Making mistakes is a fundamental requirement of language acquisition. If a user suspects that their speaking errors or grammar slip-ups are being stored, aggregated, or sold to advertising networks, they will self-censor. Self-censorship kills learning.
Why privacy is a pedagogical requirement
This is not a compliance argument — it is a learning science argument. Research on speaking anxiety (MacIntyre, 1994; Horwitz, 1986) consistently shows that the perceived audience for an utterance directly affects its quality. Even knowing that a recording might be reviewed later is enough to degrade performance.
For nthoughts to work, learners must feel completely safe making mistakes. That requires genuine privacy, not just a privacy policy.
Our architecture
nthoughts separates data into three categories:
1. Transient audio (never stored)
Raw audio captured by the browser microphone is processed in real time by the WebSpeech API. The transcription is what gets stored — not the audio. For pronunciation scoring, a short clip is sent to our AI provider's endpoint over an encrypted connection for scoring, and is not retained after the API response.
2. Mistake logs (encrypted, user-controlled)
When Maya identifies an error in your spoken output, the error pattern (not the audio) is stored in an encrypted, user-specific database partition. This is what populates your Leitner spaced repetition decks. You can view, export, or delete this data at any time from your account settings.
3. Session metadata (anonymised usage analytics)
We collect anonymised metrics — session count, session duration, feature usage — for product improvement. This data is never linked to individual user accounts.
GDPR and data deletion
nthoughts supports complete account deletion with single-click data purge. When you delete your account:
- All mistake logs and flashcard histories are permanently deleted from our database
- All session metadata is anonymised
- No data is retained in backups after the next backup cycle (maximum 30 days)
To request data deletion without deleting your account, email care@nthoughts.com.
Read the full data handling policy on our security and privacy page.