How we keep it safe
Written plainly, because a promise you cannot check is not worth much.
Every story is checked before anyone sees it
Checks run at four levels, cheapest first. A word list catches the obvious, matched whole rather than as fragments so ordinary words and place names are not caught by accident. A scoring step weighs how much of a concern something is for the age it was written for, so a chase that is fine for a nine year old is treated differently for a three year old. Anything near the line is looked at more carefully. Anything still unclear waits for a person.
When a check cannot complete, the story waits rather than going through. Pausing something harmless costs a few minutes. The other mistake reaches a child.
Nothing is shared without a person and a parent
A book only becomes visible to other children if you have turned sharing on for that child, and a member of our team has read it. Shared books show a first name only. There is no field for a surname anywhere in our system, so there is nothing to leak.
Every shared book has a report button. Reports go to a person, not to an automated queue that closes itself.
What a child can and cannot type
Children choose from pictures rather than typing. The only free text is a name for the main character, and that is limited to what a name can be. What they choose is treated as ingredients for a story and never as instructions, and anything that reads like an instruction is refused and recorded.
You are in charge
- Turn off any themes or characters you would rather not see.
- Set a daily limit. When it is reached, Pip says it is time for a rest.
- Decide whether a child may share anything at all. Off unless you turn it on.
- Decide whether we learn from what they enjoy. Off unless you turn it on, and turning it off removes what was learned.
- End every signed-in session on every device, from your dashboard.
What we do not do
We do not advertise to children. We do not sell or share what a child does with anyone else. We do not use a child’s reading to train anything outside this product. We do not use streaks, timers, or notifications designed to pull a child back.
Where we are honest about the limits
No check of this kind is perfect. That is exactly why a person reviews everything that becomes public, why reporting is one tap away, and why the settings above exist for you rather than only for us.
On typefaces: we default to Lexend, which has the better evidence behind it. We also offer OpenDyslexic because some readers prefer it, but the research does not show it improves reading, and we are not going to tell you otherwise.