Story Lantern — Privacy Policy

Who we are and who this app is for

Story Lantern is an app for children that helps practice reading aloud through short interactive stories. We built it around a data-minimization principle: we collect and transmit only what a feature strictly needs to work, and nothing beyond that.

No sign-up required

There are no accounts, no login, no email address, and no phone number anywhere in the app. Nobody identifies your child in any way, other than the parent themselves via the in-app PIN that protects the parent settings section.

What stays on the device only

The following is stored locally on the phone and never leaves the device:

None of the above is ever sent to our servers or synced across devices.

What is sent to our server to generate a story

For the dragon Iskra to write the next chapter, the app calls our server-side proxy. At that moment, the following is sent:

• the selected language and story theme;
• the current chapter number;
• the text and choices of the previous chapters of this same story — as context to continue the plot;
• the heroine's name, if entered;
• this week's spelling words from school, if the parent set any.

Our server does not permanently store this data — it is used only for the duration of the request, to pass it to the AI model (Anthropic, our text-generation provider) and return the finished chapter back to the app. Anthropic's processing of the request text is governed by their own privacy policy.

Anonymous usage statistics

We count exactly one thing: the number of chapters generated per language and date (for example: "July 17, English, 42 chapters"). This count is not tied to any user, device, or identifier — it cannot be used to determine who read what.

Microphone and speech recognition

The microphone is used only inside the "Now I Read" and "Echo with Iskra" modes, to mark which words your child read aloud correctly. Audio is processed through iOS's built-in speech recognition (Speech Framework) — when an offline model is available for the language and device, recognition happens entirely on the device itself; if no offline model is available, iOS may process the audio through Apple's own cloud speech service instead. Either way, the voice recording is never sent to Story Lantern's server and is never stored anywhere — not by us, not by the app.

Ads, trackers, and third parties

The app contains no ads, no analytics SDKs, no trackers, and does not sell or share any data with third parties for marketing purposes. The only external services the app talks to are our own proxy server on Vercel and, through it, the Anthropic API for story-text generation.

Deleting your data

Since all personal data is stored on the device only, deleting the app is enough to remove it completely — saved rewards, statistics, and settings are deleted along with it. Our servers hold nothing that could be tied to a specific child, so there is no separate server-side deletion request to make.

Children and data protection

Story Lantern is built for children and was designed from the start around minimal data collection: the app doesn't need your child's name, age, or any contact details to work. The only piece of information about a child that exists at all is whatever a parent chooses to type into the app themselves (such as the heroine's name), and it stays on the device.

Changes to this policy

If this policy changes, we'll update this page and the date at the top. Material changes affecting how data is handled will also be reflected in the App Store listing.