Kids PhonePrivacy Policy
Kids Phone for iPhone · Last updated October 24, 2026
Kids Phone is made by fermave ("we", "us"). It is a parental-control app for children roughly 6 to 12 years old, set up and controlled by a parent or guardian. This policy explains exactly what the app collects, where it goes, and how to delete it. We wrote it to be read by parents, and we are happy to answer questions at [email protected].
The short version
- No ads, no ad networks, no analytics, no tracking, no data brokers, nothing is sold.
- The parent creates the account on the phone. There is no sign-up with us and no email or phone number is required.
- Most data stays on the phone or in the parent's own iCloud. Our small server only does what calls, texts and reading checks need.
- A parent can erase everything with "Delete this account" in Parent Settings.
What we collect and why
| Data | Why | Where it lives |
|---|---|---|
| Child's first name and birthday | To greet the child, size tasks by age, and let friends see a birthday | On the phone, in the parent's private iCloud backup. Only the birthday month and day are sent to our server so friends can get a birthday reminder. |
| Username (chosen by the parent) | So friends can find and call each other | Apple iCloud (CloudKit public database) and our server |
| Parent passcode and security answer | To protect Parent Settings | On the phone only, as salted hashes. We cannot read or recover them. |
| Friend's secret word | To add a friend without sharing contact details | Apple iCloud, as a salted hash |
| Friend links and blocks | So only parent-approved friends can call or text | Apple iCloud and our server |
| Push notification token and a device identifier | To ring the phone for incoming calls and deliver texts | Our server (Cloudflare Workers). Removed when the account is deleted. |
| Text messages between approved friends | To deliver them to the other phone | Relayed through our server and delivered to the friend's phone. We do not read them or use them for anything else. |
| Drawings sent to a friend | The shared drawing widget | Apple iCloud |
| The child's retelling of a chapter (as text) and their diary or essay text, with their age | To decide pass or fail for earned minutes and return one encouraging sentence | Sent once through our server to Anthropic's Claude API, which returns the verdict. We do not store the text. See "Reading and writing checks" below. |
| Voice and video during calls | The call itself | Phone to phone, encrypted (WebRTC). Calls never pass through our server and are never recorded. |
| Minutes earned and app-lock settings | The core feature | On the phone (Apple Screen Time / Family Controls) |
Reading and writing checks
When a child retells a chapter, Apple's on-device speech recognition turns their voice into text on the phone. The audio never leaves the device. That text, or the diary or essay the child typed, is sent together with the child's age to our server, which forwards it to Anthropic's Claude API with instructions to be lenient and reply with a pass or fail and one short, kind sentence. We keep only the pass or fail result. We do not store the text, and Anthropic does not use data sent through its API to train its models. No name, username or other identifier is sent with the text.
Permissions the app asks for
- Screen Time (Family Controls): to lock the apps the parent chooses. Handled entirely by iOS on the phone; we never see which apps are used.
- Microphone: for calls and to hear the chapter retelling.
- Camera: for video calls and to scan a friend's code.
- Speech recognition: on-device, for the chapter retelling.
- Local network: so two phones in the same house can connect directly for clearer calls.
- Notifications: to ring for incoming calls and show texts and earned-minutes reminders.
You can decline any of these. Features that need them simply won't work until a parent turns them on in Settings → Kids Phone.
Services we use
- Apple iCloud (CloudKit) for usernames, friend links, call invites and the family's own backup.
- Apple Push Notification service for incoming-call and text alerts.
- Cloudflare Workers, our server, for push delivery, text relay, call setup and forwarding reading and writing checks. Cloudflare may log the connecting IP address briefly for abuse protection.
- Anthropic (Claude API) for the reading and writing checks described above.
- WebRTC with public STUN servers run by Google and Cloudflare, which only help the two phones find each other so the call can go directly between them.
These providers process data only on our behalf and under their own privacy terms. We do not use any analytics, advertising or social SDKs.
Children's privacy (COPPA and GDPR-K)
Kids Phone is designed for children and is operated with the parent's consent: a parent installs the app, enters the child's information, approves every friend with the parent passcode, and can review or delete all data at any time. We collect only what the features above need, never more. We do not show ads, do not build profiles, and do not disclose a child's information to third parties except the service providers listed above. A parent may contact us at [email protected] to review, correct or delete their child's information, or to withdraw consent, and we will respond within 7 days.
Deleting data
Parent Settings → "Delete this account" erases the username, friend links, call invites, push tokens, server records and everything stored on the phone, and returns the app to onboarding. Deleting the app from the phone removes all on-device data. You can also email us the username and we will remove any server-side data within 7 days.
Security
Calls are end-to-end encrypted between the two phones. Passcodes and secret words are stored as salted hashes. All traffic to our server and to Apple uses HTTPS. No system is perfectly secure, but we keep as little as possible so there is little to lose.
Changes
If this policy changes we will update the date at the top and, for anything material, show a notice in the app.
Contact
fermave · [email protected]