Privacy Policy – Story Genie Books

Who May Use Our Service

Only adults (18+) may create accounts, submit payment information, or provide personalization details for a child. We do not knowingly collect information directly from children under 13.

Information We Collect

Adults may provide information needed to personalize and fulfill a book order:

• Account or purchaser name and email
• Shipping address
• Child personalization details (name, age, traits, pronouns, or similar descriptive details)
• Optional photo for accuracy

Photo upload is voluntary and used only for personalization, reprints, or support.

How We Use Information

We use personal information only to:

• Personalize and produce books
• Process and ship orders
• Provide customer support or reprints
• Maintain order records required for operational or legal purposes

We do not sell personal information or authorize unrelated secondary use.

Photos and personalization details are never publicly displayed, shared on social media, used in marketing materials, or distributed to other customers. Your child’s likeness exists only in the personalized book you ordered, plus the working files needed to fulfill that order.

AI and Machine Learning

We use AI tools to create the personalized illustrations and narrative for your child’s book. When you upload an optional photo, it is sent to our AI illustration vendor only to generate the specific images for your specific order, and only for as long as the generation request takes to complete.

We never use customer photos, names, traits, or interaction data to train, fine-tune, or improve any AI model — ours or any vendor’s. We use paid API tiers from our AI vendors specifically because those tiers contractually prohibit the vendor from retaining or training on customer prompts and uploads. We do not share customer data with AI vendors for training, research, or any purpose other than fulfilling your specific order.

This applies to identified and anonymized data alike. We do not aggregate or anonymize customer data for AI training, third-party sharing, or any purpose unrelated to fulfilling your specific order.

Parental Consent

Because personalization details may include information about a child under 13, we treat a verified adult payment at checkout as parental consent for:

• Collecting necessary personalization information
• Using it for personalization, fulfillment, support, and reprints
• Secure storage for recordkeeping purposes

Only adults may complete checkout.

Third-Party Service Providers

To fulfill orders and operate our service, limited personalization information may be shared with secure service providers that support:

• Book design and production
• Printing and shipment
• Storage, authentication, or payment processing

These providers may use the information only to deliver the requested service. We do not sell information or authorize advertising use.

Data Storage and Retention

We retain customer data only as long as needed to fulfill orders, support customers, and meet legal obligations. Specifically:

• Optional uploaded photosare removed from active service within 30 days of book delivery, or within 30 days of upload if the order is not completed. After this point, your photo is no longer used to generate illustrations, no longer accessible in your account, and no longer retrievable by customer-service staff. Your photo may be retained in a separate restricted-access archive for up to 60 additional days for fraud investigation, audit, and emergency operational support — not for routine use. Photos are permanently purged from all our systems by 90 days after delivery (or 90 days after upload if no order was completed). Verified deletion requests trigger immediate purge of both the active copy AND the archive copy.
• Child personalization details (name, age, traits) are retained for 12 months after book delivery to support reprints and customer service, then automatically deleted unless you have requested longer retention.
• Transaction records (order ID, payment confirmation, shipping address) are retained for 7 years to comply with U.S. financial recordkeeping requirements. These records do not include child personalization details or photos.
• Account email and purchaser information are retained for as long as you have an active account, plus 30 days after account closure.

You may request earlier deletion at any time by emailing support@storygeniebooks.com or using our Data Deletion Request page. We remove information promptly upon verified request, except for the limited transaction records we must retain for legal or financial recordkeeping.

Categories of Service Providers

To operate our service we work with reputable third-party service providers. Each is contractually bound to use customer data only for the purpose listed below, and only to the extent necessary to provide that service. We do not authorize any service provider to use customer data for advertising, AI model training, or any purpose other than fulfilling your order.

We engage these providers under written agreements that require them to handle customer data only on our instructions, apply appropriate security safeguards, and not retain data longer than needed to deliver the service. We will update this list when we add a category of service provider that handles customer data.

Parents and legal guardians may request additional information about the specific providers that handle their data on reasonable written request to support@storygeniebooks.com, in accordance with applicable law.

Cookies and Tracking Technologies

We use cookies and similar technologies to operate the site and measure how it’s used. Cookies fall into three categories on our site:

Essential cookies are required for the site to function. Analytics and advertising-attribution cookies can be disabled via your browser settings or browser-level “do not track” preferences; we honor browser-level signals where possible.

We do NOT use cookies to track you across other websites for behavioral profiling beyond ad-attribution measurement, and we do NOT sell cookie data to data brokers. Our analytics and advertising-attribution cookies provide aggregate measurement only; they do not identify individual users to us.

Parental Rights

Parents or legal guardians may:

• Review the information we have about their child
• Correct inaccurate information
• Request partial or full deletion
• Withdraw consent for future collection

To exercise these rights, email support@storygeniebooks.com. We may request reasonable verification.

A telephone or video call can be arranged upon written request when additional verification or assistance is needed.

When you request a review of stored information, we provide it in a human-readable format (PDF or email summary) within 30 days of verified request. Machine-readable formats (JSON, CSV) are available on request for accessibility or data-portability purposes.

Security

We protect customer data with multiple safeguards:

• Customer data and uploaded photos are encrypted at rest using industry-standard ciphers provided by our cloud-hosting and database providers.
• All data transfer between your browser and our servers is encrypted in transit using current TLS (HTTPS) standards.
• Internal access to customer data is limited to team members directly responsible for fulfilling and supporting orders, and is governed by role-based access controls.
• Our payment processor handles all credit-card data via PCI-DSS-compliant tokenization; we never see, store, or process full payment card numbers.
• We do not allow public download links or anonymous access to any customer-uploaded content. Photos are only accessible through authenticated requests by the original purchaser or authorized internal staff.

No system is perfectly secure, but we apply industry-standard technical and operational safeguards to minimize the risk of unauthorized access or misuse.

Children Under 13

We do not knowingly allow children under 13 to create accounts or interact directly with our service. If we learn that a child submitted information directly, we will delete it promptly.

California Residents (CCPA / CPRA)

If you are a California resident, you have the right to:

• Know what categories of personal information we collect about you and how we use it
• Request a copy of your personal information
• Request deletion of your personal information, subject to limited exceptions for financial recordkeeping
• Opt out of the sale or sharing of your personal information — note that we do not sell or share personal information for advertising or any commercial purpose other than fulfilling your order
• Correct inaccurate personal information we hold about you
• Be free from retaliation for exercising any of these rights

To exercise these rights, email support@storygeniebooks.com. We may verify your identity before completing the request.

Changes to This Policy

We may update this policy if our service or legal requirements change. Updated terms will appear on this page.

Additional Resources (optional section)

For site usage terms, see our Terms of Use.
For deletion requests, see our Data Deletion Request page.