Privacy Policy

1. Who we are

Flickwick (“Flickwick”, “we”, “us”) is a bedtime story service operated as a sole proprietorship by Mac Parish. This policy explains what we do with personal information when you use the Flickwick website, web app, and printed book service (together, the “Service”).

For the purposes of UK and EU data protection law, Flickwick is the data controller for the information described here. You can reach us at any time at flickwick@agentmail.to.

2. What we collect

Account information

When you create an account we store your email address, an optional display name, and a hashed version of your password. We never store your password in a readable form — it is hashed with bcrypt before it touches the database, and we cannot recover it.

Story and book details you give us

To write a story we need to know what it should be about. Depending on what you choose to enter, this can include:

• Your child’s first name and age (we ask for an age between 3 and 8 so the writing suits them; we do not ask for a date of birth)
• A theme, world, and the lesson or value you’d like the story to carry
• Character names, roles, and descriptions — which may describe real people, such as siblings, grandparents, or pets
• Any free-text guidance you write for a book
• Ratings and written feedback you leave on a chapter, which we use to tune how future chapters are written

You are always free to use a nickname instead of your child’s real name. The story works just as well.

Content the Service generates

We store the chapters, books, illustrations, and character artwork created for you, along with the story “bible” of characters and places that keeps your series consistent from night to night.

Photographs

Only if you choose to upload one. This is covered in detail in section 4.

Order and delivery information

If you order a printed book, our payment provider collects your name, delivery address, phone number, email address, and payment details. Payment card numbers go directly to Stripe and are never seen or stored by Flickwick. We keep a record of the order — its status, the format you chose, the delivery address, and identifiers for the payment and print job — so we can produce, ship, and support your order.

Usage information

When you visit, we record basic analytics: the page path, the referring page, your browser’s user-agent string, and a truncated one-way hash of your IP address rather than the address itself. Within the app we also log a small set of product events (for example, that a story was created or a chapter generated) along with a session identifier and, if you are signed in, your user ID.

Messages you send us

If you use the in-app feedback widget or email us, we keep what you send so we can respond and improve the Service.

3. Children’s privacy

Flickwick is designed to be operated by a parent or carer and read aloud to a child. Accounts are for adults aged 18 or over. Children cannot register, sign in, create stories, place orders, or communicate with anyone through the Service. There is no chat, no profile, no social feature, and nothing for a child to log into.

We do not knowingly collect personal information directly from children. The information we hold that relates to a child — typically a first name, an age between 3 and 8, and sometimes a photograph — is provided by you, the adult account holder, and is used solely to personalise the stories and books you ask us to make.

We do not use children’s information to advertise, we do not build advertising or behavioural profiles about children, and we do not sell or rent it to anyone.

As the account holder you may review the child-related information we hold, ask us to correct it, ask us to delete it, and withdraw permission for us to keep using it — at any time, by emailing us.

4. Photographs and likeness

Printed books can include characters drawn to resemble a real person. This is optional, and it is the most sensitive information we handle, so here is exactly what happens.

1. You give permission. You must tick a consent box confirming you are the parent or guardian of the child in the photograph, or that you have the permission of the person shown. Uploads are refused without it.
2. The photo is stored privately. It goes to a private storage bucket that is not publicly readable and is not linked from any public page.
3. It is used once, to draw a character sketch. The photo is sent to our AI image provider as a reference so it can produce a stylised, illustrated model sheet of that character.
4. You approve the sketch. You review the illustration and confirm it looks right. From then on, the illustration — not the photo — is the reference used for every page of the book.
5. The photo is deleted. The moment you approve the sketch, the original photograph is deleted from storage and its reference is cleared from our database. It is also deleted if you replace it, remove it, or delete the character.

We do not perform facial recognition. We do not create, derive, or store faceprints, face embeddings, biometric templates, or any other biometric identifier, and we do not use photographs to identify anyone. A photograph is used only as a visual reference for an artist-style rendering, and only for the book you are making.

5. How we use information

We do not sell personal information. We do not share it with advertising networks. We do not use your stories, your child’s details, or your photographs to target advertising at you.

6. AI providers and your content

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

To produce a chapter or a book page, we send the model the material it needs: the theme and lesson, the child’s first name and age where you have provided them, character names and descriptions, the story so far, and the scene being illustrated. Where you have uploaded and consented to a photograph, that photograph is sent once for the character-sketch step described above.

These providers process this content in order to return a result to us. We do not authorise them to use your content to train their models, and we select providers on that basis; however, we do not control their internal systems and their own terms and privacy policies also apply to that processing.

7. Who we share with

We share personal information only with the service providers that make Flickwick work, and only with what they need. We do not sell it, rent it, or trade it.

We may also disclose information if we are legally required to, or where we need to in order to establish or defend legal claims, protect the safety of a person, or investigate abuse of the Service. If Flickwick is ever sold or transferred, information may pass to the acquirer, and we will tell you before that happens.

Note that your printed book files, which may contain your child’s name and illustrated likeness, are transmitted to our print provider in order to physically produce the book.

8. Share links

You can generate a share link for a story or a book, so that a grandparent or a co-parent can read it without an account. Please understand what this means before you use it:

• The link is unlisted, not private. Anyone who has the URL can read the whole thing, including any character names and your child’s first name where it appears. There is no password on it. Treat it the way you would treat a photo sent to a group chat.
• Shared pages are not indexed by search engines. They carry a noindex instruction and are excluded from our sitemap, so well-behaved search engines will not list them — though no instruction can bind a crawler that chooses to ignore it.
• Sharing is entirely your choice. Stories and books are private to your account until you create a link.

You can switch a link off yourself, at any time. Open the story or the book and choose Stop sharing. The old URL stops working immediately, for everyone holding it. If you share again later, we mint a brand-new link — the revoked one never comes back to life.

If you would rather we did it for you, or you want a page removed from a search engine’s cache after it was shared, email flickwick@agentmail.to.

9. Cookies and local storage

Flickwick does not use advertising cookies, tracking cookies, or third-party marketing pixels. We do not run cross-site advertising trackers.

We use your browser’s own storage for a handful of practical things:

You can clear these at any time through your browser settings, though doing so will sign you out. Fonts are loaded from Google’s font CDN, which means Google receives your IP address as part of that request.

10. How long we keep things

• Your account, stories, and books are kept for as long as your account exists, so you can come back to them years later. That is rather the point of the Service.
• Uploaded photographs are deleted as soon as you approve the character sketch, or immediately if you remove or replace them.
• Order records are kept for as long as we need them to support the order and to meet tax and accounting obligations.
• Analytics records are kept in aggregate with hashed IP addresses and no direct identifiers.
• Everything else is deleted when you ask us to delete your account.

We do not currently run an automatic deletion schedule. If you want your data gone, tell us and we will remove it.

11. Your choices and rights

Wherever you live, you can ask us to:

• Show you a copy of the personal information we hold about you
• Correct anything that is wrong
• Delete your account and everything in it
• Export your stories and books in a portable format
• Stop sending you the weekly story email
• Switch off a share link (you can also do this yourself, from the story or book)

We will never discriminate against you — by degrading the Service, changing your price, or refusing service — because you exercised any of these rights.

12. UK and EU rights (GDPR)

If you are in the United Kingdom or the European Economic Area, the UK GDPR and EU GDPR give you specific rights, and we must tell you the legal basis on which we process your information.

Our legal bases

Your rights

You have the right to access, rectify, and erase your data; to restrict or object to processing; to data portability; and, where we rely on consent, to withdraw that consent at any time without affecting processing carried out before you withdrew it. To exercise any of these, email flickwick@agentmail.to.

We do not make decisions producing legal or similarly significant effects about you by automated means. Stories are generated automatically, but nothing about your rights, money, or access is decided by an algorithm.

If you think we have handled your data badly, please tell us first — we would like the chance to put it right. You also have the right to complain to your data protection authority. In the UK that is the Information Commissioner’s Office (ico.org.uk); in the EEA it is the supervisory authority in your country.

13. California rights (CCPA/CPRA)

If you are a California resident, the California Consumer Privacy Act as amended gives you additional rights.

Categories we collect

• Identifiers — name, email address, delivery address, phone number, hashed IP address
• Commercial information — records of books ordered
• Internet activity — pages viewed, referring pages, product events
• Visual information — photographs you choose to upload, and the illustrations generated from them
• Inferences — none; we do not build profiles about you or your child

The sources, purposes, and recipients for each of these are described in sections 2, 5, and 7.

Sale and sharing

We do not sell personal information, and we do not share it for cross-context behavioural advertising, as those terms are defined by the CCPA. We have not done so in the preceding twelve months. We do not sell or share the personal information of anyone under 16.

Sensitive personal information

We do not use or disclose sensitive personal information for any purpose other than providing the Service you requested. We do not use photographs to infer characteristics about anyone.

Exercising your rights

California residents may request to know, delete, or correct their personal information, and may opt out of sale or sharing (although we do neither). Email flickwick@agentmail.to. We will verify your request by confirming you control the email address on the account. An authorised agent may act for you with written permission.

14. Security

We take sensible measures to protect your information:

• All traffic to the Service is encrypted in transit over HTTPS
• Passwords are hashed with bcrypt and are never stored in readable form
• Access to your stories, books, and characters requires an authenticated session
• Uploaded photographs are held in a private, non-public storage bucket
• Payments are verified server-side before anything is printed, and card details never reach our servers
• Analytics store a truncated hash of your IP address rather than the address itself

No service can promise perfect security, and we would rather say so plainly than pretend otherwise. If you discover a vulnerability, please report it to flickwick@agentmail.to and we will act on it quickly.

15. International transfers

Flickwick is operated from the United States, and our providers listed in section 7 process data in the United States and other countries. If you are in the UK or the EEA, this means your information is transferred outside your home jurisdiction.

Where that happens, we rely on appropriate safeguards for the transfer — principally the Standard Contractual Clauses adopted by the European Commission and the UK International Data Transfer Addendum, as incorporated into our providers’ data processing terms. You can ask us for more detail on any specific provider.

16. Changes to this policy

If we change how we handle your information, we will update this page and move the “last updated” date at the top. If the change is significant — a new category of data, a new provider receiving your child’s information, or a new purpose — we will email account holders before it takes effect.

17. Contact us