How come this app had access to my contacts?

[Silly John Fatty]

Something very weird happened …

So I have this app installed called "Duolingo", you can learn languages with it and I've been using it for a month.

A few days ago, my mother has received the weirdest email ever.

The subject was "Your child has created a duolingo account" and it started with "Dear parent …".

Umm, yeah. I've been an adult for a while now, and if at all, it should be me who's getting warning emails, but whatever.

This was the entire email:

Your child has created a Duolingo account with the email address of [email address which resembled the one from my mother but wasn't hers] and with the username [username containing the name of my mother].

If this is not your child and you didn't create this account, click here to remove this email address.

If this is your child and you do not wish for your child to have a Duolingo account, you may contact us at privacy@duolingo.com to request that we delete the account. When we delete the account, we will also delete the personal data associated with it.

For more details about how we protect child data, please refer to Duolingo's Privacy Policy at Children's Privacy Policy.

Some features of Duolingo have been disabled on your child’s account, including leagues and events to protect your child’s privacy and safety. If you would like to remove these restrictions from your child’s account then please contact our support team to provide your consent at privacy@duolingo.com. In the future, once we’re sure your child is old enough we will automatically remove the restrictions, reset the settings to their defaults and make the settings visible for your child to configure how they choose. Your child’s safety online is important to us. Please teach your child not to share any personal data online, including their username and password.


Thanks,
The Duolingo Team

This is the weirdest thing ever … never did I do such thing. I only created an account for myself. How does this thing even know who my mother is, or what her email address is?

Turns out the App Store says that this app is collecting pretty much all information there is about you on your device, including your contacts.

I saw this before I downloaded it, but I thought I could still consent or not. And the weird thing is, I thought I didn't consent and the app therefore didn't have my data, because if I go to privacy > contacts for example, it is clearly shown that no app has access to my contacts.

This means that Apple's menu showing you which app has access to your contacts is just a nice facade and nothing more than that.

It seems to be much more relevant what is stated about the app in the app store.

This smells like gangster practices …

Now I'm thinking to go tell the police eventually.

 

[Feek]

Now I'm thinking to go tell the police eventually.

What do you expect them to do?

 

[Silly John Fatty]

What do you expect them to do?

I'm not sure, that's up to them. Probably they would make a criminal complaint against them. I live in a country with very strict data protection legislation.

I could also go directly to the data protection authority. I used them a few times, they are very straightforward and don't mess around, I was surprised and pleased to see this back then.

My problem is that apparently Apple is part of this game. They tell you the app is not having access to your contacts, but it is. That means some shady app has my contact list now.

It reminds me of when I disabled access to my microphone for Shazam in the privacy settings, but I could see use Shazam from the control center.

Apple is apparently just holding a facade when they talk about privacy. Behind the scenes, it seems like everyone has access to all your data, maybe even to your camera or microphone, and everyone can buy this data somewhere. That's how it seems to me.

Visually, the privacy is there, but technically it seems it's not. That's society these days, it's just about how it looks on the outside, what's inside doesn't matter (or should even be hidden!). Glitter outside, rotten inside 🙃

 

[iStorm]

When a child signs up for Duolingo, they have to put in their parent's email address. I'm guessing this is just a crazy coincidence where someone else just mistyped the email address that happened to be similar as your mother's. Also, people tend to use their name in usernames. It's really not a surprise to me that the email looked similar and that the username also contained her name.

The question is, why did it go to her inbox? Take a look at the "To" address in the email. Was it sent to her exact address, or something similar (like the one in the body of the email)? A lot of email services have something called plus addressing, where you can make variations/aliases of your normal address using the + sign. For example, if her email address is johnsmom[at]email.com, email sent to johnsmom+whatever[at]email.com will get sent to her inbox.

Perhaps they meant to put in something like jonsmom+duolingo[at]email.com or johnsmom_123[at]email.com, but mistyped and put in johnsmom+duolingo[at]email.com or johnsmom+123[at]email.com instead. Both of which would have gotten sent to your mother's inbox.

Does it look like that may be what happened here? Otherwise, reach out to Duolingo to see what happened. Maybe they got some wires crossed. I really doubt Duolingo snooped through your contacts, especially when they didn't even use the correct information in the email.

 

[Cunir]

Did this other email address have a dot it? For years my gmail address was of the format namesurname@gmail.com but i would regularly get all the emails sent to name.surname@gmail.com
Apparently they dont recognise dots and just strip them out, and they end up being sent to you. In my case the sender meant to send it to name_surname

 

[iStorm]

Did this other email address have a dot it? For years my gmail address was of the format namesurname@gmail.com but i would regularly get all the emails sent to name.surname@gmail.com
Apparently they dont recognise dots and just strip them out. The sender might have meant to send it to name_surname

That's another good point! Forgot about that with Gmail.

 

[Silly John Fatty]

Did this other email address have a dot it? For years my gmail address was of the format namesurname@gmail.com but i would regularly get all the emails sent to name.surname@gmail.com
Apparently they dont recognise dots and just strip them out, and they end up being sent to you. In my case the sender meant to send it to name_surname

Thanks, it didn’t though!

When a child signs up for Duolingo, they have to put in their parent's email address. I'm guessing this is just a crazy coincidence where someone else just mistyped the email address that happened to be similar as your mother's. Also, people tend to use their name in usernames. It's really not a surprise to me that the email looked similar and that the username also contained her name.

The question is, why did it go to her inbox? Take a look at the "To" address in the email. Was it sent to her exact address, or something similar (like the one in the body of the email)? A lot of email services have something called plus addressing, where you can make variations/aliases of your normal address using the + sign. For example, if her email address is johnsmom[at]email.com, email sent to johnsmom+whatever[at]email.com will get sent to her inbox.

Perhaps they meant to put in something like jonsmom+duolingo[at]email.com or johnsmom_123[at]email.com, but mistyped and put in johnsmom+duolingo[at]email.com or johnsmom+123[at]email.com instead. Both of which would have gotten sent to your mother's inbox.

Does it look like that may be what happened here? Otherwise, reach out to Duolingo to see what happened. Maybe they got some wires crossed. I really doubt Duolingo snooped through your contacts, especially when they didn't even use the correct information in the email.

This is what it seems to be, it has the + you mentioned. How come it’s sent to her? They do this to “guess” email addresses and just send spam to everyone?

They still must have snooped through my contacts, because her name and surname are unique. Nobody else in the world has it except some people in our family.

Moreover, it knew that it was my mother. And on top of that, Duolingos App Store page clearly says it accesses your contacts.

What irritates me is that the setting for that on my iPhone were turned off. My contacts are only shared with the Signal app.

So there’s several possibilities:

- Apple is involved in gangster tactics
- Apple is stupid and has no idea
- Apple isn’t stupid but makes low quality software
- Duolingo is involved in gangster tactics
- There’s different ways to access your contacts, one through the contacts app (which was turned off in my case) and maybe another one through cookies or other technologies.

It reminds me a lot of the aforementioned case with Shazam. How can it work and recognise music, when I didn’t give it access to my microphone?

It’s seems like it’s easy to circumvent apples “safety cage”. I think it’s just a facade and there to look at. It’s just marketing, there’s nothing but hot air behind it.

 

[Cunir]

Why would duolingo send out a spam email to just one of your contacts asking them if they want to cancel your account? There’s nothing in it for them.
If they really did access your contacts then presumably they would have sent it to the correct address.
More likely its just someone mistyping their own address, and a coincidence

 

[Silly John Fatty]

Why would duolingo send out a spam email to just one of your contacts asking them if they want to cancel your account? There’s nothing in it for them.
If they really did access your contacts then presumably they would have sent it to the correct address.
More likely its just someone mistyping their own address, and a coincidence

It is not just absolutely impossible to guess my mothers first and last name, but even more impossible to guess both her names at the same time. It's more probable that a black hole will swallow our planet. There's absolutely no chance guessing it.

So the app definitely snooped in my contacts. On top of that, it knew that it was my mother. That's most likely because I saved her as "Mom".

And yet, if I go to privacy settings on my iPad and then contacts, not only Duolingo isn't having access to my contacts, but it's not even listed there. This list will usually show which apps are asking for access to your contacts, and then you can allow it or not. Duolingo isn't even listed here.

Probably Apple thinks it doesn't need to ask you whether you would like to give an app access to your contacts or whatever else as long as it says it can access your contacts or other data in the App Store.

This would mean that there's no more asking for permission, and that you need to inform yourself on what you download and look precisely to what the app will have access.

 

[JonaM]

Dumb question, but your Mum hasn't installed Duolingo at all has she?

 

[Silly John Fatty]

Dumb question, but your Mum hasn't installed Duolingo at all has she?

No she hasn’t, but it wasn’t a dumb question at all of course. It was in fact her who told me she received this, saying her son had installed Duolingo …

 

[Honza1]

Thanks, it didn’t though!



This is what it seems to be, it has the + you mentioned. How come it’s sent to her? They do this to “guess” email addresses and just send spam to everyone?

They still must have snooped through my contacts, because her name and surname are unique. Nobody else in the world has it except some people in our family.

Moreover, it knew that it was my mother. And on top of that, Duolingos App Store page clearly says it accesses your contacts.

What irritates me is that the setting for that on my iPhone were turned off. My contacts are only shared with the Signal app.

So there’s several possibilities:

- Apple is involved in gangster tactics
- Apple is stupid and has no idea
- Apple isn’t stupid but makes low quality software
- Duolingo is involved in gangster tactics
- There’s different ways to access your contacts, one through the contacts app (which was turned off in my case) and maybe another one through cookies or other technologies.

It reminds me a lot of the aforementioned case with Shazam. How can it work and recognise music, when I didn’t give it access to my microphone?

It’s seems like it’s easy to circumvent apples “safety cage”. I think it’s just a facade and there to look at. It’s just marketing, there’s nothing but hot air behind it.

This is taking you down really deep rabbit hole.
So:
1. you happen to have Duolingo with adult account.
2. some child (male) with similar name creates Duolingo child account (which triggers the e-mail to family member) and
3. mistypes the e-mail address for the parent.
That is all which was enough for you to start on this path... None of this is in any way unusual, unlikely or even rare.

And you create whole Q conspiracy based on this...

Stop, this is not going to help your health.

E-mails are really bad, I keep getting e-mails with mistyped addresses routinely. Too many people, not enough names, and even less e-mail addresses. And absolutely no verification on e-mail address as you write type it. What can go wrong...

 

[Silly John Fatty]

This is taking you down really deep rabbit hole.
So:
1. you happen to have Duolingo with adult account.
2. some child (male) with similar name creates Duolingo child account (which triggers the e-mail to family member) and
3. mistypes the e-mail address for the parent.
That is all which was enough for you to start on this path... None of this is in any way unusual, unlikely or even rare.

And you create whole Q conspiracy based on this...

Stop, this is not going to help your health.

E-mails are really bad, I keep getting e-mails with mistyped addresses routinely. Too many people, not enough names, and even less e-mail addresses. And absolutely no verification on e-mail address as you write type it. What can go wrong...

Don't be mad at me, but that's just bs. My first name contains rare characters and is unique worldwide (and it isn’t John by the way). Our family name also contains special characters and there’s no other name close to it.

You can't end up with our names by mistyping someone else's name. Ever. On top of that, even if this extremely unlikely event happened, you'd still need to guess the last name that goes with it.

I'm not sure how good you are at math, but statistically speaking, that becomes even more unlikely, so incredibly unlikely, that’s it’s more likely that your computer monitor will turn into a cat (yes, that’s physically possible, ask any physician. But it’s very unlikely).

On top of that, it knew it was my mother. Ok, here we are adding another layer of unlikeliness on top of what’s already a completely improbable event. And on top of that, this child with the similar name to mine is also using Duolingo (what a coincidence!), and it’s got a mother with a similar name like mine. Sure, buddy 🤣

I don’t know how much you know about probabilities and combinatorics, but I studied statistics (like, really, not „by myself“, with tin foil on my head, but at the most renowned university in my state) and I can tell you these probabilities become exponential with every additional variable, and we got quite a lot of these in there already. It’s mathematically absolutely excluded any of this is a „coincidence“ of some sort, they snooped in my data and that’s the facts 😂

I guess it's probably more got to do with the fact they're stating very openly on their App Store page that they're accessing your contacts. The main thing I am wondering is why this is happening without 1) my device ever asking me if I'd like to share my contacts with this app, and 2) my device's privacy settings not stating anywhere that my contacts are actually being shared with this app.

And this is what drags Apple into the game. No tin foil. No conspiracies. Just pure rationalism …

 

[Honza1]

Don't be mad at me, but that's just bs. My first name contains rare characters and is unique worldwide (and it isn’t John by the way). Our family name also contains special characters and there’s no other name close to it.

You can't end up with our names by mistyping someone else's name. Ever. On top of that, even if this extremely unlikely event happened, you'd still need to guess the last name that goes with it.

I'm not sure how good you are at math, but statistically speaking, that becomes even more unlikely, so incredibly unlikely, that’s it’s more likely that your computer monitor will turn into a cat (yes, that’s physically possible, ask any physician. But it’s very unlikely).

On top of that, it knew it was my mother. Ok, here we are adding another layer of unlikeliness on top of what’s already a completely improbable event. And on top of that, this child with the similar name to mine is also using Duolingo (what a coincidence!), and it’s got a mother with a similar name like mine. Sure, buddy 🤣

I don’t know how much you know about probabilities and combinatorics, but I studied statistics (like, really, not „by myself“, with tin foil on my head, but at the most renowned university in my state) and I can tell you these probabilities become exponential with every additional variable, and we got quite a lot of these in there already. It’s mathematically absolutely excluded any of this is a „coincidence“ of some sort, they snooped in my data and that’s the facts 😂

I guess it's probably more got to do with the fact they're stating very openly on their App Store page that they're accessing your contacts. The main thing I am wondering is why this is happening without 1) my device ever asking me if I'd like to share my contacts with this app, and 2) my device's privacy settings not stating anywhere that my contacts are actually being shared with this app.

And this is what drags Apple into the game. No tin foil. No conspiracies. Just pure rationalism …

OK, so tin foil continues... The chances are, that the child wanted to type in something which looked like e-mail but was not his parent address. Intentionally created something which e-mail provider sent to your mother. Or the e-mail provider has bug in the system - bug do exist, e-mail get misdirected routinely. Or lost...

Here is a test to prove if you are right or wrong: use your mothers e-mail account and send Duolingo information, that she does not agree with her child to have account and that the account should be immediately cancelled. That her son did not ask for permission (best guess - this is true) etc. Easy to write in 5 minutes.
And see, if your account gets suspended.

I bet you that your account will NOT get suspended and some child somewhere will be taught lesson not to lie on registration forms.

As far as anyone knows, if Apple OS does not show that app is allowed access to specific info (e.g., contacts) it does not have it. They pushed this concept to absurdity, when I have to allow application access to Documents folder in order to save document which I opened from Documents folder. Security is becoming barrier for productivity.
There are security researchers who test these things and would love to make name on catching Apple on this and publish this. There is money in it as this would be bug for which they would get bounty...
What you have is stretch of imagination, no proof. Other possibilities exist.

 

[Silly John Fatty]

OK, so tin foil continues... The chances are, that the child wanted to type in something which looked like e-mail but was not his parent address. Intentionally created something which e-mail provider sent to your mother. Or the e-mail provider has bug in the system - bug do exist, e-mail get misdirected routinely. Or lost...

Here is a test to prove if you are right or wrong: use your mothers e-mail account and send Duolingo information, that she does not agree with her child to have account and that the account should be immediately cancelled. That her son did not ask for permission (best guess - this is true) etc. Easy to write in 5 minutes.
And see, if your account gets suspended.

I bet you that your account will NOT get suspended and some child somewhere will be taught lesson not to lie on registration forms.

As far as anyone knows, if Apple OS does not show that app is allowed access to specific info (e.g., contacts) it does not have it. They pushed this concept to absurdity, when I have to allow application access to Documents folder in order to save document which I opened from Documents folder. Security is becoming barrier for productivity.
There are security researchers who test these things and would love to make name on catching Apple on this and publish this. There is money in it as this would be bug for which they would get bounty...
What you have is stretch of imagination, no proof. Other possibilities exist.

What you don't understand is math. But it's hard to explain it to someone who doesn't think in mathematical dimensions and doesn't have this thinking. Like I said, it's more probably your monitor will turn into a cat. This is not a joke, this is real physics, I am talking about reality here!

And the whole privacy/access to data thing is probably just a marketing facade. Do the test yourself: Install Shazam, disallow it to use the microphone, but add it to control center and press it there. Let's see if it works. For me it does. And I also know other apps (that don't belong to Apple, like Shazam) that can circumvent this and access to your photo album, even though it's not allowed.

On top of that, this button is meant to not allow an app using contacts, microphone, etc., but there's also other ways of collecting data. Apple introduced new information about which data every App uses when you download it from the app store, and Duolingo collects pretty much everything. That's what it officially states.

So even if these contacts/camera/microphone buttons weren't just facade, they could still collect data over cookies, tracking data, and other, and find out who your mother is for example.

But in my case, it probably used my contacts, because it says itself that it collects these, so it's not surprising.

Oh, and I forgot: The kid that entered the same first name as me (that nobody else has in the world), and who has a similar last name (which is unique worldwide, even more so in combination with my first name), who has a mother with the same name as mine, and the same last name as mine's (even though she is the only one in the world), by coincidence happened to create his Duolingo at the exact same time as I did. 🫠😂

Be honest: Do you work for Duolingo?

 

[iStorm]

This is what it seems to be, it has the + you mentioned. How come it’s sent to her? They do this to “guess” email addresses and just send spam to everyone?

That's how plus addressing works, there's no guessing involved. youremail+whatever[at]email.com will always get delivered to youremail[at]email.com; anything after the + is basically ignored. This feature can be used for a couple reasons:

1. Better email organization. Say you sign up at CompanyX and give them youremail+companyx[at]email.com. You can now easily set up a mail rule such that when an email is addressed to youremail+companyx[at]email.com, move it to a different folder or delete it. You no longer have to worry about what email address they're going to send from, or wonder what keywords to use for your rules.
2. Keeping an eye on your email. If you start getting email sent to youremail+companyx[at]email.com, but it's not from CompanyX, then you know they sold your information.

Do you have any friends or family members that would know about this plus addressing feature and wanting to prank your mother?

---

This is what it seems to be, it has the + you mentioned. How come it’s sent to her? They do this to “guess” email addresses and just send spam to everyone?

How can you be so sure? Do you have a list containing all 8 billion people in the world? Is it possible that this name or username could be read or interpreted differently, perhaps in another language? For the longest time I thought a user who went by "theyayarealiving" meant "the yay are a living" instead of "the yay area living". Sometimes different names or phrases end up being the same as something else when all spaces are removed.

---

If Duolingo did indeed snoop through your contacts and then sent an email based on that info. What's in it for them, especially when they didn't even use the right email address or username? If they really wanted to let your mother know, don't you think they would have used the correct email address (the one you provided) and your username in order for it to be taken seriously?

Here's the first part of that email again. The email and username are what the other person provided.

Your child has created a Duolingo account with the email address of and with the username [username].

 

[Honza1]

What you don't understand is math. But it's hard to explain it to someone who doesn't think in mathematical dimensions and doesn't have this thinking. Like I said, it's more probably your monitor will turn into a cat. This is not a joke, this is real physics, I am talking about reality here!

And the whole privacy/access to data thing is probably just a marketing facade. Do the test yourself: Install Shazam, disallow it to use the microphone, but add it to control center and press it there. Let's see if it works. For me it does. And I also know other apps (that don't belong to Apple, like Shazam) that can circumvent this and access to your photo album, even though it's not allowed.

On top of that, this button is meant to not allow an app using contacts, microphone, etc., but there's also other ways of collecting data. Apple introduced new information about which data every App uses when you download it from the app store, and Duolingo collects pretty much everything. That's what it officially states.

So even if these contacts/camera/microphone buttons weren't just facade, they could still collect data over cookies, tracking data, and other, and find out who your mother is for example.

But in my case, it probably used my contacts, because it says itself that it collects these, so it's not surprising.

Oh, and I forgot: The kid that entered the same first name as me (that nobody else has in the world), and who has a similar last name (which is unique worldwide, even more so in combination with my first name), who has a mother with the same name as mine, and the same last name as mine's (even though she is the only one in the world), by coincidence happened to create his Duolingo at the exact same time as I did. 🫠😂

Be honest: Do you work for Duolingo?

hm... No, I have PhD in Physics and work in physics research for 30+ years. Honestly.
Enjoy your tin hat... Not my problem to fix.

 

[Cunir]

if you're really that worried about it then you should probably just email duolingo and explain what happened

 

[Silly John Fatty]

That's how plus addressing works, there's no guessing involved. youremail+whatever[at]email.com will always get delivered to youremail[at]email.com; anything after the + is basically ignored. This feature can be used for a couple reasons:

1. Better email organization. Say you sign up at CompanyX and give them youremail+companyx[at]email.com. You can now easily set up a mail rule such that when an email is addressed to youremail+companyx[at]email.com, move it to a different folder or delete it. You no longer have to worry about what email address they're going to send from, or wonder what keywords to use for your rules.
2. Keeping an eye on your email. If you start getting email sent to youremail+companyx[at]email.com, but it's not from CompanyX, then you know they sold your information.

Do you have any friends or family members that would know about this plus addressing feature and wanting to prank your mother?

Thanks for the clarification! The email address is indeed

[my-mother's-first-name].[my-mother's-last-name]+[my-mother's-first-name]son[a-number].

So if my mother's name was Mary Smith, and I changed the number at the end to something else (I can't recognise a logic behind it yet), then the email would look like:

mary.smith+maryson13@gmail.com.

And there's also a username, which is maryson13.

Nobody who's a son of someone named Mary ever created an account named "maryson13" 🤣 Imagine your mother was named Patricia and you signed up on MacRumors with "PatriciaSon53". 😅

This is very obviously an automatic software thing from Duolingo, it's a form of client/user categorisation.
They're using people's data and doing this kind of stuff, it's very common, most service companies do this today and that's what they live from. Their marketing departments need to use this data to find out more about their customers, adapt their services, etc., because otherwise they'd be wandering in the dark and they'd disappear as a company very quickly.

That's not the problem. The problem is I don't think I allowed this!

How can you be so sure? Do you have a list containing all 8 billion people in the world? Is it possible that this name or username could be read or interpreted differently, perhaps in another language? For the longest time I thought a user who went by "theyayarealiving" meant "the yay are a living" instead of "the yay area living". Sometimes different names or phrases end up being the same as something else when all spaces are removed.

---

If Duolingo did indeed snoop through your contacts and then sent an email based on that info. What's in it for them, especially when they didn't even use the right email address or username? If they really wanted to let your mother know, don't you think they would have used the correct email address (the one you provided) and your username in order for it to be taken seriously?

Here's the first part of that email again. The email and username are what the other person provided.

I know exactly what you mean, but as someone who is, I'd say, an expert in Statistics, and also thinks in statistical patterns during every day life and works with it, it is not just improbable, but it's so improbable that it's very close to what's called an "impossible event", it's not quite there yet in the world of mathematics, but in reality that is pretty what it is.

And what's weird is that it's telling my mother that I created an account with basically her email (or more precise: With Duolingo's internal classification of her email (the plus address basically)).

It could very well be that this email was never meant to be sent out by Duolingo, it was probably a software error. Simply because it's improbable Duolingo would send an email like this with an address that contains internal client categorisation and is formatted in the plus address format.

This is I believe some internal stuff that went out by mistake. But the content is real.

hm... No, I have PhD in Physics and work in physics research for 30+ years. Honestly.
Enjoy your tin hat... Not my problem to fix.

PhD with 30+ years in Physics but not even basic school-level knowledge in Statistics, alright 🤣 There's no Physics without Statistics. It's almost based on it by now and is part of every curriculum, you can't get around it. That started 250-300 years ago I believe … 👀

if you're really that worried about it then you should probably just email duolingo and explain what happened

I'm not worried, I'm mad, because it's a form of gangster tactic in my eyes. I'm not against collecting customer data. Or even contacting their contacts. But everything should always be based on agreements and accord. I believe this wasn't the case here, so I'm mad. It's a form of anti-democratic culture and I'm allergic to it …

And yes I sent them the case and this thread as well, so they're reading this. I'm still waiting for their response. I am very curious how they will react, how they will argue, wether they will admit their mistake in case they made one, and what they will offer me in case they did (hopefully no Duolingo special offer, I'm done with that and deleted the app from everywhere).

 

[Cunir]

using your example, it looks like someone has just mistyped their mothers email address as
mary.smith@gmail.com
(maybe they meant mary_smith@gmail.com, or something)
and the +maryson13 has been automatically added by duolingo’s software to track it.
Strip the dot out, and everything after the +, and thats why its ended up being sent to your mother.
I wouldn’t worry about it at all

 

[JustAnExpat]

Do you by chance have a child profile on your iPad? In other words, is your account being controlled by your mother? Go into setting and see if you have a managed account by your parent.

 

[Anthony_DBoss]

Do not reply to this email, but email Duolingo support and ask what has happened to receive such a weird email. They will assist you for sure.

 

[Pierre535]

Dang, my computer turned into a cat after reading this. How silly is this!?