Privacy

The short version

We collect the least we can and still teach your child to read. That is a first name or a nickname, roughly how old they are, and the writing they do in the app along with how it was marked.

We do not sell anything about your family to anybody. We do not run advertising. We do not load analytics, trackers or social buttons.

There is no cookie banner because there is nothing to ask you about. Once you sign in we set one cookie, which is what keeps you signed in. It does nothing else, it is not shared with anybody, and signing out removes it.

You can read everything we hold about your child, and you can have all of it deleted, at any time, without giving a reason.

What we ask you for

From you, the parent or guardian: an email address. That is the whole account. There is no password to choose or forget, because we sign you in with a link sent to that address.

From you, about your child: a first name or a nickname, and the year they were born. The name is what your child sees at the top of the screen, so a nickname is perfectly fine and we would rather you used one.

We do not ask for a birth date, a home address, a phone number, a school, or a photograph. We do not ask for a last name. The birth year is used once, to work out where your child starts reading, and it is not kept afterward.

What your child creates, and why we keep it

Your child reads a passage and writes an answer. We keep that writing, the marks it was given, and the reasons for those marks.

We keep it because it is the product. A parent who cannot see what their child wrote last month cannot tell whether anything is improving, and a child who cannot see why an answer scored what it did has been given a number rather than a lesson.

We also read it in aggregate to check that our marking is fair, and to find where it is wrong. That work is done on the writing of many children at once, and it never names a child.

Your child's voice

The youngest readers can answer by speaking rather than typing, because a five year old can say a sentence long before they can type one. This part of the app is still being built and no child has used it yet.

We ask your child's device to turn that speech into text by itself, so the sound never leaves it. Some devices cannot. When that happens the speech is sent to a service that turns it into text, and the screen says so before your child speaks. It is never sent quietly, and that is the part we hold ourselves to.

We allow that fallback rather than refusing outright, and the reason is worth saying plainly. Every computer this runs on has dictation built into it, two keystrokes away. A child blocked here would simply use that instead, where we could tell you nothing at all and record nothing about how the answer was written.

You can ask us to require the on device kind only, and we will set that for your child. A switch you control yourself is being built. Until it is there, write to us and a person will do it.

We keep the text, never the recording.

Who else sees any of this

The company that stores our database, and the company that marks written answers. Your child's writing goes to the marking company for one purpose, which is to score it and say why.

What we promise here is about us, because we are what we control: we never sell your child's writing, we never share it for advertising, and we never use it for anything except the marking it was written for and the fairness checks described above.

We have not yet read our suppliers' own data terms line by line, so we are not making a promise on their behalf that we have not checked. When we have checked, we will say so here with the date. Telling you that gap exists is better than writing a stronger sentence we cannot stand behind.

Nobody else. Not advertisers, not data brokers, not schools, and not other families.

If we are ever required by law to hand something over, we will tell you unless we are forbidden from telling you.

Consent, and who gives it

You consent, not your child. You accept these terms before any child profile exists, and you give consent separately for each child you add.

We record which version of this policy you agreed to and when. That is why this page has a date in its address: the version you agreed to stays at that address, unchanged, for as long as your record does.

If we change this policy in a way that matters, we will ask you again rather than assume the old answer still applies.

Getting it back, and getting rid of it

Ask us and we will send you everything we hold about your child, in a form you can open and read.

Ask us and we will delete it. Deletion means the writing, the marks, the reasons, the words your child looked up, and the profile itself. It is built as one operation over every place a child's data is held, rather than a list somebody works through by hand.

Closing your account deletes the children on it. We will say so clearly before you do it.

How to reach a person

Write to the address on the contact page. A person reads it. There is no contact form here that drops what you wrote into a queue.