, Amazon, ElevenLabs, Deepgram, AssemblyAI, Soniox, Sprag, Inworld, xAI, Cartesia, Gladia, MiniMax, Fish Audio, NVIDIA, Fireworks AI, Baseten, OpenRouter, Groq, and Cerebras; security and fraud prevention consultants; support and customer service vendors; product fulfillment and delivery providers; analytics and crash reporting providers that analyze the use of our Services, such as Google Firebase in our mobile apps; our payment processing partners Stripe, Google Pay, and Apple Pay, as applicable, may collect your voluntarily-provided payment card information necessary to process your payment. Please see Stripe, Google Pay, and Apple Pay’s terms of service and privacy policy for information on its use and storage of your Personal Data.
Advertising Partners. We use Meta (Facebook and Instagram) and TikTok to measure and improve our advertising. When you visit our website, install our app, start a trial, subscribe or make a purchase, we may send these partners information about that event together with identifiers such as your IP address, browser user agent, their click and browser identifiers (for example Meta’s fbclid, fbc and fbp, and TikTok’s ttclid) and, in our mobile apps, your device’s advertising identifier. On iOS, we share advertising identifiers only if you allow tracking. We do not share your voice recordings, transcripts, photos or lesson content with advertising partners, and we do not sell your Personal Data. You can limit ad tracking in your device settings and in Meta’s and TikTok’s ad settings.
Business Partners. These parties partner with us in offering various services. They may include businesses that you have a relationship with, and companies that we partner with to offer joint promotional offers or opportunities.
Parties You Authorize, Access or Authenticate. This includes third parties you access or interact with through the services, social media services, and other users.
Others. We may disclose any Personal Data that we collect with third parties in conjunction with any of the activities set forth under the “Legal or Security” subsection above. Additionally, all of your Personal Data that we collect may be transferred to a third party if we undergo a merger, acquisition, bankruptcy or other transaction in which that third party assumes control of our business (in whole or in part).
Cookies
The Services use cookies and similar technologies such as pixel tags, web beacons, clear GIFs and JavaScript (collectively, “Cookies”) that may collect or facilitate the collection of your Personal Data for various purposes. We may also supplement the information we collect via Cookies with information received from third parties, including third parties that have placed their own Cookies on your device(s).
We use the following types of Cookies:
- Essential Cookies. Essential Cookies are required for providing you with features or services that you have requested. For example, certain Cookies enable you to log into secure areas of our Services. Disabling these Cookies may make certain features and services unavailable.
- Functional Cookies. Functional Cookies are used to record your choices and settings regarding our Services, maintain your preferences over time and recognize you when you return to our Services.
- Performance/Analytical Cookies. Performance/Analytical Cookies allow us to understand how visitors use our Services. They do this by collecting information such as the number of visitors to the Services, what pages visitors view on our Services and how long visitors are viewing pages on the Services. These Cookies help us better understand user of our Services and can also help us measure our targeted advertising efforts.
- Retargeting/Advertising Cookies. Retargeting/Advertising Cookies collect data about your online activity and identify your interests so that we can provide advertising that we believe is relevant to you.
Most internet browsers have an option for turning off the Cookie feature, which will prevent your browser from accepting new Cookies, as well as (depending on your browser software) allow you to decide on acceptance of each new Cookie in a variety of ways. You can also delete all Cookies that are already on your device. If you do this, however, you may have to manually adjust some preferences every time you visit our website and some of the Services and functionalities may not work.
To find out more information about Cookies generally, including information about how to manage and delete Cookies, please visit http://www.allaboutcookies.org/.
Data Security and Retention
Although we work to protect the security of your account and Personal Data that we hold in our records, please be aware that no method of transmitting data over the internet or storing data is completely secure. You can help protect your Personal Data by practicing password hygiene – for example, by creating strong and unique passwords; securing your password and/or other sign-on mechanism; limiting access to your computer or device and browser; and signing off after you have finished accessing your account.
We retain Personal Data about you for as long as necessary to provide you with our Services or to perform our business or commercial purposes for collecting your Personal Data. When establishing a retention period for certain categories of Personal Data, we consider who we collected the data from, our need for the Personal Data, why we collected the Personal Data, and the sensitivity of the Personal Data. In some cases we retain Personal Data for longer, if doing so is necessary to comply with our legal obligations, resolve disputes or collect fees owed, or is otherwise permitted or required by applicable law, rule or regulation. We may further retain information in an anonymous or aggregated form where that information would not identify you personally.
Security and server logs, which include IP addresses, are kept for up to 90 days, or longer when needed to investigate or enforce a specific case of fraud or abuse. If you reached us through one of our advertising links, we also keep the IP address, browser user agent and click identifiers recorded at that visit with your account, to attribute your sign-up to that campaign, until you delete your account.
Deleting your account. You can delete your account in Settings in the Issen app, at app.issen.com/delete-account, or by emailing contact@issen.com (for example if you used the app without creating a login). When you delete your account we delete your profile, recordings, transcripts, photos, saved words, sessions and learning data. We keep records of purchases and payments as required for tax, accounting and dispute purposes, an anonymous account record that cannot be linked back to you, and a one-way hash of your email address so that we do not send you marketing emails again.
Personal Data of Children
As noted in the Terms of Use, we do not knowingly collect or solicit Personal Data from children under 13 years of age; if you are a child under the age of 13, please do not attempt to register for or otherwise use the Services or send us any Personal Data. If we learn we have collected Personal Data from a child under 13 years of age, we will delete that information as quickly as possible. If you believe that a child under 13 years of age may have provided Personal Data to us, please contact us at contact@issen.com.
Users in the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom and Brazil
If you are in the European Economic Area (EEA), the United Kingdom or Brazil, Issen, Inc. is the controller of your Personal Data. We process it on the following legal bases: to perform our contract with you (providing your account, tutoring sessions, lessons and purchases); our legitimate interests (keeping the Services secure, preventing fraud and abuse including through IP addresses, measuring and improving the Services and our advertising, and enforcing our Terms), which we balance against your rights; your consent where we ask for it (for example sharing data with AI providers in the iOS app, tracking for advertising on iOS, and non-essential cookies where consent is required); and compliance with legal obligations.
Issen is based in the United States, and our service providers may process your Personal Data in the United States and other countries. Where required, we rely on appropriate safeguards for these transfers, such as the European Commission’s Standard Contractual Clauses or our providers’ certification under the EU–U.S. Data Privacy Framework.
Subject to applicable law, you have the right to access, correct, delete or receive a copy of your Personal Data, to restrict or object to our processing (including processing based on legitimate interests and direct marketing), and to withdraw consent at any time without affecting earlier processing. Brazilian users also have the rights set out in Article 18 of the LGPD, including confirmation of processing and information about the parties we share data with. To exercise these rights, contact us at contact@issen.com; this address also reaches the person responsible for data protection at Issen. You may also lodge a complaint with your local data protection authority (in Brazil, the ANPD).
State Law Privacy Rights
California Resident Rights
Under California Civil Code Sections 1798.83-1798.84, California residents are entitled to contact us to prevent disclosure of Personal Data to third parties for such third parties’ direct marketing purposes; in order to submit such a request, please contact us at contact@issen.com.
Our Services do not support Do Not Track requests at this time. To find out more about “Do Not Track,” you can visit www.allaboutdnt.com.
Nevada Resident Rights
If you are a resident of Nevada, you have the right to opt-out of the sale of certain Personal Data to third parties. Please note that we do not sell your Personal Data as sales are defined in Nevada Revised Statutes Chapter 603A.
Contact Information:
If you have any questions or comments about this Privacy Policy or the ways in which we collect and use your Personal Data, please do not hesitate to contact us at:
- www.issen.com/
- contact@issen.com.