Privacy Policy

1. An Overview of Data Protection

General Information

The following information will provide you with an easy to navigate overview of what will happen with your personal data when you visit this website. The term "personal data" comprises all data that can be used to personally identify you. For detailed information about the subject matter of data protection, please consult our Data Protection Declaration, which we have included beneath this copy.

Data Recording on This Website

Who is the responsible party for the recording of data on this website (i.e., the "controller")?

The data on this website is processed by the operator of the website, whose contact information is available under section "Information about the responsible party (referred to as the 'controller' in the GDPR)" in this Privacy Policy.

How do we record your data?

We collect your data as a result of your sharing of your data with us. This may, for instance, be information you send us by e-mail.

Other data shall be recorded by our IT systems automatically or after you consent to its recording during your website visit. This data comprises primarily technical information (e.g., web browser, operating system, or time the site was accessed). This information is recorded automatically when you access this website.

What are the purposes we use your data for?

A portion of the information is generated to guarantee the error free provision of the website. Other data may be used to analyze your user patterns.

What rights do you have as far as your information is concerned?

You have the right to receive information about the source, recipients, and purposes of your archived personal data at any time without having to pay a fee for such disclosures. You also have the right to demand that your data are rectified or eradicated. If you have consented to data processing, you have the option to revoke this consent at any time, which shall affect all future data processing. Moreover, you have the right to demand that the processing of your data be restricted under certain circumstances. Furthermore, you have the right to log a complaint with the competent supervising agency.

Please do not hesitate to contact us at any time if you have questions about this or any other data protection related issues.

2. Hosting

We are hosting the content of our website at the following provider:

External Hosting

This website is hosted externally by Vercel. Personal data collected on this website are stored on the servers of the host. These may include, but are not limited to, IP addresses, contact requests, metadata and communications, contract information, contact information, names, web page access, and other data generated through a web site.

The external hosting serves the purpose of fulfilling the contract with our potential and existing customers (Art. 6(1)(b) GDPR) and in the interest of secure, fast, and efficient provision of our online services by a professional provider (Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR). If appropriate consent has been obtained, the processing is carried out exclusively on the basis of Art. 6 (1)(a) GDPR and § 25 (1) TDDDG, insofar the consent includes the storage of cookies or the access to information in the user's end device (e.g., device fingerprinting) within the meaning of the TDDDG. This consent can be revoked at any time.

Our host will only process your data to the extent necessary to fulfil its performance obligations and to follow our instructions with respect to such data. We have concluded a data processing agreement (DPA) with our host pursuant to Art. 28 GDPR.

We are using the following host:

Vercel Inc.
340 S Lemon Ave #4133
Walnut, CA 91789
United States of America

Details: https://vercel.com/legal/privacy-policy.

Data Transfer to the USA

Vercel Inc. is based in the United States. When you visit this website, your data (including your IP address) is therefore transferred to the USA and processed there. Vercel Inc. is certified under the EU-U.S. Data Privacy Framework (DPF), which the European Commission has recognised as providing an adequate level of data protection (Art. 45 GDPR, adequacy decision of 10 July 2023). In addition, where required, the transfer is safeguarded by the EU Standard Contractual Clauses (Art. 46(2)(c) GDPR) included in Vercel's Data Processing Addendum. Information on Vercel's DPF certification is available at dataprivacyframework.gov.

Please note that, despite these safeguards, U.S. authorities may under certain conditions access personal data without you being able to assert effective legal remedies comparable to those in the EU.

3. General Information and Mandatory Information

Data Protection

The operators of this website and its pages take the protection of your personal data very seriously. Hence, we handle your personal data as confidential information and in compliance with the statutory data protection regulations and this Data Protection Declaration.

Whenever you use this website, a variety of personal information will be collected. Personal data comprises data that can be used to personally identify you. This Data Protection Declaration explains which data we collect as well as the purposes we use this data for. It also explains how, and for which purpose the information is collected.

We herewith advise you that the transmission of data via the Internet (i.e., through e-mail communications) may be prone to security gaps. It is not possible to completely protect data against third-party access.

Information About the Responsible Party (referred to as the "controller" in the GDPR)

The data processing controller on this website is:

Wai-Hung Man
c/o Postflex #9655
Emsdettener Str. 10
48268 Greven
Germany

Email: info [at] waibytes.net

The controller is the natural person or legal entity that single-handedly or jointly with others makes decisions as to the purposes of and resources for the processing of personal data (e.g., names, e-mail addresses, etc.).

Storage Duration

Unless a more specific storage period has been specified in this privacy policy, your personal data will remain with us until the purpose for which it was collected no longer applies. If you assert a justified request for deletion or revoke your consent to data processing, your data will be deleted, unless we have other legally permissible reasons for storing your personal data (e.g., tax or commercial law retention periods); in the latter case, the deletion will take place after these reasons cease to apply.

General Information on the Legal Basis for Data Processing on This Website

If you have consented to data processing, we process your personal data on the basis of Art. 6(1)(a) GDPR or Art. 9 (2)(a) GDPR, if special categories of data are processed according to Art. 9 (1) DSGVO. In the case of explicit consent to the transfer of personal data to third countries, the data processing is also based on Art. 49 (1)(a) GDPR. If you have consented to the storage of cookies or to the access to information in your end device (e.g., via device fingerprinting), the data processing is additionally based on § 25 (1) TDDDG. The consent can be revoked at any time. If your data is required for the fulfillment of a contract or for the implementation of pre-contractual measures, we process your data on the basis of Art. 6(1)(b) GDPR. Furthermore, if your data is required for the fulfillment of a legal obligation, we process it on the basis of Art. 6(1)(c) GDPR. Furthermore, the data processing may be carried out on the basis of our legitimate interest according to Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR. Information on the relevant legal basis in each individual case is provided in the following paragraphs of this privacy policy.

Recipients of Personal Data

In the scope of our business activities, we cooperate with various external parties. In some cases, this also requires the transfer of personal data to these external parties. We only disclose personal data to external parties if this is required as part of the fulfillment of a contract, if we are legally obligated to do so (e.g., disclosure of data to tax authorities), if we have a legitimate interest in the disclosure pursuant to Art. 6 (1)(f) GDPR, or if another legal basis permits the disclosure of this data. When using processors, we only disclose personal data of our customers on the basis of a valid contract on data processing. In the case of joint processing, a joint processing agreement is concluded.

Revocation of Your Consent to the Processing of Data

A wide range of data processing transactions are possible only subject to your express consent. You can also revoke at any time any consent you have already given us. This shall be without prejudice to the lawfulness of any data collection that occurred prior to your revocation.

Right to Object to the Collection of Data in Special Cases; Right to Object to Direct Advertising (Art. 21 GDPR)

Right to Log a Complaint with the Competent Supervisory Agency

In the event of violations of the GDPR, data subjects are entitled to log a complaint with a supervisory agency, in particular in the member state where they usually maintain their domicile, place of work or at the place where the alleged violation occurred. The right to log a complaint is in effect regardless of any other administrative or court proceedings available as legal recourses.

Right to Data Portability

You have the right to have data that we process automatically on the basis of your consent or in fulfillment of a contract handed over to you or to a third party in a common, machine-readable format. If you should demand the direct transfer of the data to another controller, this will be done only if it is technically feasible.

Information About, Rectification and Eradication of Data

Within the scope of the applicable statutory provisions, you have the right to demand information about your archived personal data, their source and recipients as well as the purpose of the processing of your data at any time. You may also have a right to have your data rectified or eradicated. If you have questions about this subject matter or any other questions about personal data, please do not hesitate to contact us at any time.

Right to Demand Processing Restrictions

You have the right to demand the imposition of restrictions as far as the processing of your personal data is concerned. To do so, you may contact us at any time. The right to demand restriction of processing applies in the following cases:

• In the event that you should dispute the correctness of your data archived by us, we will usually need some time to verify this claim. During the time that this investigation is ongoing, you have the right to demand that we restrict the processing of your personal data.
• If the processing of your personal data was/is conducted in an unlawful manner, you have the option to demand the restriction of the processing of your data instead of demanding the eradication of this data.
• If we do not need your personal data any longer and you need it to exercise, defend or claim legal entitlements, you have the right to demand the restriction of the processing of your personal data instead of its eradication.
• If you have raised an objection pursuant to Art. 21(1) GDPR, your rights and our rights will have to be weighed against each other. As long as it has not been determined whose interests prevail, you have the right to demand a restriction of the processing of your personal data.

If you have restricted the processing of your personal data, these data — with the exception of their archiving — may be processed only subject to your consent or to claim, exercise or defend legal entitlements or to protect the rights of other natural persons or legal entities or for important public interest reasons cited by the European Union or a member state of the EU.

SSL and/or TLS Encryption

For security reasons and to protect the transmission of confidential content, such as inquiries you submit to us as the website operator, this website uses either an SSL or a TLS encryption program. You can recognize an encrypted connection by checking whether the address line of the browser switches from "http://" to "https://" and also by the appearance of the lock icon in the browser line.

If the SSL or TLS encryption is activated, data you transmit to us cannot be read by third parties.

4. Recording of Data on This Website

Data Stored on Your Device

Hanzi Garden has no user accounts. Whatever the site needs to remember for you is kept only in your own browser (its local storage and cache storage) and is never transmitted to us or to anyone else:

• My words — the words in your default collection "My words" (dictionary entry number, characters and readings), from which you print practice sheets and which you review.
• Collections — any further word lists you create (for example one per class or chapter) or save from a shared link or a word list: their names, the words in them, which one is active and whether it is included in review. Collection names stay on your device unless you put one into a share link yourself.
• Review history — for each word you review — from your collections or in a list session — its spaced-repetition schedule (next due date, intervals, number of reviews and lapses) and the day you first reviewed it (for the new-words-per-day limit), so the review page knows what to show you next.
• Review preferences — your review mode, how many new words per day and which collections a review session includes.
• Practice-sheet layout — the layout you last created a practice sheet with (grid, cell size, rows, tracing characters and which extra lines were shown), so the next sheet starts the same way. It is saved when you create a sheet and never includes the title or the words.
• Settings — colour theme, script (simplified or traditional), pronunciation (Mandarin or Cantonese), tone colours, your preferred voices, speech rate and the voice for the audio download.
• Reader draft — the text in the reader’s input box (at most 20,000 characters) and when it was saved, so that it survives a reload. It is saved shortly after you type, paste, pick a sample text or open a file. This is on by default, and the reader shows a notice while it is on. “Clear” and “New text” delete the draft; “Don’t keep drafts” deletes it and stops saving, after which only that choice is stored. The draft is not part of the export.
• Backup copies — if a stored value (your words, a collection, review history, review preferences, the practice-sheet layout, settings or the reader draft) can no longer be read (for example after an update), the unreadable value is kept as a copy instead of being thrown away, so it can still be recovered.
• Hints — whether you have dismissed the "Add to Home Screen" hint, so it is not shown again.
• Mandarin voice model — only if you start an audio download in the reader: a speech model of about 130 MB, downloaded from this website and kept in your browser's cache storage so the next download can start straight away. The audio is generated on your device; your text is never uploaded.
• Offline copies — a service worker keeps copies of the pages, scripts, fonts and stroke-order data you have loaded, so the site opens faster and also works offline. Like your browser's normal cache, these are copies of our public content and contain nothing you have entered.

Export and import: in the settings and on the review page you can export your learning data (your words and collections, review history, review preferences and settings) as a JSON file that your browser saves to your device, and import such a file again. The file is created and read entirely in your browser and is never uploaded.

This information is stored and read only to provide the functions of this website that you use (§ 25 (2) no. 2 TDDDG); no consent is required for this, and we have no access to it.

To delete it: you can remove words on the practice-sheet page. Removing words keeps their review history, so tidying up a list never costs you progress; "Reset review history" on the review page deletes it for one collection or for all of them. To remove everything at once (including collections, review history, settings, the voice model and offline copies), delete the stored data for this website in your browser settings (usually under "Cookies and site data").

Text Reader

When you annotate a text in the reader, the text is sent over an encrypted connection to our server function (hosted by Vercel, see section 2), which looks up the words in the dictionary and sends the result back. The text is processed in memory for this purpose only; we neither store it nor write it to our logs. Creating audio from the text happens entirely on your device (see "Mandarin voice model" above). If you open a text file in the reader, it is read on your device and is not uploaded; as with pasted text, only the text is sent, and only when you click Annotate.

The legal basis is Art. 6(1)(b) GDPR — providing the function you requested.

Fonts

The Chinese display fonts (Noto Serif SC and Noto Serif TC) are served from this website itself. Your browser does not contact Google Fonts or any other font service, so no data such as your IP address is passed to a font provider. Apart from the analytics server described below, which we operate ourselves, our pages load nothing from other servers.

Pronunciation Audio

The speaker buttons use the speech synthesis built into your browser or operating system; this website does not send the text anywhere. Some browsers also offer online voices, however (in Chrome, for example, voices whose name starts with "Google"); when such a voice is used, your browser itself sends the text to its provider to be spoken. In the settings you can choose which of your browser's voices is used.

Cookies

This website does not set cookies for analysis or advertising purposes. Should technically required cookies become necessary for certain functions in the future, they would be stored on the basis of Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR; the operator of the website has a legitimate interest in the storage of required cookies to ensure the technically error-free and optimized provision of the operator's services.

You have the option to set up your browser in such a manner that you will be notified any time cookies are placed and to permit the acceptance of cookies only in specific cases. You may also exclude the acceptance of cookies in certain cases or in general or activate the delete-function for the automatic eradication of cookies when the browser closes. If cookies are deactivated, the functions of this website may be limited.

Plausible Analytics (Self-Hosted)

We use a self-hosted instance of Plausible Analytics, a privacy-friendly web analytics tool, served from plausible.cellius.de (operated by us). Plausible does not use cookies, does not store any data in your browser, and does not collect personal data or cross-site / cross-device tracking identifiers. IP addresses are only used transiently to generate a daily, salted, one-way hash that allows Plausible to count unique visits — the hash is not stored and the raw IP address is discarded immediately. Aggregated, anonymous metrics (page views, referrer, country, browser, operating system, device type) are stored on our analytics server in Germany.

The legal basis for this processing is our legitimate interest pursuant to Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR in understanding how our website is used in order to improve it. Because Plausible neither sets cookies nor accesses information stored on your device, no consent under § 25 (1) TDDDG is required. You may object to this processing at any time by enabling Do Not Track or Global Privacy Control in your browser (then no page view or event is sent at all) or by using a script blocker.

Usage Events (Aggregate Counts)

Besides page views, our Plausible instance counts a few actions, so we can see whether the site's tools are actually useful, for example how many practice sheets were created in a week. Each event is counted only in aggregate. It carries no identifier, no words, no titles and no text you entered: only the name of the event and, where listed below, values from a fixed set.

These are the events. Numbers are only ever sent as ranges (1, 2–5, 6–10, 11–20, 21–50, 51–100, 101+; text length 1–50, 51–200, 201–1000, 1001–5000, 5001+ characters):

• sheet_generated — a practice sheet was created: number of words (range); source (collection, shared set or sample); grid; script; reading (pinyin or jyutping); whether a meaning line and a title were used (yes/no, never the title itself)
• review_session_completed — a review session was finished: mode (recognition, recall or listening); number of cards (range); source (your words or a list)
• text_annotated — a text was annotated in the reader: its length (range) and how it got there (pasted, sample, uploaded file or restored draft), never the text
• audio_exported — an audio file was created in the reader: text length (range)
• set_opened — a shared word-set link was opened: number of words (range) and a short code computed from the word list (the first 8 characters of its SHA-256 hash). The code contains neither the words nor the title. For sets we publish ourselves we can tell which set it is; for sets you put together we only see that the same set was opened again
• set_shared — a word-set link was shared: number of words (range) and where from (list, collection, festival, pack, shared set or idioms)
• bulk_added — several words were added at once: source (list, text, festival, shared set, pack or idioms) and number of words (range)
• projector_opened — projector flashcards were opened: number of words (range) and source (shared set or collection)

Before anything is sent, the page address is cut at "?" and "#". So the words in a shared word-set link, a search term or a review list never reach the statistics. Only campaign tags that begin with utm_ are kept.

These events have the same legal basis as the page views (Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR). Nothing is stored on your device for them, so no consent under § 25 (1) TDDDG is required.

Server Log Files

The provider of this website and its pages automatically collects and stores information in so-called server log files, which your browser communicates to us automatically. The information comprises: the type and version of browser used, the used operating system, the referrer URL, the hostname of the accessing computer, the time of the server inquiry and the IP address. This data is not merged with other data sources. This data is recorded on the basis of Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR. The operator of the website has a legitimate interest in the technically error free depiction and the optimization of the operator's website.