Privacy Policy

This policy explains what Voicebooks ("we", "us") collects, why, who we share it with, and what you can do about it. It covers the Voicebooks website at getvoicebooks.com and the Voicebooks apps for iOS and Android (together, the "Service").

Who the account belongs to

A Voicebooks account is held by an adult. Adults create a family, and inside it they create listener profiles — one for each child the recordings are for. A listener profile is a name and, if the adult chooses, a photo. It is not an account: a child cannot sign in, has no email address or password with us, and is never asked for personal information by the app. An adult can put a PIN on the family so the grown-up side of the app — settings, billing, recording, invitations — is behind a gate the child does not pass.

What we collect

Information you give us

• Your account. Your email address and a password, which we store only as a one-way hash and cannot read. Optionally a first name, the name your family calls you ("Grandpa", "Mom"), and a profile photo.
• Your family. The family's name, an optional family photo, the listener profiles you create (name and optional photo), and the parent PIN if you set one.
• Recordings. The audio you record while reading a book, and the timing of where each page turn falls in it, so the pages follow along as the recording plays. Recordings you make are audible to the members of the family you made them in, and to nobody else.
• Books you add. Photographs or PDF scans of the pages of a book you want to record, and the title, author, and publisher you enter for it.
• Invitations. The email address, and the name you suggest, for a family member you invite. We use it to send that one invitation and the reminders you ask us to send. We do not add invited addresses to any marketing list.
• Messages to us. Anything you write when you contact support.

Information the Service records as you use it

• Listening activity. Which recording was played, which pages of it were heard, when, and which listener profile was chosen at the time. This is what draws the "listened to twice this week" facts your family sees on a book, and it stays inside your family.
• Technical and device information. IP address, browser or app version, device type, and server logs of the requests your device makes. We keep these for security, abuse prevention, and debugging.
• Cookies and local storage. We use a session cookie to keep you signed in and to remember which family and which listener profile is active on the device. We use no advertising cookies and no cross-site tracking cookies.
• Push notification tokens. If you allow notifications, the device token Apple or Google issues, so we can deliver a notification to that device.

Purchases

Subscriptions bought inside the app are processed by Apple or Google, and gift purchases on the website are processed by Stripe. We never receive or store your card number. We receive a transaction identifier and the resulting subscription status, which is what tells the app your plan is active.

What we do not do

• We do not sell, rent, or trade your personal information.
• We do not show advertising, and there are no ad networks in the app.
• We do not embed third-party analytics or advertising software development kits, and we do not track you across other apps or websites.
• We do not use your recordings, photographs, or your family's activity to build advertising profiles, and we do not use them to train machine learning models.
• We do not let anyone outside your family listen to your family's recordings.

Children

Voicebooks is made for families and is used by children, so we designed it so that children give us nothing directly. The information that concerns a child — a first name or nickname, and a photo if one is added — is entered by the adult who holds the account, on that child's behalf, and is visible only inside their family. A child is never asked to enter personal information, never given an email address or password with us, and never contacted by us.

We do not knowingly collect personal information directly from a child under 13 (or the equivalent age under the law that applies to you). The adult who created a listener profile can review everything held under it, change it, or delete it outright, from your Profile or by writing to us at the address below. Deleting a listener profile removes the profile and the listening history recorded against it.

How we use what we collect

• To run the Service: sign you in, store and play back recordings, build the pages of a book, and keep your family's shelf.
• To send the transactional email and notifications you have asked for — an invitation, a reminder, a new recording waiting for a child.
• To provide support when you write to us.
• To bill you and honour your plan.
• To keep the Service secure and working: detect abuse, diagnose faults, and prevent fraud.
• To meet our legal obligations.

Where the law requires a legal basis for processing, ours is the performance of our contract with you (running the Service), our legitimate interest in keeping it secure and working, your consent where you have given it (push notifications, optional photographs), and compliance with the law.

Who we share it with

We share personal information only in the following situations, and never for anyone else's marketing.

• Inside your family. The other members of a family you belong to can see the family's books and recordings, the listener profiles, and the listening activity within it.
• Service providers who run parts of the Service for us, under contracts that limit them to that purpose: Amazon Web Services (hosting, and the storage that holds recordings and images), Mailtrap (transactional email delivery), Apple Push Notification service and Google Firebase Cloud Messaging (notification delivery), Apple, Google, and RevenueCat (in-app subscriptions), and Stripe (website gift purchases).
• When the law requires it, to comply with a valid legal process, or to protect the rights, safety, and property of our users or of us.
• In a business transfer. If Voicebooks is acquired or merged, your information may transfer with it. We will tell you before that happens, and this policy continues to apply until we tell you otherwise.

Where it is stored, and how it is protected

Your information is stored on servers and in cloud storage located in the United States. If you use Voicebooks from outside the United States, you are sending your information there.

Traffic between your device and the Service is encrypted with HTTPS. Passwords are stored only as one-way hashes. Recordings and images live in private cloud storage and are reached only through short-lived links issued to a signed-in member of the family they belong to. Access to production systems is limited to the people who need it. No system is perfectly secure, and we do not claim otherwise; if a breach affects your information we will notify you as the law requires.

How long we keep it

We keep your account information, recordings, and books for as long as your account exists, because that is the point — a recording is a keepsake, and cancelling a paid plan does not delete anything. A plan limits how many new books you can add; every recording your family has already made keeps playing.

When you delete a recording, a book, or a listener profile, or when you ask us to delete your account, we remove it from the Service and delete the underlying files from our storage, ordinarily within 30 days — the steps are on Delete your Voicebooks account. Backups are cycled out on their own schedule and may hold a copy for a short period after that. We keep what the law requires us to keep — billing records, for example — and server logs for a limited period for security.

Your choices and rights

• See and change your information. Your account, your family, and the listener profiles are all editable from the Family and Profile tabs.
• Delete. You can delete a recording or a listener profile in the app yourself. Deleting a whole account is done by asking us — see Delete your Voicebooks account for the steps and for what deletion removes and keeps.
• Export. Ask us and we will send you a copy of your family's recordings and the information held on your account.
• Notifications. Turn push notifications off in your device settings at any time. Transactional email about your account is part of the Service and cannot be turned off while the account exists.
• Regional rights. Depending on where you live, you may have the right to access, correct, delete, or port your personal information, to object to or restrict certain processing, and to complain to your data protection authority. California residents have the rights described in the CCPA, including the right not to be discriminated against for exercising them — and we note again that we do not sell or share personal information for cross-context behavioural advertising. Write to us and we will honour these requests; we will not charge you for it.

Changes to this policy

If we change this policy we will update the date at the top of this page, and for a change that materially affects how we handle your information we will tell you in the app or by email before it takes effect.

Contact us

Questions about this policy, or a request about your information, go to info@getvoicebooks.com. We answer privacy requests from parents and guardians about their children's information first.