Privacy Policy — Bedtime Stories

Bedtime Stories is made for the last twenty minutes of a small child’s day: an adult starts a tale, dims the screen, and the narration plays while the child falls asleep. It is published in the Kids category of the Apple App Store and is written for toddlers and pre-school children who cannot yet read a consent form, let alone understand one.

That audience sets the standard we hold ourselves to. Bedtime Stories follows Apple’s App Store Review Guidelines for children’s apps, the United States Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) and the children’s provisions of the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR-K). Rather than promising to look after data carefully, we built the app so that no data is ever produced.

Opening Bedtime Stories takes you straight to the story shelf. There is no sign-up, no profile and no questionnaire, and the app therefore never collects:

• a child’s name, age, birthday or gender — the shelf is the same for everyone;
• email addresses, phone numbers or postal addresses;
• GPS or network location; the app never triggers the iOS location permission prompt;
• contacts, calendar entries or reminders;
• photos or camera access, and no microphone access — the app plays audio, it never records it;
• the advertising identifier (IDFA) or any other cross-app tracking identifier;
• voice recordings, biometric data or anything else that could identify the person holding the iPad.

Bedtime Stories contains no messaging, no user-generated content and no social features, so a child cannot be contacted through it by anyone.

A child falling asleep should not be sold anything. Bedtime Stories shows no advertisements — no banners, no video interstitials between tales, no sponsored characters and no cross-promotion pop-ups — and contains no advertising SDK at all.

The app is equally free of third-party analytics: no Firebase, no Google Analytics, no Meta or TikTok SDK, no attribution or A/B-testing platform, no session-recording tool. We do not measure which stories are popular, how long a child listens, or when the app is opened. Those questions are simply left unanswered.

We do not sell, rent, share, licence or otherwise transfer information about our users to advertisers, brokers, publishers, marketing partners or anyone else — not in exchange for money and not in exchange for services. No profiles are built, no audiences are assembled, and no third party receives a signal when the app is used.

Every story, lullaby and sleep sound ships inside the app, so the library plays perfectly with the device offline — useful on a plane or in a car. The only things the app records are practical, and they stay in the app’s private container on that single device:

• which tales have been played and where playback stopped;
• favourites added to the “Loved stories” shelf;
• the sleep-timer length, playback volume and background-sound mix;
• night-mode preferences such as screen dimming and whether the next story plays automatically.

None of this is uploaded, none of it is visible to us, and all of it disappears when the app is deleted from the device. Families who use iCloud device backup may find this local data inside their own encrypted Apple backup, which is governed by Apple’s policies and is not accessible to us.

A free selection of tales is available to everyone; an optional subscription opens the complete library and the extended sleep-sound collection. Every payment runs through Apple In-App Purchase and never through us.

The app has no payment form, no card field and no billing screen of its own. We do not receive, process or store card numbers, bank details, billing addresses, Apple ID names or email addresses. iOS hands the app a plain yes-or-no answer about whether a subscription is active, and that answer identifies nobody. “Restore Purchases” asks Apple to re-issue the entitlement attached to the Apple ID already signed in on the device.

Purchase information is processed by Apple under the Apple Privacy Policy at apple.com/legal/privacy. Subscriptions are managed and cancelled in the Apple ID settings on the device, as described in our Terms of Use.

Bedtime Stories is directed at children, most of them well under 13. We knowingly collect no personal information from children of any age and operate no service that could receive it.

Under COPPA, an operator must obtain verifiable parental consent before collecting personal information from a child under 13; under GDPR-K, processing a child’s data requires a lawful basis and, in most cases, the consent of the holder of parental responsibility. Because Bedtime Stories collects and processes nothing, neither obligation is triggered — and no parent is asked to hand over their own details in order to satisfy a consent flow.

Parents and guardians who want to verify this, or who suspect a child has somehow shared personal information with us, are welcome to write to kallumdanielbrooks@icloud.com. We will answer honestly and delete anything that should not exist.

A sleepy child tapping the screen should not be able to spend money or wander onto the open internet. Bedtime Stories therefore places a parental gate in front of every exit: a written instruction and a small calculation that a pre-school child cannot reasonably complete.

The gate must be passed before the app will:

• show the subscription offer or begin a purchase;
• restore an earlier purchase;
• open any external link, including this policy, the terms of use and the support page;
• open the parents’ area with playback and download settings.

We also recommend Guided Access and Screen Time on iOS for families who want to lock the device to a single app at bedtime.

Depending on where you live, you may have the right to know what personal data a company holds about you, to obtain a copy, to correct it, to have it erased, to restrict or object to its use, and to lodge a complaint with a data-protection authority. Californian residents additionally have the right not to be discriminated against for exercising these rights.

We honour all of them. In our case each request has the same short answer, because we hold no personal data about you or your child. Local progress on the device is yours alone and is erased by deleting the app. To ask a question, or to receive a written confirmation of what we store, contact kallumdanielbrooks@icloud.com; we reply within 2 business days.

Bedtime Stories runs inside the standard iOS sandbox, so its files are unreadable to other apps and are protected by the device passcode and Apple’s encryption. We operate no servers that hold user content, which removes the single largest source of risk: there is no database to leak and no account to be stolen.

This policy may be revised when the app changes — for instance when new stories, new sleep sounds or a new subscription option are added. The current version always lives at this address, and the “Last updated” date at the top of the page reflects the most recent revision.

If a future release ever introduced data collection of any kind, we would say so clearly in the App Store release notes and in this document before that release shipped, and would obtain any consent the law requires. Continued use of Bedtime Stories after an update is published constitutes acceptance of the revised policy.

Holy Apps Studio reads and answers every message sent to kallumdanielbrooks@icloud.com. The support page has a contact form, answers to common questions about subscriptions and restoring purchases, and the same address again. The privacy policy for Bible for Kids covers our other application.