The ViolinAcademy

Privacy Policy

Version 2.0 · September 2026 · Morales Violin Education GmbH

This policy explains which personal data we process, why, on what legal basis, who receives it, how long we keep it and what your rights are.

1) Who is responsible

Morales Violin Education GmbH (brands: The Violinacademy and Die Geigenakademie), Giselbertstraße 14, 51429 Bergisch Gladbach, Germany, represented by its Managing Director Antoine Morales. E-mail: info@theviolinacademy.com, phone: +49 176 9875 8868. More in our Impressum.

2) What this policy covers

All our programmes, The Violinacademy and Die Geigenakademie, in every language: our websites theviolinacademy.com and antoinemorales.com, including our online store, our student tools and learning platform, and our e-mails, text messages, calls and lessons.

3) Visiting our websites

When you open a page, your browser sends technical data to our hosting providers: your IP address, the date and time, the page, the page you came from, your browser and operating system. They need it to deliver the page and keep it in server logs for a short time, for security. Our pages also use the country derived from your IP address, to apply the right regional rules (section 4) and to preselect your country in forms. Legal basis: our legitimate interest in a secure, working website (Art. 6 (1) (f) GDPR).

We count visits with a cookie-free statistics service. It stores nothing on your device, does not keep your IP address and gives us only totals. On theviolinacademy.com, a page that breaks sends a technical error report to our error-monitoring service, without your name or e-mail address; for visitors outside the EU, the UK and Switzerland it may include a short replay of the page with all text masked. Legal basis: our legitimate interest in knowing which pages work and in fixing errors (Art. 6 (1) (f)).

For visitors in the EU, the EEA, the UK and Switzerland, our websites store nothing on your device for statistics or advertising, so there is no cookie banner. Our store sets only the cookies it needs to work, for your cart, your login and secure payment, which need no consent (§ 25 (2) no. 2 TDDDG).

4) Advertising outside the EU, the UK and Switzerland

People in the EU, the EEA, the UK and Switzerland, visitors whose country cannot be determined and browsers that send the Global Privacy Control signal are left out: for them none of the following happens. For everyone else:

Google Ads. On theviolinacademy.com we load Google’s advertising tag (Google Ireland Limited). It sets advertising cookies and adds your browser to our remarketing audiences, so that we can show you our ads on Google and YouTube. You can opt out at adssettings.google.com.
Meta. Our server tells Meta Platforms Ireland Limited when you view a page, send a form, book a consultation or buy. It sends your IP address and browser type, a random visitor id kept in your browser, the click id if you came from one of our ads and, for forms, bookings and purchases, your e-mail address, name, phone number and country in hashed form. Meta uses this to measure our ads and to build audiences, and may link it to your Meta account (facebook.com/privacy/policy). We and Meta are jointly responsible for collecting and sending this data; Meta alone is responsible for what it does with it afterwards (Art. 26 GDPR).

Legal basis: our legitimate interest in measuring and targeting our advertising (Art. 6 (1) (f)). You can object at any time by e-mail to info@theviolinacademy.com or with Global Privacy Control.

5) Embedded content

Some pages embed content that loads from other providers’ servers, which then receive your IP address and browser data: our videos (from our video-hosting provider in the EU), the booking calendar and interactive sheet music (from providers in the USA), and YouTube videos. YouTube videos use the privacy-enhanced mode: the page loads only the preview image from Google, the player loads when you click, and YouTube (Google Ireland Limited) may then set cookies. Legal basis: our legitimate interest in showing you this content (Art. 6 (1) (f)).

6) Forms, e-mails and newsletters

When you sign up for the free masterclass or the waitlist, or write to us, we process what you enter (name, e-mail address and, for the waitlist, your phone number), the page and campaign you came from and the consent wording you accepted. We give you access to the masterclass, send you what you asked for and, if you agreed, e-mails about the masterclass and our programmes. Every marketing e-mail has an unsubscribe link and measures opens and clicks. Service e-mails such as confirmations and receipts are part of our service. Legal basis: Art. 6 (1) (b) GDPR for what you asked for, your consent for marketing e-mails (Art. 6 (1) (a)).

We also note the country you are in (from your phone number or IP address) and a public statistic about it, to decide which enquiries we follow up first. The masterclass page may show other visitors that someone recently signed up, with first name and country only. Some links in our e-mails carry your contact id; when you open such a page, we note that you did and, for videos, how much you watched. Legal basis for these three: our legitimate interest in following up enquiries well and sending useful e-mails (Art. 6 (1) (f)).

7) Consultations

You book through our booking calendar: name, e-mail address, phone number, time zone and your answers. We create a record for you, send you reminders by e-mail and, if you opted in, by text message, and meet you by video call. Before the call you may send us a video of your playing. With your consent, the call is recorded and transcribed by an AI notetaker that you see in the call, and the transcript is summarised with AI so that we can prepare your programme; if you say no at the start, we do not record. Legal basis: steps before a contract that you asked for (Art. 6 (1) (b)); your consent for the recording and for text messages (Art. 6 (1) (a)).

8) Students

To conclude and carry out your contract we process your name, address, contact details, contract and payment data, your programme, level, teacher and learning activity, and the videos you send us (Art. 6 (1) (b) GDPR). We keep what tax and commercial law requires (Art. 6 (1) (c)).

Your contract is signed electronically; the signing service records the time and IP address of each signature.
Card payments are processed by Stripe Payments Europe, Limited (Ireland), PayPal payments by PayPal (Europe) S.à r.l. et Cie, S.C.A. (Luxembourg), bank transfers by our bank. We never see your full card number. The payment providers may run fraud checks under their own policies.
On our learning platform, other members see your name, profile picture and community posts. In live group sessions, other participants see and hear you if your camera and microphone are on.
You receive our weekly student newsletter as part of your membership; you can unsubscribe at any time.
Your teacher sees what they need to teach you. Some of our teachers work from the USA, inside our systems and bound in writing to confidentiality. If yours does, your data reaches the USA as far as this is necessary to give you the lessons you contracted for. There is no adequacy decision for this; the basis is Art. 49 (1) (b) GDPR.
We publish testimonials or videos of you only with your separate consent, which you can withdraw at any time (Art. 6 (1) (a)).

9) Lessons, recordings and AI

Calls, lessons and live group sessions are recorded as a standard part of our programmes. We tell you at the start of each session, and you may keep your camera off. Recordings are transcribed and analysed with AI to give you replays, summaries, feedback and practice recommendations, and to review our teaching. Replays of group sessions are available to the members of that group. Our AI providers work as our processors and do not use your data to train their models. We may use recordings and analyses in de-identified form to improve our teaching and to build our own teaching tools.

Legal basis: Art. 6 (1) (b) for lessons, replays and feedback; our legitimate interest in good teaching (Art. 6 (1) (f)) for quality review, the training of our teachers and improvement. If you object, we exclude your recordings from those uses. If you mention health matters in a lesson, they are in the recording; tell us and we remove them.

10) Text messages (SMS)

If you give us your mobile number and opt in, we send text messages such as appointment reminders, onboarding information and one-to-one messages about your enquiry, registration or enrolment. Message frequency varies. Message and data rates may apply. Consent is not a condition of purchase. Reply STOP to opt out at any time or HELP for help. Carriers are not liable for delayed or undelivered messages. Legal basis: your consent (Art. 6 (1) (a)).

Mobile information will not be shared with third parties or affiliates for marketing or promotional purposes. All the other categories in this policy exclude text-messaging originator opt-in data and consent; this information will not be shared with any third parties.

11) Who receives your data

We use service providers for hosting, automation, our database, statistics and error monitoring, e-mail and text messages, customer management, booking, video calls, recording, transcription and AI analysis, video hosting, our learning platform, electronic signatures, file storage and internal planning. They process personal data only on our instructions, under data-processing agreements (Art. 28 GDPR). Google, Meta, Stripe and PayPal also process data on their own responsibility, as described above. Beyond that we share data with our teachers (section 8), with tax advisers and lawyers where needed, and with authorities where the law requires it.

Some providers are in the USA or Canada. Canada is covered by an adequacy decision of the European Commission, and so are US companies certified under the EU-U.S. Data Privacy Framework; with the other US providers we have agreed the EU standard contractual clauses (Art. 46 GDPR). On request we send you a copy of these clauses and the names of the recipients of your data.

12) How long we keep your data

We keep personal data only as long as we need it for the purpose we collected it for, then delete it, unless the law requires us to keep it: invoices and accounting records for 8 to 10 years, business letters, including contracts, for 6 years (German tax and commercial law). What we need to establish or defend legal claims we keep until the limitation period ends, usually after 3 years. After you unsubscribe, your e-mail address stays on a block list so that we do not write to you again.

13) Your rights

You have the right to access your data (Art. 15 GDPR), to have it corrected (Art. 16), erased (Art. 17) or its processing restricted (Art. 18), to receive it in a portable format (Art. 20), and to withdraw a consent at any time with effect for the future (Art. 7 (3)). You may complain to a data protection authority, for example the one responsible for us, the LDI NRW in Düsseldorf (www.ldi.nrw.de). To exercise a right, e-mail info@theviolinacademy.com.

Your right to object (Art. 21 GDPR)

Where we rely on our legitimate interests, you may object at any time for reasons arising from your particular situation. You may object to direct marketing at any time, without giving reasons. An e-mail to info@theviolinacademy.com is enough.

14) Do you have to give us your data?

No. But we cannot conclude or carry out a contract without the data it needs, and we cannot send you the masterclass without your e-mail address.

We update this policy when our services or the law change. The current version is always on this page.