Your progress, your streak, your review schedule, your reminder setting and your subscription tier are saved on this device only, under names beginning “hahu/”. If you used an early version, one older entry named “amharic-buddy/progress/v1” may still be there too — it was copied across rather than deleted, so that a failed copy could never lose your progress. None of it is uploaded, and there is nothing to upload it to: no account, no sign-in, no sync. Clearing this site’s data — or deleting the app — erases all of it, and there is no copy anywhere else.

A fixed list of twelve things that happened: the app was opened, onboarding was finished, a lesson was started, a lesson was finished, a drill answer was right or wrong, a review session was started, a review session was finished, a word was practised, a sound was played, the pronunciation key was opened, the Fidel grid was searched, and a paid section was shown. Each one carries counts and nothing else — how many questions, how many correct, which family by number. None of those twelve can carry text. The list of what may be recorded is written so that anything you type or read would fail to compile, and a test holds that in place. Your searches, your answers and the words you look up are never sent anywhere. One thing alongside them is not a count: the address of the screen you moved to, such as “/lesson/h/drill”, is sent to Google each time you navigate. It is the route, never a search box or an answer.

The website sets two cookies, “_ga” and one beginning “_ga_”, for Google Analytics. They hold a randomly generated number and nothing else — no name, no account, nothing you typed. The number lets Google recognise a returning browser as the same one, which is how we can tell whether people come back to keep learning rather than visiting once. They last about two years, though several browsers shorten that to a week or so on their own. That number is a way of telling browsers apart, so we describe it as an identifier rather than calling the site anonymous. It is not linked to anything about you, because the app holds nothing about you to link it to.

No cookie is set at all. The rules there say a site should ask before storing anything on your device, and we have not built a way to ask — so rather than set one anyway, we do without. Your visit is still counted, as an event with no number attached, which means Hahu can see that a page was opened but cannot tell whether you have been here before. That means the countries of the European Union, plus Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway and the United Kingdom — worked out by Google from your network address. It is not the whole of Europe: in Switzerland, for one, the law does not require us to ask first, so the cookie described above is set as normal.

Two companies, both acting for us: Vercel hosts the website. Like any host it records the requests it serves — the page, the time, your browser and network address — to run and protect the service. It sets no cookies for this. Google receives the analytics described above: the page you are on, the site or search you arrived from, your browser and device type, and an approximate location — roughly city level — that Google works out from your network address. We never see that address. Advertising is switched off: no Google Signals, no ad personalisation, and advertising permissions are refused before the first measurement is sent. Nothing is sold, and nothing is shared with anyone else. Google deletes the detailed records — the individual events, and anything tied to that random number — after 14 months, though that clock can restart on a later visit depending on a setting in the property. The summary totals behind Google’s standard reports are not covered by that setting and are kept indefinitely; those are counts, with no way back to a particular browser.

The iOS and Android apps contain no Google tag at all and set no cookies. Everything above about cookies, Google and hosting applies to amharic-buddy.xyz only. On a phone, the app records nothing beyond what it keeps on the device.

Blocking cookies for this site in your browser’s settings stops the cookie, and with it any way of recognising you on a later visit — but the visit itself is still measured, in the same cookieless way it is across the EEA and the UK. To stop the measurement as well, there are two routes and they work differently. A content blocker stops the analytics loading at all, so nothing is requested from Google. Google’s own opt-out add-on lets the script load and then stops it sending any measurement. Hahu works exactly the same with either on — nothing here is used to decide what you are shown, and no feature depends on being measured.

Hahu asks for no personal details from anyone — no name, no account, no age. Advertising and cross-site features are switched off for every visitor.

The date at the top moves when the wording does. There is no mailing list to notify, because there is no list of anyone to notify.