EnglishHints.com's Privacy Policy

EnglishHints was written to help you learn and practice the English you need to reach your goals. Knowing a little about you makes it easier to do that. But, as the creator and writer of EnglishHints, I respect your privacy and your personal data and protect it (as I try to protect my own when I use the Internet!) 

Thanks for your patience with all the detail below—necessary to meet legal requirements as well as to clearly show you all the possible uses of your data at EnglishHints.

Kindest regards,

Catherine Simonton, EnglishHints

EnglishHints strives to maintain the highest standards of decency, fairness, and integrity in all our operations. We are dedicated to protecting our customers' and online visitors' privacy on our website.

This privacy policy outlines the types of personal information we receive and collect when you use EnglishHints.com, as well as some of the steps we take to safeguard information. This will help you make an informed decision about sharing personal information with us..

About Our Cookies

A cookie is a string of information that EnglishHints stores on your computer, which your browser provides to EnglishHints each time you return to the site. We use cookies to improve visitor experience by helping us identify and track visitors, their use of our website, and their website access preferences. 

Google Analytics Cookies

EnglishHints uses Google Analytics to analyze the use of EnglishHints and make its information more useful to site visitors. Google Analytics collects demographic and interest data, and generates statistical and other information about website use, by means of cookies. These cookies are kept on your computer. We share this information with Google, which will store and use this information on its servers. Google's privacy policy is available at: https://policies.google.com/privacy.

EnglishHints uses information from Google Analytics to track the number of visits to the website, browsers and operating systems. No personally identifiable information is obtained from these cookies. We use the information that Google Analytics generates relating to our website to create reports about the use of the site. These reports allow us to update the site and improve your usage of it.

If you do not wish your data to be collected via Google Analytics, you can install its opt-out browser extension or add-on its opt-out page.

Advertising Cookies

We use Ezoic to provide personalization and analytic services on this website, so Ezoic's privacy policy also affects this site. It can be reviewed here. 

You may opt out of personalized ads for over 125 different ad networks. Click here to do that.

Some third-party advertisements are served by Google. Google's cookie enables it to serve ads to our visitors based on their visits to other sites on the Web. You may opt out of personalized ads by visiting the Google advertising privacy policy.   

This link from Google provides more information about how Google manages data in its ad products.

Affiliate Products and Services

We may receive an affiliate commission for a few excellent products of Espresso English recommended on EnglishHints.

By clicking on a product or service link for Espresso English, you consent to that platform's possible use of cookies, as outlined in this link.

Refusing Cookies

You can set your browser to accept or refuse all cookies automatically or notify you when a cookie is being requested. Taking this action should not cause a problem with the continued use of our site. Consult the Help section of your browser for guidance on how to refuse all cookies or to notify you when a cookie is requested.

If you choose to refuse EnglishHint's cookies, you may not be able to fully experience the interactive features of the site.

Personally Identifiable Information

EnglishHints may collect and use your personal information for the following purposes:

• To run and operate our site.

• To display content on the site correctly.

• To improve customer service.

• To help us respond to your customer service requests and support needs more efficiently.

• To personalize your user experience.

• To understand how our users as a group use the services and resources provided on our site.

• To improve our site.

• To improve our products and services.

• To run a promotion, contest, survey or other site feature.

• To send information to you that you agreed to receive about topics we think will be of interest to you.

• To send periodic emails, which may include electronic newsletters and/or autoresponder series of emails.

• To respond to your enquiries, questions, and/or other requests.

EnglishHints may collect personally identifiable information from you in a variety of ways, including, but not limited to, when you visit our site, register on the site, or fill out a form, and in connection with other activities, services, features or resources we make available on our site.

Specifically, if you subscribe to our newsletter, we will ask for your first name and will require your email address.

If you complete a form, we will require your name and your email address, and will ask for information relevant to the purpose of the form. We use Sendinblue for sending emails. (See their Terms of Use.)

To protect from spam, we also use Google's reCaptcha API on forms. According to its Terms of Service, "the reCAPTCHA API works by collecting hardware and software information, such as device and application data, and sending these data to Google for analysis. The information collected in connection with your use of the service will be used for improving reCAPTCHA and for general security purposes. It will not be used for personalized advertising by Google."

If this is a problem to you, use the Contact Me Directly form at the bottom of that page, tell me what offer you are interested in (English Detective, another email series, a free e-book, etc.) & I will try to send it directly.

If you purchase a product or service from us, FastSpring, the secure company that processes payments for us, will collect your name, email address, billing address and credit card number.

Their privacy policy is here. You may use Paypal to pay them. (Paypal's privacy policy varies by country. the U.S. version is here.)  

EnglishHints also uses Facebook commenting. Facebook stores all of your comments and may show them on your timeline, depending on your Facebook settings. Facebook's updated data and privacy policy is here.

In addition, this site lets you share content with your friends and followers on several social media platforms. Links to their privacy policies are: Pinterest, Twitter, and Facebook (specifically their cookie policy. For their Data policy see preceding paragraph.)

You can always refuse to supply personally identifiable information and visit our site anonymously. However, it may prevent you from engaging in certain site-related activities.

If we make material changes in the collection of personally identifiable information, we will inform you by placing a notice on our site. We will use personal information received from you for internal purposes only and will not sell it or provide it to other third parties.

We also collect each visitor's IP address, which helps us combat spam and fraud. We do not use IP addresses for any other purpose.

EnglishHints contains links to other websites that may be of interest to you. However, once you have used them to leave our site, we do not have any control over that other website. Therefore, we cannot be responsible for the protection and privacy of any information you provide while visiting such sites. These sites are not governed by this privacy statement. Always exercise caution by reviewing the privacy statement of the website in question before continuing to use it.

California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA)

The California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), enacted in 2018, creates new consumer rights relating to the access to, deletion of, and sharing of personal information that is collected by businesses.

As noted above, EnglishHints and its advertising partners collect personal information (such as your browser cookies, the advertising identifier on your mobile device, or the IP address of your device) when you visit EnglishHints. This information is used to tailor and show ads to you. 

See section above for more details about the personal information we may collect on this site and what it is used for.

We have not sold any personal information in the previous 12 months (or ever).

Non-personally Identifiable Information

We may collect non-personally identifiable information about you whenever you interact with our site. Non-personally identifiable information may include the browser name, the type of computer and technical information about your method of connecting to our site, such as the operating system and the Internet service provider you used, and other similar information.

Children's Privacy Policy

EnglishHints is directed to adults. It is not directed to children under the age of 16. We operate our site in compliance with current regulations. Anyone under the age of 16 must provide parental consent to use this site. We do not knowingly collect or use personally identifiable information from anyone under 16 years of age.

Release of Information

In the unlikely event that we need to sell EnglishHints, the information we have obtained from you through your voluntary participation in our site may transfer to the new owner as a part of the sale so that the service provided to you may continue. In that event, you will receive notice through our website of that change in control and practices, and we will make reasonable efforts to ensure that the purchaser honors any opt-out requests you might make.

Data Storage

All personally identifiable information and non-personally identifiable information is stored on our host's servers. That host is SiteSell Inc., located at 1000 Saint-Jean Boulevard, Suite 702, Pointe-Claire, QC H9R 5P1 Canada.

Some information is collected by third-party services. These include (links are to their privacy pages) BirdSend (in connection with the English Detective newsletter and emails), and StatCounter (which uses cookies to collects data including IP address to help us understand and improve site use.) 

You can also learn more about cookies from StatCounter-- or set your browser to refuse them—by clicking here.

How You Can Correct or Remove Information

We provide this privacy policy as a statement to you of our commitment to protect your personally identifiable information. If you have submitted personally identifiable information through our website and would like to review that information, click on this link.

You can also request to edit or delete any of your information from the servers by clicking on this link. 

Updates and Effective Date

EnglishHints reserves the right to make changes in this policy. If there is a material change in our cookie and privacy practices, we will indicate on our site that those practices have changed and provide a link to the updated privacy policy. We encourage you to periodically review this policy so that you will know what information we collect and how we use it.

Agreeing to Terms

If you do not agree to EnglishHints's privacy policy as posted here on this website, please do not consent to the setting of cookies and the collection and storage of your personally identifiable information.

Your explicit consent indicates acceptance of this privacy policy in its entirety.

Last updated: 1-6-2024.