Privacy

The short version

We collect the least we can and still teach your child to read. That is a first name or a nickname, the month and the year your child was born, the grade you tell us they are in, and the writing they do in the app along with how it was marked.

We do not sell anything about your family to anybody. We do not run advertising. We do not load analytics, trackers or social buttons.

Your child's writing is marked by an artificial intelligence service outside StratoReading, and that service processes and stores what we send it in the People's Republic of China. A second artificial intelligence service also receives your child's answer, on the questions where the answer did not earn full marks. The section below called Who else sees any of this sets out both of them, and what we know and do not know about each.

There is no cookie banner because there is nothing to ask you about. Once you sign in we set one cookie, which is what keeps you signed in. It does nothing else, it is not shared with anybody, and signing out removes it.

You can read everything we hold about your child, and you can have all of it deleted, at any time, without giving a reason.

StratoReading complies fully with the privacy laws that apply to a service children use, the United States Children's Online Privacy Protection Act among them. Everything on this page is how we handle your family's information, not a plan to.

What we ask you for

From you, the parent or guardian: an email address and a password you choose. That is the whole account. If you would rather not keep a password, you can also sign in with a link we send to that address, and you can use your Google account instead.

AN EARLIER VERSION OF THIS PAGE SAID THERE WAS NO PASSWORD TO CHOOSE OR FORGET. That was written before passwords existed here and it stayed on the page after they arrived, which made it wrong. This version exists partly to say so. The older versions are left exactly as they were, because they are what other families agreed to.

From you, about your child: a first name or a nickname, the month and the year they were born, and the grade they are in. The name is what your child sees at the top of the screen, so a nickname is perfectly fine and we would rather you used one.

The grade is the one you tell us, not one we decide and impose. Nothing suggests it and nothing fills it in for you, which is what a family needs when a child was held back a year or moved up one. You can change it whenever it stops being right.

We also ask for your child's email address, because that address is how your child signs in and it is where we send the one message that tells them they are registered. If your child has no address of their own, use one you can open for them.

We do not ask for a home address, a phone number, a school, or a photograph. We do not ask for a last name. We do not ask for the day of the month your child was born, only the month and the year.

WE KEEP THE MONTH AND THE YEAR, and an earlier version of this page said we did not. Until 2026-08-22 this page said the birth year was used once and not kept afterward. That was true when it was written and it is not true now. This version exists to say so, and the older versions are left exactly as they were, because they are what other families agreed to.

Here is what the two of them are for. Together they tell us how old your child is. Today that is how we choose where their reading starts. It is also what an age check on topics will use, so that material written for older readers is not put in front of a younger child. That check is built and is not switched on yet; when it is, a later version of this page will say so.

If your child signed themselves up

A child can start here without a parent, and some do. When that happens we ask the child for their own email address, a password, their age, the grade they are in, and a name to call them by. We also ask them for YOUR email address.

We use your address for one thing: to tell you that your child is here, and to tell you when they move up a reading level while they are still on the free passages. Nothing else is sent to it. It is not sold, not shared, and not added to any list.

We are asking a child for somebody else's contact details and we do not pretend otherwise. It is the only way a child who found this on their own can be connected to the adult responsible for them. If you did not expect this message, you can tell us the child is not yours and we will remove the connection, or you can ask us to delete the account outright. Either way, write to the address on the contact page and a person will do it.

Until you say the child is yours, what that child writes is kept apart: it is not added to the writing we read in aggregate, and the account is not billed for anything.

What your child creates, and why we keep it

Your child reads a passage and writes an answer. We keep that writing, the marks it was given, and the reasons for those marks.

We keep it because it is the product. A parent who cannot see what their child wrote last month cannot tell whether anything is improving, and a child who cannot see why an answer scored what it did has been given a number rather than a lesson.

We also read it in aggregate to check that our marking is fair, and to find where it is wrong. That work is done on the writing of many children at once, and it never names a child.

Your child's voice

The youngest readers can answer by speaking rather than typing, because a five year old can say a sentence long before they can type one. This part of the app is still being built and no child has used it yet.

We ask your child's device to turn that speech into text by itself, so the sound never leaves it. Some devices cannot. When that happens the speech is sent to a service that turns it into text, and the screen says so before your child speaks. It is never sent quietly, and that is the part we hold ourselves to.

We allow that fallback rather than refusing outright, and the reason is worth saying plainly. Every computer this runs on has dictation built into it, two keystrokes away. A child blocked here would simply use that instead, where we could tell you nothing at all and record nothing about how the answer was written.

You can ask us to require the on device kind only, and we will set that for your child. Write to us and a person will do it.

We keep the text, never the recording.

Who else sees any of this

Three companies outside StratoReading touch your child's work. One stores our database. The other two are artificial intelligence services we pay to do a job: one marks the writing, and one writes the improved examples your child reads afterward. We describe each of them by the job it does rather than by its company name, because the job is the part that affects your child, and it stays true on the day we change a supplier.

The company that stores our database is barred by its contract with us from using anything in that database to train or improve any artificial intelligence model, and from letting anybody else do so. We have read that clause. Our database sits in the United States. This is the one supplier promise on this page that we are willing to repeat to you as a promise.

The company that marks your child's writing receives that writing so that it can score it and explain the score. We have read its published terms as well, and they do not say the same thing. They list training its own models as one of the purposes it processes what it receives, and they do not set the paid connection we use apart from that. So we are not going to tell you that your child's writing is kept out of that training. We would not be able to stand behind it.

That same marking company processes and stores what we send it in the People's Republic of China. Its own published privacy policy says so in those words. We are telling you before you create an account rather than after, because it is the kind of fact a parent is entitled to weigh first, and once your child has written something it is too late to weigh it.

The second artificial intelligence service writes the improved versions of an answer that your child is shown when the answer did not earn full marks. It receives your child's answer in order to do that. So the writing that reaches it is, by the way the product is built, the writing of a child who found that question hard. It is a different company from the one that marks.

On 2026-08-12 we read that second company's terms with the same care we gave the other two, which is what the previous version of this page promised we would do. Its contract with us forbids it from using what we send to train or improve its own models unless we specifically agree to that, and we have not agreed and will not. We have read that clause too, so this is the second supplier promise on this page we are willing to repeat to you.

That second company keeps what we send for up to thirty days, to run the service and to look for misuse, and then removes it. We are giving you that number because we have it. The marking company's published policy sets no period at all, so please do not read the thirty days as covering both of them.

Two things about that second company are less comfortable, and you should have those as well. The first is that if its own systems flag something as possibly breaking its rules, a sample of the flagged writing can be read by a person working for a review contractor, and its published list of those contractors gives their locations as the United States, Canada and the Philippines. The second is that there is no single country where your child's answer is held. That same published list, dated July 9, 2026, names the companies it uses to run the service and the countries each of them processes in, and between them they come to more than twenty countries, the United States among them. We are not going to name one country for you, because the documents do not name one.

One more company, Stripe, takes the payment if you choose to pay for StratoReading, and this one we name, because the page you type your card into is Stripe's own, not ours. Your card and your billing details go to Stripe and stay on Stripe's systems. They are never on our servers, and we never see the card number. What we send Stripe is the price, how many children the plan covers, and a reference number for your family that means nothing outside StratoReading. What we keep is Stripe's reference for your subscription, which plan it is, and whether it is paid or has ended. Nothing your child reads or writes goes to Stripe.

What we promise here is about us, because we are what we control: we never sell your child's writing, we never share it for advertising, and we never use it for anything except the marking it was written for and the fairness checks described above.

Nobody else. Not advertisers, not data brokers, not schools, and not other families.

If we are ever required by law to hand something over, we will tell you unless we are forbidden from telling you.

Consent, and who gives it

You consent, not your child. You accept these terms before any child profile exists, and you give consent separately for each child you add.

We record which version of this policy you agreed to and when. That is why this page has a date in its address: the version you agreed to stays at that address, unchanged, for as long as your record does.

If we change this policy in a way that matters, we will ask you again rather than assume the old answer still applies.

Getting it back, and getting rid of it

Ask us and we will send you everything we hold about your child, in a form you can open and read.

Ask us and we delete it. Deletion means the writing, the marks, the reasons, the words your child looked up, and the profile itself, gone from our systems. It is built as one operation over every place a child's data is held, rather than a list somebody works through by hand, and nothing is kept back.

Closing your account deletes the children on it. We say so clearly before you do it.

How to reach a person

Write to the address on the contact page, or use the form there. A person reads both. What you type into the form is kept in our database, with the email you gave, so that person can answer you and you can reply from your own email. The same is true of the Contact us box in your child's settings, whose message reaches you, the parent, rather than the child. Nobody else reads either and neither is used for anything else.