Privacy notice
What we hold about you and your children, what we do with it, who receives it, and the rights you have over it.
Who we are
Sapling Stories is the data controller for everything described here, and contact@saplingstories.com is the address to write to about any of it — including a request to see or delete your data, and any question for our data protection officer. We answer to that address rather than by post.
Your children do not have accounts
You hold the account. Your children never sign in and never use this app directly.
Everything we hold about a child was entered by you, their parent or guardian. By entering it you consent, on their behalf and your own, to everything described in this notice. You must be 18 or over to hold an account.
What we hold
| Category | What it covers |
|---|---|
| Your account | Your name, your email address and your sign-in details. |
| The children you add | Each child's first name, birth month and gender. |
| Reading activity and content | What each child read, finished, loved and where they stopped; the stories you generate and the descriptions you type to make them; and the words kept in each child's notebook. Where our safety checks refuse a request, we keep a copy of the description you typed, even though no story was made from it. |
| Technical and usage records | Which screens and features are used and where you arrived from; your device, browser, network address and the approximate location it indicates; and request and error logs. |
What we do with it
Running the app for you. Showing each child books at the right level, keeping their reading record, generating and checking stories, and helping you when something goes wrong.
Making the app better. We look at how families use it — across all accounts, not one at a time — to see which books work, which features are ignored, and how children's reading changes as they grow. This is also how we build the comparisons and averages you see on your dashboard, and it includes training and testing the AI that chooses books and writes stories.
Research and insights. We produce findings and figures about how children read, which we may publish or sell to others. These describe groups of children rather than individuals, and we may keep them indefinitely.
Sharing and selling. We may share or sell the data described in this notice to other companies — for their own research, analysis or advertising — and may be paid for it. This is the part of this notice parents most often want to change, so:
You can tell us not to. Write to contact@saplingstories.com and we will stop using your family's data for research, insights, selling and AI training, and you can keep using the app exactly as before.
Who receives it
We use outside suppliers to run the app, and we may change or add to them at any time. By category:
| Category of recipient | What reaches them |
|---|---|
| Hosting, database and sign-in providers | Everything, because this is where the app runs and the data is stored. |
| AI providers, for generating and checking stories | The description you type, the age band and the reading difficulty, plus your child's first name and words from their notebook where you select those options. |
| Speech providers, for read-aloud | The text of the page being read, or the word being pronounced. The same applies to anyone you send a story link to. |
| Dictionary data providers, for word lookup | The word being looked up. |
| Analytics and measurement providers | Which screens and features were used, the kind of device, roughly where from, and where you arrived from. |
| Other recipients | Suppliers for storage, email, payments, advertising and support; parties who buy, license or receive data under the section above; anyone the law requires or permits us to tell; and a buyer or successor if the product changes hands. |
Stories are private unless you share them
Every story you generate is private to your account. Sharing one with other families is a separate action on the finished story, and you can withdraw it again. Other families see the story rather than your account details.
You can also get a link to a story and send it to someone, who can then read it without an account. The link is long and unguessable and is listed nowhere, and whoever holds it can open the story and forward the link to anyone else. You can stop a link from your settings.
If the story says your child's name, everyone you send the link to will see it.
If you delete your account, stories you shared are deleted too, and disappear from other families' libraries. Their links stop working as well.
How long we keep it
We keep the data described in this notice for as long as we consider it useful, which may be indefinitely, and we may keep it after an account is closed where we are permitted to. We may also close and delete an account we consider inactive or abandoned.
Deleting your account from your settings removes your profile, every child, every story you generated and the reading record. Aggregate figures, records we are required to keep, and data already shared with or sold to a third party are not affected.
We also keep our record of any request the safety checks refused, including the description that was typed. Deleting your account removes your name from that record but not the record itself, so that deleting an account cannot erase what was asked for.
Your rights
Data protection law gives you rights over your family's data, which may include access, correction, deletion, portability, objection, restriction and withdrawal of consent, depending on where you live. This notice does not add to them or take them away.
Your account settings let you download your data, correct a child's details, remove a child and delete your account; a child's notebook lets you remove a saved word. For anything else, write to contact@saplingstories.com. You may also complain to the data protection authority for the country you live in.
Security
Data is encrypted in transit, and your password is handled by Supabase rather than by us. No system is perfectly secure, and we cannot guarantee the security of data held by us or by anyone who receives it.
Changes
This notice is version 2026-08-19, effective 19 August 2026. We may change it at any time. Where a change materially affects what we do with your family's data we will ask you to accept the new version, and continuing to use the app after a change means you accept it.
Version 2026-08-19, effective 19 August 2026.