Privacy Policy

We built PollyReads to give our own kids a pleasant way to practice reading English aloud. It is run by an independent solo developer as a non-commercial educational aid, with infrastructure hosted by cloud providers located outside mainland China.

The service is currently in an invite-only beta, open only to invited users. Registered users must be adults aged 18 or older — parents, teachers, or guardians. Children are supervised users accompanied by a guardian, not independent account holders.

This page explains what we collect, what we don’t, and how third-party providers handle data. For usage rules, see the Terms of Service.

1. What We Collect

• Account information: your email address. We use passwordless email one-time-passcode (OTP) login, so we store no passwords.
• Content you create: picture books you upload or generate with AI and their derived data — titles, page images, sentence segmentation, timestamps, translations, keywords, custom collections, reading progress, and read-along scores.
• Asset files: page images rendered from your PDFs, transcoded audio, and any narration you re-record for a book — stored in object storage and linked to your account.
• Usage records: how often and when you use AI features (e.g., image generation, recognition), for billing, quotas, and service analysis.
• Technical logs: access logs automatically recorded by our hosting platform (IP, timestamp, user agent, URL) and anonymized error-monitoring data, for troubleshooting.

2. What We Do NOT Collect or Store

• ❌ No passwords (passwordless email OTP login).
• ❌ Read-along recordings are never stored (see Section 5).
• ❌ Screen recordings are never uploaded; they stay in your local browser.
• ❌ No third-party advertising, behavioral tracking SDKs, or social tracking pixels.
• ❌ We never sell your data to third parties.

3. Where Data Is Stored

Your account information and created content are stored in cloud databases and object storage located outside mainland China. We choose providers with strong security and privacy practices, but please be aware data is processed and stored abroad.

4. Third-Party Providers We Rely On

To provide full functionality, the service transmits relevant data to a number of third-party providers when necessary. We choose only providers with strong security and privacy practices and transmit data on a “minimum necessary” basis; each handles data under its own privacy policy. By function category:

• Account & database service — stores your email, book data, and reading records.
• Object storage service — stores page images and audio files.
• Application hosting service — runs the site and records access logs.
• Email delivery service — sends login verification codes.
• Speech recognition service — transcribes book audio and read-along recordings; zero retention is enabled, so data is discarded after processing and not used for training.
• Large language model service — sentence segmentation, keywords, translation; API not used for training by default.
• Translation / OCR / text-to-speech service — translation fallback, scanned-book recognition, AI narration; commercial API not used for training.
• AI image generation service — generates book illustrations from your descriptions.
• Payment service (only after paid features launch) — processes subscriptions and top-ups. We do not handle your full payment card details.
• Error monitoring service — collects anonymized error stacks (no user content) to help fix bugs.

5. How Microphone Audio Is Handled

The app uses the microphone in two places that are handled very differently — please note the distinction:

(1) Read-along recordings — used for instant scoring; we handle this data with the strictest care:

• Recordings are transmitted only temporarily between your device and the speech-recognition service;
• They are destroyed immediately after recognition and are never written to any database, object storage, or local persistent storage;
• They are not used for training, not shared, not reused;
• Only the recognized text (not the recording) is used briefly for scoring, then discarded;
• We recommend a parent or teacher be present when children use this feature, and judge its suitability beforehand.

(2) Book re-recording audio — as a book owner you may re-record a book’s narration to replace the original. Unlike read-along recordings, this audio is saved to cloud object storage as a book asset for later playback; it is kept with that book and deleted when the book is deleted.

6. Cookies and Local Storage

We use only the session credentials necessary to keep you logged in, plus storage for your preferences (theme, playback settings) and local caching (to speed up repeat visits). We use no tracking cookies, so there is no cookie consent banner.

7. Data Retention and Deletion

• To delete your account, email us (address below). Upon deletion we remove your account information and cloud content (soft-deleted, then physically deleted after 24 hours to guard against mistakes).
• You may at any time use the export feature (.prbook) to take your books with you.
• Deleting individual books or collections takes effect immediately.

8. Your Rights

At any time you may: access your data, modify your content, delete individual or all content, export your data, and delete your account. Contact us at the email below for help.

9. Children’s Privacy

The service is intended for adult parents and teachers. It is not directed at children and does not knowingly collect children’s identifying information. Children use it under guardian supervision. Parents/guardians are responsible for supervising their child’s use, including what content is uploaded, whether the microphone is enabled, and how recorded videos are shared.

10. Data Handling in the Sharing Feature

You may share books you created with others (for example, a teacher sharing with parents). Once shared, the recipient receives a copy of that book. The sharer is responsible for the copyright legality of shared content (see the Terms of Service). We do not proactively review shared content.

11. Changes to This Policy

If this policy is materially updated, we will update the “Last updated” date at the top of this page.

12. Contact Us

Privacy / copyright / other questions: support@pollyreads.com