Privacy Policy

1. The short version

This site collects one thing, and only if you offer it: your first name and email address, typed into the box that offers you free material. Nothing else. There is no sign-in, no tracking, and no analytics. You can read every page here without telling me who you are.

Four things are worth knowing, and the rest of this page is those four: the free-material box and what happens to what you type in it, your browser loading fonts and video stills from Google, buying a book sending you to a separate shop that does hold your details, and this site running on hosting that keeps ordinary access logs.

2. Who is responsible

Kim Sang-rok (김상록), trading as 로크파트너스, a sole proprietorship registered in the Republic of Korea.

Business registration no. 865-26-01691

Contact: maruacademy@rokp.world

3. No analytics, and no cookies

There is no analytics on this site. Nothing counts your visit, records which pages you read, or builds a profile of you, and no third-party measurement or advertising script runs here.

This site sets no cookies. It stores one thing in your browser, and it is not about you: when you close the box offering free material, a note is kept locally so the box leaves you alone for a month. It holds a date and nothing else, it never leaves your device, and I cannot read it. Clearing your browser data removes it, and the box comes back.

4. What your browser loads from elsewhere

Two things on these pages come from Google's servers rather than mine, and loading anything from a server tells that server your IP address, which page asked for it, and roughly what browser you are using.

Fonts. The typefaces here are served by Google Fonts and load on every page. Video stills. The preview images on the courses page are the YouTube thumbnails, served by Google.

The video player itself is different: it is not loaded until you press play. Until then there is a still image and nothing from the player. When you do press play, YouTube's privacy-enhanced player loads and YouTube's own terms apply to the playback.

5. When you buy a book

The shop is not on this site. Every buy button sends you to Stan Store, which takes the payment and holds the record of it, including your name, email and what you bought. I can see that record, and I use it for two things only: delivering what you bought, and sending you updated editions of products you own.

I never see your card details. Those are handled by Stan and its payment processor and never reach this site or me.

Terms of Sale covers what happens to that purchase. This page covers only the data side of it.

Read the Terms of Sale.

6. When you fill in a form

Apart from the free-material box in the next section, the forms here are Google Forms — joining Maru, or an enquiry — and what you type into one goes to Google and then to me. Google's privacy policy covers that collection; mine covers what I do with it afterwards, which is to read it and reply.

Writing to me by email is the same: I have your message and your address, and I keep them for as long as the conversation is useful.

7. The free material, and your address

A box appears once while you are reading, offering the Hangul video and the first week of the course for nothing. If you fill it in, your first name and email address are sent to a Google Apps Script I own, written to a Google spreadsheet in my own Drive, and used to send you one email with the material. That is the whole of it.

There is no mailing-list service in between. Your address is not uploaded to a marketing platform, not shared, not sold, and not used to advertise to you anywhere else.

I may write to you again about what I teach. If you would rather I did not, reply to that first email and say so, or write to the address below — either is enough and I do not ask why. You can also ask me to delete the row entirely, and I will.

If you close the box without filling it in, nothing is sent and nothing is recorded about you.

8. Hosting and server logs

This site is served by Cloudflare. Like any web host, it keeps short-lived technical logs of requests — IP address, time, page, browser — which exist to serve pages and to stop abuse. I do not use them to analyse readers and I do not join them to anything else.

The journal pages read their text from Notion when the page is built on the server. That request carries no information about you.

9. Where in the world

I am in Korea, so anything that reaches me is held in Korea. The services above are American companies and hold data on their own infrastructure: Stan Store for purchases, Google for fonts, forms, video and the spreadsheet the free-material addresses are written to, Cloudflare for hosting, Notion for the journal's text.

10. How long things are kept

Purchase records are kept for as long as the shop is open, because that is how a buyer gets a lost file re-sent and how an updated edition reaches the right people. Email conversations are kept while they are useful and deleted when they are not.

An address given for the free material is kept until you ask me to remove it, and removing it means deleting the row rather than marking it. Nothing else is kept, because nothing else is collected.

11. What you can ask me to do

Write to me and I will tell you everything I hold about you, correct it, or delete it. If you are in the EU, the UK or Korea you have those rights in law — access, correction, erasure, objection, and portability — and you do not have to say which law you are using. I will answer within a month.

If you want to be removed from product-update emails, say so and that is the end of it; it does not affect anything you have already bought.

12. Children

The books and courses here are written for adults. I do not knowingly collect anything from a child under 14, and if you believe I have, write to me and I will delete it.

13. Changes to this page

The date at the top changes when a section changes. It is typed by hand, so it marks a real edit rather than a rebuild.