Children's Privacy Notice

Last updated: July 5, 2026 · Bedside Stories, McKillop Creative LLC, Greenville, South Carolina

This notice explains, in plain language, how Bedside Stories handles information about your child. It supplements our full Privacy Policy. If anything here is unclear, email us — a real person answers.

Who enters the information

A parent or legal guardian. Children do not create accounts, are not asked to sign in, and are not marketed to. Before any child details are collected, we show a one-time parent gate confirming you are the parent or guardian and consent to using these details to create stories.

The parent is the operator and the intermediary. Every prompt, button, and message in the service is addressed to you, the parent — not to your child. The service does not knowingly communicate directly with children, does not solicit anything from a child, and has no chat, comments, notifications, or other features directed at a child. Your child participates the way they would with a bedtime book: through you.

What we collect about your child

• A nickname (we ask you to use a nickname, not a full name)
• An age range (3–4, 5–6, 7–8, or 9+) — not an exact age or birthdate
• A short list of interests (e.g., "dinosaurs, soccer")
• Story ingredients for a single night — a line of ingredients and an optional magic word
• Optionally, an additional co-author sibling's nickname, age range, and one idea
• Optionally, a pet name
• Optionally, a Care Story topic you pick from a fixed list (e.g., "first day of school")
• The stories that are generated for your family
• A randomly generated device token that counts free-trial nights and keeps a subscription unlocked on this device, plus your IP address for hourly rate limiting and free-trial abuse prevention (stored only as a one-way hash, never the address itself). These contain nothing about your child and support only these internal operations — never profiling, advertising, or contacting anyone.

Why we collect it

Only to generate and personalize the bedtime story your child helped create. That's the entire purpose. We do not build advertising or behavioral profiles of children, and there is no child-to-child communication, no public profiles, and no comments, likes, messaging, or other social or engagement mechanics directed at children. (A parent may see a simple, private "family storybook" count of the stories you've made together — a keepsake shown to you, the adult, not a reward loop aimed at your child.)

The one thing we never send: your child's name

Your child's nickname and any pet name stay in your browser's storage on your device. Before a story is created, our system replaces them with neutral placeholder tokens (like "CHILD_NAME_1" and "PET_NAME"). The AI provider only ever sees the tokens. When the finished story comes back, your device substitutes the real nickname back in. The result: your child's actual name is never transmitted to any third party.

One exception, and only if you choose it: members can ask for the optional Storyteller voice, which reads the finished story aloud in a natural narrated voice. Because the finished story on your screen contains the nickname, creating that recording sends the story text — nickname included — once to our audio provider (OpenAI). We ask you plainly on the screen before anything is sent, every family decides for itself, and saying no simply means your device's own built-in voice reads the story instead, with nothing leaving your phone. The recording is kept only on your device, never on our servers, and narration text is never used to train any model. We generate audio; we never record your child — the product has no microphone capability at all.

Where the information goes

• Your device: the nickname, pet name, interests, and your saved story library are kept in your browser's local storage. The nickname and pet name never leave your device — not to us, not to anyone. Your saved stories stay there too, unless you turn on the optional library backup below.
• Our storage, only if you turn on library backup: a copy of your saved stories, so they survive a lost or replaced phone. The child's nickname and pet name are replaced with neutral placeholders before the copy leaves your device, so the backup holds no child's name; your email is stored only as a one-way hash. Delete it any time from the saved-stories screen; auto-deleted after 18 months of no use.
• Our AI provider (Anthropic): the age range, interests, and story ingredients — but not the child's name — are sent to Anthropic's Claude API at the moment a story is created, solely to write that story. Under Anthropic's commercial API terms, data submitted through the API is not used to train their models.
• Our server / hosting (Cloudflare): processes the request and applies safety checks. It never receives the child's name and does not log children's inputs or story text.
• Payment & email (Stripe): handles the parent's checkout and subscription. Stripe never receives any child data.

Are stories stored? For how long?

• Unsaved story ingredients are not persisted on our servers and are discarded after the story is generated.
• The nickname and interests live on your device only, for as long as you keep them — you control them, and they're removed when you delete them or clear your browser storage.
• Saved stories live on your device the same way — unless a parent turns on the optional library backup, which keeps a copy in our storage so the stories survive a lost or replaced phone. That copy contains no child's name: the nickname and any pet name are swapped for neutral placeholders before anything leaves the device, and only that parent's own device can put the real names back. A parent can delete the backup instantly from the saved-stories screen, and it is deleted automatically after 18 months without use.
• Server logs never contain your child's name, inputs, or story text.
• The device token and free-night count are kept while you use the service so your trial and subscription work; they contain no child information and are deleted on request like everything else.
• Payment records are retained by Stripe and in our accounting as legally required.

Analytics, cookies, and ads

The Story Soup screen, the story screen, and the story-generation flow carry no advertising pixels, no session replay, and no behavioral tracking — no advertising or analytics tracker is ever placed on any screen where child information is entered or stories are created or displayed. Our marketing pages (home page, pricing, and the post-purchase confirmation page) use Cloudflare Web Analytics (cookie-free, no personal identifiers) and cookies for ad measurement, including the Meta Pixel — these pages collect nothing about your child, and no child data is ever disclosed to any advertising platform, for any purpose.

Never used for training, ads, resale, or profiling

Child data is never sold, never shared with advertisers, never used to build marketing or behavioral profiles, and never used to train AI models.

How to review or delete your child's data

Because your child's profile and stories live on your device, you can review or delete them at any time inside the app, or by clearing your browser storage. If you turned on library backup, clearing your browser does not remove the backed-up copy — tap "turn off & delete" on the saved-stories screen and it is erased from our storage immediately. You may also request deletion of any child story data by emailing [email protected] or [email protected]; we verify and delete retrievable child data associated with your account or email.

Contact

Questions about your child's privacy: [email protected] or [email protected].