Duolingo: Difference between revisions

According to Duolingo's mission statement, the goal of Duolingo is to make language learning "universally available."<ref>https://investors.duolingo.com/</ref> It states, "We created Duolingo so that everyone could have a chance. Free language education – no hidden fees, no premium content, just free."<ref>https://www.duolingo.com/info</ref> It goes on to say, "We believe true equality is when spending more can't buy you a better education."

Recently, some of the timed learning games inside the app are impossible to complete in the time allowed, even for a native speaker of the language. In order to win, the user needs to pay for a subscription to buy more time. This also means that the learning high scores can essentially be bought.

According to the privacy policy, if a Duolingo Max user utilizes artificial-intelligence (AI) features, a copy of their text or audio data will be shared with vendors such as [[OpenAI]].<ref>https://www.duolingo.com/privacy</ref> This is also similar for non-AI features, as Duolingo "may also collect and analyze your speech to help [it] understand the effectiveness of [its] lessons and to improve the product," though the data is anonymized.  

The policy states the app works with third-party advertising networks to personalize advertising, such as with [[Google]], [[Meta]], [[OAuth]], and [[Unity]]. Personalized advertising can be disabled in the app's settings.

The Exodus Privacy project lists as many as 13 tracking, advertising and analytics service libraries being present in the Android version of the app.<ref>https://reports.exodus-privacy.eu.org/de/reports/com.duolingo/latest/</ref> The app does not work for more than about one lesson without internet access, hence turning off internet access is not an option to prevent data exfiltration. The [https://trackercontrol.org/ F-Droid version of Tracker Control] can help with blocking some of the traffic to these services without impacting the functionality of the app.