Privacy Policy

  1. General
    This Privacy Policy applies to HeyKorea websites, mobile apps, and related services (“Service”). By using the Service, you agree with EUP’s collection, use, and sharing of your personal information in accordance with the terms of this Privacy Policy. Certain HeyKorea services are subject to additional or different terms..
    Please note that EUP is constantly testing and improving our product features. Any features discussed in this Privacy Policy may not be available to all users or in all jurisdictions.
  2. Information We Collect
    When you use the Service, EUP may collect the following personal information about you.
    a. Account Registration
    To register for a HeyKorea  account, you may provide us with your age and email address. In some countries, you may also provide us with your phone number.
    You may also register for a HeyKorea account using social logins: Google Sign-In and Apple Sign-In. If you register for HeyKorea using a social login, EUP may receive information about you from your social login provider, including your email address and basic profile information (such as name). Apple Sign-In allows you to hide your email address through Apple's private relay service.
    You can manage your     HeyKorea  account and social logins from your settings.
    b. Profile Page & User-Generated Content
    After you register for your HeyKorea account, a profile page will be created for you ("Profile"). Your Profile is populated by information you submit, such as your name, username, and profile picture. Your date of birth and email address are not displayed on your Profile.
    Your Profile also includes information about your learning progress, such as the languages you are learning, your learning statistics, your achievements, and your position on public leaderboards.
    Your username, profile picture, learning statistics, and achievements may be visible to other HeyKorea users through the in-app leaderboard. You can adjust leaderboard visibility in your settings.
    EUP may review profile information (such as username, display name, profile picture) to ensure compliance with our Terms and Conditions of Service. EUP may restrict or delete profile content if it violates our Community Guidelines or for any other reason.
    c. HeyKorea Premium
    If you subscribe to HeyKorea Premium (or our HeySpeak add-on), you may interact with Artificial Intelligence ("AI") features. Different AI features use different third-party service providers:
    - Speech Recognition: Your speech is converted to text using your device's built-in speech recognition (Apple Speech for iOS, Google Speech Services for Android). Recognition happens on-device or via the operating system's services according to Apple/Google's privacy practices.
    - Pronunciation Assessment: To evaluate your pronunciation, short audio clips may be sent to Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services via our backend.
    - AI Conversation (HeySpeak): Your messages and conversation history with our AI conversation partners are sent to our backend at assistant.heykorea.org, which forwards them to OpenAI (a service provided by OpenAI, L.L.C.) for generating AI responses.
    You may withdraw consent for AI data processing at any time by contacting [email protected] or via Settings if available. Withdrawing consent will disable AI-powered features.
    Please do not submit sensitive personal information (such as your full name, ID numbers, financial data, or passwords) when using AI features.
    d. Speaking Activities
    Some activities involve you speaking into the HeyKorea app. To recognize speech, your audio may be sent to a third-party provider. Additionally, EUP may collect and analyze your speech to help us understand the effectiveness of our lessons and to improve the product. You may skip speaking activities.
    Speech samples may be retained by our service providers (Apple, Google, Microsoft) and by our backend for the purpose of providing the service and improving its accuracy, subject to those providers' privacy policies and our data retention rules. To request deletion of your audio data, please contact [email protected]
    f. Activity Data & IP Addresses
    When you use the Service, we may generate data about your use of the Service, which may include your browser and device data, log data, device ID, and IP address. We will also generate data regarding your engagement in educational activities on the Service.
    h. Cookies
    When you access the HeyKorea website, we store certain data from your browser using cookies. A cookie is a piece of data stored on the user’s computer tied to data about the user. We use session ID cookies to confirm that users are logged in. If you do not want your data to be collected by cookies, there is a simple procedure in most browsers that allows you to deny or accept the cookie feature. However, cookies may be necessary to provide you with certain features available on the website (e.g., customized information).
    i.Firebase Analytics
    We use Firebase Analytics, which is a web analytics tool that helps us understand how users engage with our website. Like many services, Firebase Analytics uses first-party cookies to track user interactions, as in our case, where they are used to collect information about how users use our site. This information is used to compile reports and to help us improve our site. These reports disclose website trends without identifying individual visitors.
  3. How We Process Your Information
    EUP may process your personal information according to the following legal bases: to provide products or services you request, to promote EUP’s legitimate interests, to comply with legal obligations, and with your consent. In particular, EUP may process and share your personal information in the following ways:
    a. Providing and improving the Service
    EUP will process your personal information to provide and improve the Service. For example, we will use the information you provide to maintain your Profile and learning progress, display your Profile to other users (unless you make it private), personalize learning content, detect and fix bugs, perform research, and provide customer service to you.
    EUP may share personal information with third parties that help us provide or improve the Service, including     AI vendors, hosting providers, search engine providers, analytics providers, support providers, and payment processors. EUP may also share your information with third-party vendors that support product features such as AI, speech recognition, and content moderation.
    If you redeem a promotion code to gain a     HeyKorea subscription, we may share data regarding your usage of HeyKorea with the organization that provided the promotion code to you.
    b. Communicating with you
    EUP will use the email address or phone number you provide to send you the following types of messages:

You may opt-out of receiving non-essential messages in your settings.

c. Complying with law and preventing harmful activities
EUP may process and share personal information if necessary to comply with legal requests, such as subpoenas or court orders. EUP may share personal information when we believe it is necessary to comply with law, to protect our interests or property, to prevent fraud or other illegal activity, to assist law enforcement, or to prevent imminent harm. This may include sharing information with other companies, lawyers, agents, or government agencies.
d. Personalized advertising
EUP may process and share your personal information for the purpose of providing you with personalized advertising. To provide personalized advertising, we work with a variety of third-party advertising networks, marketing analytics service providers, and website analysis firms, such as Google, Facebook, Oath, and Unity. These third-party advertising service providers collect and use personal information about your visits to and use of the Service, as well as other websites, in order to serve you with advertisements and content tailored to meet your preferences and likely interests, and better understand ad effectiveness. Aggregate demographic and interest data will also be used for market research purposes.

You can opt out of receiving personalized advertising in your settings. In addition, your mobile devices may offer settings that let you make choices about the collection, use, and transfer of mobile app information for personalized ads (for example, Apple iOS’ Advertising ID and Google Android’s Advertising ID). Users in certain jurisdictions (including the European Union and United Kingdom) are opted out of personalized advertising by default, but may opt in.
e. Anonymous information
EUP may process aggregated, de-identified, or otherwise anonymous or anonymized information for any purpose. Such information is not considered personal information.

  1. Your Data Subject Rights
    You also have the following rights in relation to the personal information we hold about you, in addition to any other rights required by applicable law:

We do not sell your personal information for monetary gain. However, certain data sharing activities, such as with service providers for advertising or analytics, may be classified as a "sale" under some laws

You may update or correct your information in your account settings. To make another privacy-related request, please send an email to [email protected].
Please note that these rights are not absolute and EUP may refuse requests to exercise data subject rights if there is a legitimate reason, such as if we cannot authenticate your identity, if the request could violate the rights of a third party or applicable law, or if the request could interfere with a EUP service or prevent us from delivering a service you requested.
You may also have the right to make a GDPR complaint to the relevant Supervisory Authority.

  1. Data Retention
    EUP will generally retain your personal information until your account is deleted. However, EUP may retain certain information longer if necessary to provide our Service, defend our legitimate interests or those of third parties, comply with legal requirements, resolve or defend ourselves in disputes, investigate misuse or disruption of the Service, or perform agreements. We may also retain anonymous data indefinitely.
  2. Child Users
    We know that children deserve extra privacy protection. That’s why we treat Child Users (meaning users under the age of 13 in the United States or another age of digital consent in their country) differently to ensure their parents are in control and we only collect the bare minimum information we need to make HeyKorea work.
    Child Users are permitted to create a     HeyKorea account, but we ask them to provide their parent’s email address instead of their own, and to register using a username that is not tied to their real name.
    After a Child User registers, we will send an email to the parent’s email address about EUP’s privacy practices regarding Child Users, including what personal information we collect and how we use, share, and protect that personal information. The email also explains how parents can request to access, change, or delete information about their child.
    All Child Users receive the following special treatment when using     HeyKorea (“Age Restrictions”):

Child Users in certain jurisdictions (including the United States, European Union, United Kingdom, Norway, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, South Korea, and Japan) are subject to these additional Age Restrictions:

We have activated limited social features for some Child Users. Child Users with these features active can only participate in social features on a limited basis as follows:

Child Users will have access to leaderboards but will receive the following special treatment:

Parents may remove their child’s Age Restrictions. Additionally, parents can report any abuse to us at [email protected].
In addition, all users under the age of 16 receive the following special treatment:

With regards to the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, EUP collects personal information from children under the age of 13 for the sole purpose of performing internal operations of the Service. If we discover that we have unknowingly collected additional personal information from these children, we will delete it. If you believe this to be the case, please contact us at HeyKorea@eupgroup.net.

  1. Do Not Track
    The Service is not designed to respond to “do not track” signals sent by some browsers.
  2. Links to Third-Party Websites
    The Service may contain links to other websites. EUP is not responsible for the content or privacy practices of other websites, including any personal or financial information collected by third-party payment processors. We encourage users to be aware of the privacy policies of other websites they visit. This Privacy Policy applies only to information collected by EUP. Any time you click on a link (including advertising banners) or submit your personal information to a third-party website, you will be subject to that third party’s privacy policies.
  3. Privacy Policy Updates
    We may update our Privacy Policy to reflect changes to our information practices. If we do this and the changes are material, we will post a notice that we have made changes to this Privacy Policy on the Website for at least seven (7) days before the changes are made, and we will indicate the date these terms were last revised at the bottom of the Privacy Policy. Any revisions to this Privacy Policy will become effective at the end of that seven (7) day period.
  4. Data Transfer
    EUP is based in Vietnam and processes data in Vietnam, which may not provide equivalent levels of data protection as your home jurisdiction. EUP may transfer the data of users outside Vietnam to Vietnam.
    Decree No. 13/2023/ND-CP on Protection of Personal Data (“Decree 13”)
    EUP has responsibility for the processing of personal information it receives under the Decree 13 Principles and subsequently transfers to a third party acting as an agent on its behalf. EUP shall remain liable under the Decree 13 Principles if its agent processes such personal information in a manner inconsistent with the Decree 13 Principles, unless EUP proves that it is not responsible for the event giving rise to the damage.
    The Ministry of Public Security of Vietnam has jurisdiction over EUP’s compliance with the Decree 13 Principles. EUP may disclose personal information in response to lawful requests by Vietnamese authorities, including to meet national security or law enforcement requirements.
  5. Supplemental Terms in Certain Jurisdictions
    In some jurisdictions, the Service may be subject to supplemental privacy policies or local laws. For users in those jurisdictions, the applicable supplemental privacy policies and local laws will take precedence over this Privacy Policy to the extent they conflict.
  6. Compliance with Regulations

California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA): California residents have the rights outlined above, including the right to request access, deletion, or correction of personal data, and the right to opt-out of data sales or sharing, as well as other rights provided under the CCPA. For CCPA-specific inquiries, email us at  [email protected].

Virginia Consumer Data Protection Act (VCDPA): Virginia residents have the right to access, correct, delete, and obtain a copy of their personal data, as well as other rights provided under the VCDPA. To exercise these rights, contact us at  [email protected].

General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR): Users in the EU have rights under the GDPR, including access, correction, deletion, portability, and the right to restrict or object to data processing, as well as other rights provided under the GDPR. Requests can be sent to  [email protected].

Lei Geral de Proteção de Dados (LGPD): Brazilian users have rights under the LGPD, including access, correction, deletion, and portability of their data, as well as other rights provided under the LGPD. Requests can be sent to  [email protected].

  1. Contact Us
    EUP TECHNOLOGY.,JSC is the data controller of your data for the purposes of the General Data Protection Regulation (“GDPR”) and any relevant local legislation. EUP’s headquarters are located within Vietnam at: Room 802, 8th Floor, 315 Truong Chinh Building, Khuong Mai Ward, Thanh Xuan District, Hanoi City, Vietnam

For all data privacy inquiries and any questions or concerns you have about this Privacy Policy, please contact us at [email protected] or visit our websites: https://eupgroup.net/

Data Protection Officer (DPO): We have appointed a Data Protection Officer (DPO) to oversee compliance with data protection regulations. If you have any questions or concerns regarding your data, you may contact our DPO:

Name: Mr. ….

Email:    @eupgroup.net  

Phone: