Children’s Privacy

1. Flickwick is for adults to operate

Accounts are for adults aged 18 or over. The Service is designed to be held by a parent or carer and read aloud to a child — on your phone, on your tablet, or as a printed book in your hands.

A child cannot register, sign in, create a story, place an order, upload anything, or send a message to anyone through Flickwick. There is no chat, no comment field, no friend list, no profile, and no public identity. There is nothing here for a child to log into, which is deliberate: the safest data is the data a product never collects.

If your child sits beside you while you make a book — which is rather the point — you are still the account holder, and everything happens through your hands.

2. What we hold about a child

Only what you type in. In practice, for most families, that is:

• A first name — or a nickname, if you would rather. The story works exactly as well either way, and we would genuinely rather you used one.
• An age between 3 and 8, which we use to pitch the vocabulary. We do not ask for a date of birth, because we do not need one.
• The names and descriptions of the people and animals they love — a sibling, a grandparent, a dog — as characters in the book.
• Anything you choose to write in the guidance box, such as “there’s a new baby coming” or “she starts school in September.”
• A photograph, only if you choose to upload one. See section 3.

We do not ask for a home address unless you order a printed book, and we do not ask for a school, a location, a birthday, or a health detail at any point.

3. Photographs, step by step

Uploading a photograph is optional — books illustrate perfectly well from a written description. If you do upload one, this is exactly what happens to it, in order:

1. You confirm you have the right to. You must tick a box confirming you are the parent or guardian of the child shown, or that you have the permission of the person shown. Without that tick, the upload is refused.
2. It goes to private storage. A bucket that is not publicly readable and is not linked from any page. It is not browsable, and it is not indexed.
3. It is used once. The photograph is sent to our illustration provider as a visual reference, so it can draw a stylised character sheet — an illustration, in the style of the book.
4. You approve the illustration. You look at the sketch and decide whether it is right. You can redraw it as often as you like.
5. The original is deleted. The moment you approve, the photograph is deleted from storage and its reference is cleared from our database. From then on the illustration — not the photo — is what every page of the book is drawn from.

The photograph is also deleted immediately if you replace it, remove it, or delete the character, whether or not you ever approved a sketch.

4. What we never do

• We do not advertise to children. There are no ads anywhere in Flickwick, for anyone.
• We do not build profiles. No behavioural profile, no advertising profile, no inferred characteristics — not about your child, and not about you.
• We do not sell or rent children’s information. Not to advertisers, not to data brokers, not to anyone. We have never done so and the business does not depend on it.
• We do not require more than we need. We will not make you provide a real name, a birthday, or a photograph in order to use the Service.
• We do not use your child’s details to train AI models. See section 5 for the honest, complete version of that.

5. What the AI providers see

Flickwick writes and illustrates using third-party AI models, reached through OpenRouter, which routes our requests to the underlying providers — currently Anthropic for the writing and Google for the illustration.

To write a page, we send the model what it needs to write that page: the theme and lesson, the first name and age where you have given them, the character descriptions, the story so far, and the scene to be drawn. Where you have uploaded and consented to a photograph, it is sent once, for the character-sketch step in section 3, and not again.

We do not authorise these providers to use your content to train their models, and we choose providers on that basis. We will not pretend to more certainty than we have: we do not control their internal systems, and their own terms apply to their processing as well. That is the honest position, and it is the reason we say plainly — if you would rather not send a real name to an AI provider, use a nickname; if you would rather not send a photograph, skip it. Nothing about the book gets worse.

6. Sharing a story or a book

Stories and books are private to your account until you decide otherwise. Two things can change that, and both are your choice:

• Inviting a co-parent gives that person access to the whole series, including your child’s name and everything in it. Invite accordingly.
• Creating a share link produces an unlisted URL that anyone holding it can open, without an account. We ask search engines not to index shared pages, and shared stories are not listed in our sitemap — but an unlisted link is still a link, so treat it the way you would treat a photo sent in a group chat.

You can switch a share link off yourself, at any time, from the story or book. Doing so takes effect immediately and the old URL stops working for everyone.

7. Your rights as the parent

As the account holder, you may at any time:

• Review everything we hold that relates to your child
• Correct anything that is wrong
• Delete any of it, or the whole account, and have it gone
• Withdraw consent for us to keep using it, including consent you gave when uploading a photograph
• Refuse any further collection while keeping the books you have already made

Email flickwick@agentmail.to from the address on your account. These are handled by a person, not a form. There is no charge, we will not ask you why, and we will not degrade your account or change your price because you asked.

8. COPPA

The Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act governs the online collection of personal information from children under 13 in the United States.

Flickwick is not directed to children, and it is not designed for children to use. We do not knowingly collect personal information from a child. The information we hold that relates to a child reaches us from you — the adult account holder — and is used solely to make the stories and books you asked us to make.

We nonetheless hold ourselves to COPPA’s substance, because it is the right way to build this:

• We collect only what is reasonably necessary to produce your book, and no more.
• We never condition your child’s participation on disclosing more than that.
• We give you, the parent, the right to review, delete, and refuse further use of your child’s information — set out in section 7.
• We do not disclose children’s information to third parties except the service providers who make the book, listed in section 7 of the Privacy Policy.
• We retain that information only while your account exists, and delete it when you ask.

If you believe a child has created an account or sent us personal information without a parent’s involvement, email flickwick@agentmail.to and we will delete it promptly.

9. Contact us