Privacy notice
Version 2, in effect since 15 September 2026.
The short version
We collect as little about your child as we can while still making them a book. No email address, no surname, no date of birth, no location, no photographs. Nothing about your child is sold, shared for advertising, or used to train anything outside this product.
TaleTykes is made for children, so we treat it as a service directed to children under the United States rule on children's privacy, and we ask for your consent before we collect anything about a child at all. We do the same wherever you are reading this from. There is no version of TaleTykes with weaker protections for children somewhere else.
What we hold about you
- Your email address and a hashed password, so you can sign in.
- A record that your account was verified as belonging to an adult: which method, when, and a one-way fingerprint. We never see or store a card number.
- Which version of this notice and of the notice to parents you agreed to, and when. The address you were using is stored as a one-way hash, not as an address.
- Your plan, your credit history and whether a payment failed. Card details are held by our payment provider, not by us.
- A record of settings you change, so there is a history of who changed what.
What we hold about a child
- A first name, or whatever you choose to call them. There is no field for a surname anywhere in this product.
- An age group such as five to seven. Not a date of birth. We need a reading level, not an identity, and an age group is the smallest thing that answers the question.
- A picture they chose as an avatar, from a fixed set we drew.
- A hashed PIN or picture sequence, so they can choose their own shelf on your device.
- The books they have made and read, which page they reached, and which ones they marked as a favourite.
- The choices they made from the picture menus.
If you turn on learning from what they enjoy, we also keep a record of which books they finished, re-read or stopped partway through, how quickly the pages turned, a summary in plain words of what those books had in common, and an estimate of the reading level that suits them. You can read all of it, and remove anything from it, on that child's page. It is off unless you turn it on, and turning it off deletes what was learned.
Which page they reached and which books they kept are not part of that. They are how a book opens where it was left, they work the same whether learning is on or off, and they are never used to decide what to suggest.
Consent before anything else
We do not let you add a child until your account has been verified as belonging to an adult, and until you have read the notice to parents. This is a legal requirement, and it is also the point of the whole design: everything about a child hangs off a verified adult account. The check happens where the record would be written, not only by hiding a page.
You can refuse, and you can change your mind. Refusing means we cannot make books for a child, because there would be nothing to make them from. Withdrawing consent later is the same as removing the reader: see below.
How long we keep things
| What | How long | From when |
|---|---|---|
| A removed reader's books and pictures | 30 days | the reader is removed. The delay is so a parent who changes their mind can undo it. |
| A removed reader's profile | 30 days | the reader is removed. |
| A closed account, its sign-in and everything under it | 30 days | the account is closed. |
| A child's sign-in sessions | 30 days | the session expires. |
| Records of books being made, and what they cost | 90 days | the record is written. Long enough to reconcile a bill or explain a failure. |
| Payment events from our payment provider | 90 days | the event arrives. |
| A record of mail we sent you | 90 days | the message is sent. The row holds the address it went to, so it is not kept longer than a delivery question would take. |
| Safety decisions that have been dealt with | 90 days | the decision is resolved. An unresolved one is kept until somebody has looked at it. |
| An account nobody has signed in to | 365 days, then a 14-day warning | the last sign-in. Written to first and removed a fortnight later. Signing in stops the clock. |
| Consent records and the audit trail | kept while the account exists | never, while the account exists. They are the evidence that consent was obtained and what was done with it. They go when the account goes. |
| Card details | not held by us | held by our payment provider, never by us. We keep a one-way fingerprint of the card and nothing else. |
These are not aspirations. A scheduled job runs every day and deletes what is past its window. An account that has simply gone quiet is written to first and removed a fortnight later, so the deletion is never the first you hear of it. Signing in stops the clock.
Who else sees anything
Each of these companies processes data on our behalf, under contract, for the purpose named and for nothing else. None of them is permitted to sell it or to use it for advertising.
| Who | What they do | What reaches them |
|---|---|---|
| xAI | Writes the stories, draws the pictures and reads them aloud | The story instructions a child chose, the text of their book, and the pictures made from it. A first name only when the child asked for themselves to be in the story. Using it to train their models is forbidden by contract. |
| Stripe | Takes payment and checks that an adult is holding the card | A parent's email address and card details, which go to Stripe directly and never through us. We keep a one-way fingerprint of the card and no card number. |
| Vercel | Runs the site and stores the pictures | Everything the site holds, as the place it runs. |
| Neon | Runs the database | Everything the site holds, as the place it is stored. |
| Upstash | Holds short-lived counters and passes each step of book-making to the next | Identifiers and counts. No story text, no names. A book's identifier passes through it; the book does not. |
| SendGrid (Twilio) | Delivers email to parents and staff | A parent's email address and the message itself. Nothing is ever addressed to a child. Open and click tracking are turned off. |
Nothing about your child is sold. Nothing is shared for advertising. There is no advertising in this product and no third-party analytics in it.
What you can ask for
- Read it. Download a copy of everything we hold about your family from your settings, as a file. It includes every book, every page of text, your consents and your credit history.
- Delete it. Remove a reader, or close the account, from your settings. Both take effect after thirty days, so a change of mind can be undone, and both are then permanent.
- Stop further collection. Removing a reader stops everything about that child. You do not have to close the account to do it.
- Correct it. Write to us at privacy@taletykes.com.
If you are in the United Kingdom or the European Union: we process your own details to provide the service you asked for, and anything about a child on the basis of the consent you gave. You may object, ask for a copy, or complain to your data protection authority. In the United Kingdom that is the Information Commissioner's Office.
Getting in touch
TaleTykes is the operator of this service and the party responsible for everything described on this page. Write to privacy@taletykes.com about anything here.