Children's privacy notice

The short version

We do not collect personal information from children. Children do not have accounts, cannot sign in, cannot post anything, and cannot be contacted through this site.

Everything that involves data — accounts, purchases, the newsletter — belongs to a verified adult.

What we collect about a child

If you choose to create an optional child profile in your family account, we store exactly two things:

• A nickname that you type. We ask you not to use a full or real name, and the field is limited to 20 characters.
• An age band — a range such as 4–6 years, never a date of birth.
• An avatar you pick from a fixed set of illustrations. No photographs can be uploaded.

What we never collect

We do not collect, and have no way to collect:

• A child’s full name, date of birth, address, phone number or email address
• Photographs or video of a child
• A child’s voice
• Location of any kind, precise or approximate
• Anything a child types, because there is nowhere for a child to type
• Behavioural or advertising profiles
• Biometric data

Advertising and tracking

There is no advertising on this site. We do not run third-party advertising code, and no advertising network receives data from us.

We run no analytics at all on pages a child can reach. On adult pages, analytics are off by default and only run if you switch them on in your account.

Video is embedded from YouTube’s privacy-enhanced no-cookie domain, and the player only loads after somebody presses play — so no request reaches Google until a person asks for one.

How we verify you are a parent

When you create a family account, we verify a mobile number by sending a one-time code by text. This is one of the parental-consent methods the FTC recognises under the amended COPPA rule.

We record what you agreed to, when, and which version of each policy was in force at the time. Those records are append-only — changing your mind writes a new record rather than editing an old one.

Your rights

You can review, export or delete everything we hold about your family from your account dashboard, without emailing anybody. Deleting a child profile is immediate.

You can also ask us to confirm what we hold, correct it, or delete the whole account. We respond within 30 days.

Getting in touch

If anything here is unclear, or you think we have got something wrong, write to us and a person will read it. We would genuinely rather know.