Privacy notice for parents and guardians
Book-E-Kids is a reading app for children aged 6 to 11. Children never have their own accounts: a parent or legal guardian creates the household, adds child profiles, and stays in charge. This page explains, in plain words, what we keep and what we never touch.
What we collect
- Your email address, to sign you in, confirm it is yours and send password-reset links.
- A hash of your password, never the password itself.
- Each child's display name and age band (6–8 or 9–11) and the avatar you pick. We suggest a first name or nickname rather than a full name.
- Book titles and reading events: the books a child adds, when they start, pause, finish or reread one, minutes read when a child logs them, and a simple reflection such as "loved it".
- Group membership: which private reading groups your household's children belong to and the shared progress of a group challenge.
- Basic service records: sign-in sessions, the time of requests and request counts used to keep the service safe. Our logs do not contain email addresses, passwords, tokens or book titles.
What we never collect
- Camera images. The barcode scanner works on the device; only the confirmed ISBN or title text is sent to us.
- Location, contacts, photos or anything else from the device.
- Advertising or tracking identifiers. There are no ads, no analytics trackers and no data sharing with advertisers.
- Messages. The app has no chat, comments or public profiles.
Groups are private
Reading groups are invitation-only. A parent creates a group and shares an invite code with families they know; there is no directory or search. Inside a group, other families see your children's display name and avatar and the group's combined progress, never individual reading histories or rankings. Creating or joining a group requires a confirmed email address.
Inviting another grown-up
If you invite another adult, we email the address you give us and keep it only for that invitation: we remove the address and the code 30 days after it is accepted, declined, cancelled or expired. Once you approve someone, they can see and manage the same information about your children that you can. We email every grown-up in the family when someone joins, leaves, is removed, exports data or becomes the owner.
How we use this information
Only to run the app: to show each child their books and reading forest, to keep the household together across devices, and to keep accounts safe. We do not sell or rent any of it, and we do not use it for advertising.
How long we keep it
- Household data stays while your household exists.
- Sign-in sessions expire after 30 days without use. Email confirmation and password-reset links expire after 24 hours and 1 hour respectively and work once.
- Short-lived safety records (rate-limit counters, request replay keys) are cleared within a day.
Export and deletion
From the grown-up area any grown-up can download everything we hold about the household as a single file (once a day; the other grown-ups are told). There are two ways to delete: Delete my account removes your own account and, if you are the only grown-up, the household with it; Delete this family is the owner's and removes every child profile, all books and reading events, forests and group memberships — straight away when the owner is alone, otherwise after seven days during which every grown-up is told and can save a copy. A grown-up who leaves or is removed keeps their own account and loses access to the children's data at once.
Where the data lives
Book-E-Kids runs on managed cloud infrastructure. Book details (title, author, cover) come from public book catalogues, Open Library and Google Books, which receive only the ISBN or search words you type, never who asked.
Questions
Write to [email protected]. If we change this notice in a way that matters, we will ask you to read and accept the new version the next time you sign in.