What you're agreeing to
Duolingo's Terms of Service are relatively straightforward for a language learning app. Duolingo can change its subscription tiers and features and can suspend accounts that violate its community guidelines.
Privacy in plain English
Duolingo collects your learning progress, device information, and in-app behavior to personalize lessons. Duolingo uses advertising on its free tier and shares limited data with ad partners.
Terms of Service: Breakdown
Concerning Clauses- - Duolingo can change its subscription tiers and features with notice.
- Free tier users receive advertising that involves sharing behavioral data with ad partners.
- The arbitration clause prevents class-action lawsuits in the US.
- - Free tier users' behavioral data is shared with advertising partners for targeted ads.
- Duolingo shares anonymized learning data with research institutions.
- - 2023: A dataset containing email addresses and usernames of 2.6 million Duolingo users was scraped via a public API and published on a hacking forum.
Verdict:
Duolingo is low-risk for paid subscribers; free tier users should be aware their usage data funds advertising.
Privacy Policy: Breakdown
Privacy Issues- - Duolingo collects granular learning data including response times, error patterns, and lesson completion rates.
- Free tier advertising involves third-party ad SDK data collection beyond Duolingo's own practices.
- - Anonymized learning pattern data is shared with academic research partners. - Ad partners on the free tier receive device identifiers and behavioral signals for targeting.
Verdict:
Duolingo is a low-risk learning app — the 2023 scraping incident affected public data and the core data practices are benign.
Safer Alternatives
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