Privacy by design
Written for parents. The technical version, for engineers and reviewers, is How the data path works.
Your child's voice is heard by the toy in their hands and nowhere else. The toy answers, then forgets. What it passes on to a teacher is a note, not a recording. And every note is stamped so nobody can change it later.
What happens when your child talks to the book
- Your child presses the button and asks. The microphone is off until that moment. There is no wake word and nothing listening in the background.
- The book works out the answer inside its own cover. A small computer in the book does the thinking. Nothing is sent anywhere to get the answer.
- The book answers out loud, then erases the recording. Within moments, the sound is gone. It is never saved.
- The book writes a short note. Which skill your child was working on, and when. No words, no voice, nothing that sounds like your child.
- The note goes to the classroom's one connected computer, then to the teacher's record, then to you. It is stamped on the way so it cannot be altered afterwards.
Questions parents ask
Is the toy always listening? No. The microphone is switched off until the button is pressed. When your child lets go, it stops.
Does my child's voice go to the internet? No. The toy has no connection to the internet. The classroom has one small computer that does, and it only ever receives the notes described above, never sound.
Can the company hear my child later? No. The recording is erased on the toy within moments. There is nothing to play back, for us or for anyone else.
Is my child's voice used to train AI? No. We never train models on children's recordings. That is a design decision, not a promise in a policy, because the recordings do not exist to train on. Where we work on speech recognition for different accents and dialects, we use adult voices and licensed recordings.
Can records be changed after the fact? No. Each note carries a stamp that proves when it was written and that it has not been altered since. A teacher, an inspector, or a parent can trust the record they see.
What if the company shuts down? The book and the plush keep working. They do not need a server, an app, or a subscription. There is nothing to switch off.
What do you ask my permission for? One thing: to share notes about your child's learning with you and with your child's teacher. Nothing else is bundled into that permission. Children's privacy law requires this, and we treat it as the floor, not the ceiling. FTC guidance on children's privacy.
Why we built it this way
- Other AI toys send the voice away. The best-known one states in its own privacy policy that audio "streams through our systems for transcription" and names outside AI companies that may receive children's information. Their policy.
- Others stopped working when the company did. One AI companion for children shut down in December 2024 and every unit went dead within days, because it depended on the company's servers. Coverage.
- A promise you can check beats a promise you have to trust. Most products ask you to believe a privacy policy. Ours is built so that the thing you are worried about, a recording of your child leaving the room, cannot happen, because the recording is gone before anything leaves.
The stamping, in one paragraph
The stamp on each note is made by an open-source system built by our sister company, Locale Network, for keeping data from physical devices honest. It gives each device its own identity, signs what the device reports, and stores the result so it can be checked later but not rewritten. If you want the technical detail, it is public: what the system is and how it works. You do not need to read it to trust the toy.
This describes the design. The book and the plush are in development, not on sale. Before anything is sold or used with children, the design will be reviewed by an independent security firm and checked against children's privacy law. Those reviews have not happened yet, and this page will say when they have.