Last updated: 28 September 2026
This policy explains what personal information we collect about you, how we use it, who we share it with, and the rights you have. We've tried to keep it clear and readable. If anything's unclear, email us at [email protected].
1. Who we are
We're Olly Richards Publishing Ltd, trading as StoryLearning (“we”, “us”, “our”). We're the controller of your personal information, which means we decide how and why it's used.
- Registered office: East Wing, Goffs Oak House, Goffs Lane, Goffs Oak, Hertfordshire, EN7 5GE, United Kingdom
- Company number: 10640155 (registered in England and Wales)
- ICO registration number: ZA930840
- Contact: [email protected]
2. What this policy covers
This policy applies when you:
- visit storylearning.com or fluentspanishacademy.com;
- use the StoryLearning app at app.storylearning.com;
- buy from us, or take one of our courses, coaching programmes or webinars;
- join our community, sign up to our emails, or contact us.
Some of our products are delivered through other platforms, such as our course platform or community platform. When you use them, those platforms may also collect information under their own privacy policies.
3. The information we collect
Information you give us
- Contact and account details: your name, email address, and login details, and your country or location if you give it to us.
- Purchase details: what you've bought, when, and how you paid. Your card details are handled by our payment providers. We never see or store your full card number.
- Messages: anything you send us, for example by email, through our support system, or on social media.
- Survey and quiz answers: for example the language you're learning, your level and your goals.
- Reviews and testimonials: anything you share with us for publication.
- Coaching information: notes about your progress, and recordings of coaching calls where you've been told a call is being recorded.
- Community and webinar activity: posts and comments in our community, and your registration and attendance at webinars.
Information we collect when you use the StoryLearning app
The languages you're learning, your level, the kinds of stories you like, the stories you read and how you rate them, the words you look up and save, your reading goals and progress, and anything you type into the app. We also collect technical information about how the app is working, so we can find and fix problems.
Information we collect automatically
When you visit our websites or open our emails, we collect technical information such as your IP address, device and browser type, approximate location, the pages you visit, the links you click and whether you open our emails. Some of this is collected using cookies and similar technologies (see section 9).
Information we get from others
- Our payment providers, who confirm your payment and may flag suspected fraud.
- Advertising platforms such as Meta and Google, if you sign up through one of their forms, or through aggregated reports about how our adverts perform.
- Affiliates, when you buy through an affiliate's link, so we know who referred you.
We don't collect sensitive information (such as health data) and we don't need it. Please don't include it in messages to us or in anything you type into the app.
4. How we use your information, and why we're allowed to
Data protection law says we need a lawful reason (a “lawful basis”) for each way we use your information. Here's what we do and the basis we rely on.
| What we do | Our lawful basis |
|---|---|
| Provide what you've signed up for or bought: your account, courses, the app, coaching, webinars and community | Contract: we need to do this to give you what you've asked for |
| Take payments, manage subscriptions and prevent fraud | Contract, and our legitimate interests in preventing fraud |
| Answer your questions and provide support | Contract, or our legitimate interests in helping people who contact us |
| Send you service emails, such as receipts, login details and important changes | Contract |
| Send you marketing emails, and occasionally text messages, about our products | Consent, or for customers, our legitimate interests in telling you about products similar to ones you've bought (you can opt out at any time) |
| Personalise our emails, website and app to you, for example based on the language you're learning, your level, your survey answers and what you've bought | Legitimate interests in making what we send you relevant |
| Invite you back after you've cancelled a subscription, for example using the languages you were learning | Legitimate interests (you can opt out at any time) |
| Measure how our websites, emails and adverts are performing, and improve them | Consent where this uses non-essential cookies, otherwise legitimate interests |
| Show you relevant adverts on other platforms, including by matching your email address with Meta or Google (see section 8) | Consent for advertising cookies, and legitimate interests for matching customer lists (you can opt out at any time) |
| Publish your review or testimonial | Consent |
| Record coaching calls | Consent: we'll always tell you before we record |
| Pay affiliates commission for sales they refer | Legitimate interests in running our affiliate programme |
| Keep our websites and app secure and working, and fix errors | Legitimate interests |
| Keep accounting and tax records, and meet other legal duties | Legal obligation |
| Deal with legal claims | Legitimate interests in protecting our business |
Where we rely on legitimate interests, we've weighed our interests against your rights and made sure you'd reasonably expect the use. You can object at any time (see section 13).
Some information is needed so we can give you what you've asked for. For example, we need your email address to create your account and payment details to process a purchase. If you don't give us this, we won't be able to provide that product.
5. How we use AI
We use artificial intelligence systems from third-party providers to power parts of our products. In the StoryLearning app, they generate and grade stories, produce audio narration and translations, and create story illustrations. Our courses are created by our teachers and product team, who use AI tools in some parts of that process, for example to help draft or adapt stories and text, or to produce audio. We may also use AI to help us answer customer support messages. If you're ever talking to an AI assistant, we'll tell you at the start of the conversation, and you can ask for a person at any time.
Our team may also use AI tools when creating or editing the videos and written content we publish on our website, blog and social media channels, for example to help draft or edit text, or to edit video. Our team reviews this content and is responsible for everything we publish.
To do this, some of your information is processed by these providers, acting on our instructions. For example, this can include your language and level, your story preferences, your learning activity (such as the words you save and the stories you've read), and the content of any messages you send to an AI assistant.
Our current AI providers are OpenAI and Anthropic. They don't use your information to train their AI models. They may keep it for a limited period, for example to check for misuse of their services, and then delete it.
6. Personalisation and automated decisions
We use your information to personalise your experience. In the app, this means matching stories to your level and interests, and choosing when your saved words come back. In our emails and on our website, it means showing you content and offers that fit the language you're learning and your level.
We don't make decisions about you based solely on automated processing that have legal or similarly significant effects on you. If you have questions about an automated feature, or would like a person to review something an automated system has done, email us at [email protected].
7. Marketing
We'll only send you marketing emails or text messages if you've agreed to receive them, or if you're a customer and we're telling you about products similar to ones you've bought.
You can stop marketing at any time by clicking “unsubscribe” in any email, replying STOP to a text message, or emailing [email protected]. We'll keep a record of your email address or phone number on a suppression list, so we can make sure we don't contact you again.
We never rent, trade or give your information to anyone for their own marketing.
8. Advertising
We advertise on platforms including Meta (Facebook and Instagram) and Google (including YouTube). To show our adverts to people who are likely to be interested, and to measure how they perform, we:
- use advertising cookies and pixels on our website, only if you've accepted them in our cookie banner;
- sometimes share a secure, scrambled (“hashed”) version of customers' and subscribers' email addresses with Meta and Google, so they can show our adverts to you, or avoid showing you adverts for things you've already bought, or find people with similar interests. The platforms delete the matched information after they've done this.
For the Meta pixel, we and Meta are joint controllers for the collection of the data on our website. Meta is responsible for what it does with it afterwards, as explained in its own privacy policy.
To opt out of list matching, email [email protected]. You can also manage your advert preferences in your Meta and Google account settings.
9. Cookies
Cookies are small files stored on your device when you visit a website. We use:
| Type | What it does | Examples |
|---|---|---|
| Strictly necessary | Makes the website work and keeps it secure, and remembers your cookie choices. These are always on. | Our cookie consent tool, Cloudflare security |
| Analytics | Helps us understand how visitors use our website and which marketing works | Google Analytics, SegMetrics |
| Personalisation | Tailors what you see on our website to your interests | RightMessage |
| Advertising | Helps us show you relevant adverts and measure how they perform | Meta pixel, Google Ads |
We only use analytics, personalisation and advertising cookies if you accept them in our cookie banner. You can change your choice at any time using the cookie settings button on our website, or by clearing cookies in your browser.
Our emails also contain small tracking images that tell us whether an email was opened and which links were clicked.
10. Who we share your information with
We share your information only where we need to, and only with organisations that protect it and use it on our instructions. The main ones are:
| Who | Why |
|---|---|
| Payments and orders: Checkout Champ, Stripe, PayPal | Processing payments, subscriptions and refunds |
| Course platform: Teachable | Hosting our courses and tracking your progress |
| Community platform: Circle | Running our online community |
| Webinars: WebinarJam | Running our webinars and masterclasses |
| Email and text messages: our email marketing platform (Kit) and our text messaging provider | Sending our emails and occasional text messages |
| Customer support: Zendesk and Google Workspace (Gmail) | Answering your messages |
| Coaching: our coaches, Zoom, Calendly and Google Workspace (Google Drive) | Running coaching sessions, booking calls and storing any recordings. Our coaches can see your name, email address and progress so they can coach you. |
| AI providers: OpenAI and Anthropic | Powering AI features (see section 5) |
| Analytics and attribution: Google Analytics, SegMetrics | Measuring how our websites, emails and adverts perform |
| Website personalisation: RightMessage | Tailoring our website to your interests |
| Error monitoring: Sentry | Finding and fixing technical problems |
| Hosting and security: our website, app and security providers, including Cloudflare | Keeping our websites and app online and secure |
| Advertising: Meta and Google | Advertising (see section 8) |
| Reviews: Trustpilot | Inviting you to leave a review, if you've bought from us |
| Affiliates | If you buy through an affiliate's link, the affiliate is told a sale was made and its value, so we can pay their commission |
| Our team | Our team members, who are contractors around the world, can access your information when their role needs it. They're bound by written confidentiality and data protection terms. |
| Professional advisers | Our lawyers, accountants, auditors and insurers, when needed |
| Authorities | Law enforcement, regulators or courts, if the law requires it |
| A new owner | If we transfer part or all of our business, or merge with another business, your information may pass to the new owner, who must use it in line with this policy |
When you post in our community, other members can see your posts and profile.
11. Transfers outside the UK and EEA
Some of the organisations we work with, and some of our team, are based outside the UK and the European Economic Area (EEA). When your information is transferred outside these areas, we make sure it's protected by at least one of these safeguards:
- The country has been approved by the UK government or the European Commission as having adequate data protection laws.
- We have a contract in place that's been approved for this purpose, such as the UK International Data Transfer Agreement or Addendum, or the European Commission's Standard Contractual Clauses.
- For US organisations, they're certified under the EU-US Data Privacy Framework and its UK Extension.
You can ask us for more information about these safeguards by emailing [email protected].
12. How long we keep your information
We keep your information only as long as we need it:
| Information | How long we keep it |
|---|---|
| Purchase, payment and tax records | 6 years from the end of the financial year in which the purchase was made, as required by law |
| Email subscribers | Until you unsubscribe. If you haven't opened or clicked our emails for a long time (usually 12 to 24 months), we remove you. |
| Suppression list (people who've unsubscribed) | Indefinitely, so we can respect your choice |
| App account and learning data | While your account is open, and deleted within 90 days after you close it |
| Course and community accounts | While your account is open, and for up to 2 years after your last activity |
| Customer support conversations | 3 years after the conversation ends |
| Coaching notes and recordings | Recordings: 12 months. Notes: 2 years after your coaching ends. |
| Reviews and testimonials | Until you ask us to remove them |
| Website analytics | Up to 14 months |
Sometimes we need to keep information longer, for example to deal with a legal claim. We may also anonymise information so it no longer identifies you, and use that for research and statistics without a time limit.
13. Your rights
You have the right to:
- Access the personal information we hold about you, and get a copy.
- Correct information that's wrong or incomplete.
- Delete your information, in some circumstances (for example, if we no longer need it).
- Restrict how we use your information, in some circumstances (for example, while we check whether it's accurate).
- Object to our use of your information where we rely on legitimate interests, including profiling. You always have an absolute right to object to direct marketing.
- Data portability: receive information you've given us in a common, machine-readable format, or have it sent to another organisation.
- Withdraw your consent at any time, where we rely on consent. This doesn't affect anything we did before you withdrew it.
- Not be subject to decisions based solely on automated processing that have legal or similarly significant effects on you. (We don't make these decisions.)
To use any of these rights, email [email protected]. It's free. We'll reply within one month, or tell you if we need longer because your request is complex. We may ask you to confirm your identity first.
Complaints. If you're unhappy with how we've handled your information, please tell us first at [email protected], and we'll look into it and reply. You also have the right to complain to the UK's data protection regulator, the Information Commissioner's Office (ico.org.uk/make-a-complaint). If you're in the EU, you can complain to the data protection authority in your country.
14. Keeping your information secure
We use appropriate technical and organisational measures to protect your information, such as encryption, access controls, and only giving access to people who need it. We choose providers who meet high security standards. If there's ever a data breach that puts your rights at risk, we'll tell you and the ICO where the law requires it.
You can help by keeping your password private and letting us know straight away if you think someone else has accessed your account.
15. Children
Our websites, products and the StoryLearning app are intended for people aged 18 and over. We don't knowingly collect information from anyone younger. If you think a child has given us their information, please contact us at [email protected] and we'll delete it.
16. Other websites
Our websites and emails contain links to other websites and platforms, such as social media. We're not responsible for how they handle your information, so please read their privacy policies.
If any of our tools access information through Google APIs, we comply with the Google API Services User Data Policy, including its Limited Use requirements.
17. Changes to this policy
We may update this policy from time to time, for example when we start using a new tool or the law changes. The date at the top shows when it was last updated. If we make a significant change, we'll tell you by email or on our website before it takes effect.
18. Contact us
If you have any questions about this policy or your information, email us at [email protected], or write to us at Olly Richards Publishing Ltd, East Wing, Goffs Oak House, Goffs Lane, Goffs Oak, Hertfordshire, EN7 5GE, United Kingdom.
