Privacy Policy

TurtleTime is made by Social Panda LLC, a company registered in South Carolina, United States, trading as TurtleTime. Our address is 75 Port City Landing, Suite 110, Mount Pleasant, South Carolina 29464, United States. You can reach us at hello@turtletime.ai.

For people in the United Kingdom, the European Economic Area and Switzerland, Social Panda LLC is the data controller for the personal information described in this policy.

This policy covers turtletime.ai and everything you do there: making stories, ordering printed books, the partner pages we run with schools, nurseries and creators, and the emails we send. It does not cover third-party websites we link to.

• TurtleTime is for grown-ups. A parent or guardian creates the account and adds the details and photo used in a story. Children do not have accounts.
• We use your child's photo and details for one purpose: to write and illustrate their story. We do not use photos or stories to train AI models, and our AI providers are not permitted to either.
• We do not sell personal information and we never show advertising inside TurtleTime.
• Nothing you make is public unless you choose to share a link or publish to the marketplace.
• You can delete characters, photos and stories yourself at any time, and you can ask us to delete your whole account by emailing hello@turtletime.ai (see also our Data deletion page). We complete deletion requests within 30 days.
• We use analytics, including session replay with all typed input masked, to understand how the product is used and fix problems. Details and controls are in the cookies section.

Account details. Your name, email address and a password (stored only as a secure hash by our authentication provider), or the name and email from your Google account if you sign in with Google.

Details about your child, added by you.A first name or nickname, an optional birthday (used to pitch the story at the right reading age), interests, a few words about their personality, family relationships (for example “big sister”), and one or more photos. You can also create characters for pets, toys and made-up friends. You must be the child's parent or guardian, or have their parent or guardian's permission, before you upload a photo.

What we make for you.The illustrated character, story text, illustrations, edits you make, read-aloud narration audio, any “come alive” page animations, downloads (PDF, eBook, Word), and messages you exchange with Ask Turtle, our in-app helper.

Purchases. Payments are handled by Stripe. We receive confirmation of payment, the plan or item bought, and a Stripe customer reference. We never see or store your full card number. For printed books we collect a delivery name, postal address and email (and a phone number if you choose to give one) and save them to your account so you can reuse them.

Messages you send us. Contact and support requests, feedback, and replies to our emails.

Guest previews. If you try TurtleTime without an account we create a temporary anonymous account for you. It is deleted automatically after 7 days unless you save your story by creating an account.

Partner and promo codes. If you arrive through a school, nursery or creator page, we record the code so the discount applies and so we can pay that partner what we owe them. Partners never see who used their page; they only see totals.

Usage and device information. Your IP address, approximate location derived from it, browser and device type, the pages you view and the actions you take, the page that referred you, and performance and error data. Most of this comes from cookies and similar technologies, described below.

Where UK or EU data protection law applies we need a legal basis for each use. The table shows what we do and why we are allowed to.

We do not make decisions about you that have legal or similarly significant effects using automated processing alone.

TurtleTime uses generative AI to write and illustrate stories. This is what actually happens:

• The photo you upload is sent to our AI provider, which produces a written description of the character (hair, eyes, outfit and so on) and illustrations in the art style you pick. The result is a cartoon likeness, not a copy of the photo. We do not use facial recognition and we do not build a biometric template that could identify your child elsewhere.
• The child's name, age and the story idea you choose are sent as text so the story can be written at the right level. Interests and personality notes are used to shape the story, not published.
• Page text is sent to a text-to-speech model for read-aloud narration, and page illustrations are sent to a video model if you ask for a page to be animated.
• Our providers are Google (Gemini models, including text-to-speech and video) and, as an automatic fallback if Google is unavailable, OpenAI. We use their commercial APIs, under terms that do not allow them to use your content to train their models. We do not train models on your content either.
• Stories are written to strict age-appropriate rules and pass through our providers' safety filters. You read and approve every page before it is printed or shared. AI can still make mistakes, so please check names and text before ordering.

TurtleTime is a service for adults. You must be 18 or over to create an account. We do not knowingly collect personal information directly from a child under 13 (or under the age at which a child can consent to online services where you live). Children may read and listen to their stories together with the adult who holds the account.

The information about children on TurtleTime is provided by their parent or guardian, who stays in control of it. As that parent or guardian you can review what you have added, change it, delete a character and its photos, delete stories, or ask us to delete everything. Email hello@turtletime.ai from the address on your account and we will act within 30 days.

If we learn that a child has created an account or given us personal information directly, we will delete it. If you think that has happened, please tell us.

When a school or nursery shares TurtleTime with its families, the school shares a link and nothing else. No pupil names, photos or contact details pass between the school and us in either direction. Our note for schools is at turtletime.ai/schools.

We share personal information only with companies that help us run TurtleTime, under contracts that limit what they can do with it. We do not sell personal information.

Public by your choice.If you turn on a share link, anyone with the link can read that story. If you publish a story to the marketplace, its cover, title, synopsis and the hero's first name appear publicly after our review, and you can unpublish at any time. We only feature a family's book in our own marketing with their express permission.

Partners.Schools, nurseries and creators whose pages you use see counts and totals only. They never see your name, your child's details or your stories.

Law and safety. We will disclose information if required by law or a valid legal request, to protect a child, to protect our rights or the safety of others, or as part of a merger, acquisition or sale of our business (in which case this policy continues to apply to your information).

We use a small number of cookies and browser storage keys. They fall into three groups.

You can block or delete cookies in your browser settings; the site will still work but you may need to sign in again. You can also opt out of Google's advertising cookies at adssettings.google.com and manage Meta's at facebook.com/adpreferences. If you would like us to exclude you from analytics entirely, email hello@turtletime.ai and we will do it manually. We do not currently respond to browser Do Not Track or Global Privacy Control signals.

• Your account, characters and stories are kept while your account is open so you can come back to them. Unpaid story previews stop being readable after 7 days.
• Guest accounts and everything made in them are deleted 7 days after they were created unless saved to a real account.
• Photos you delete are removed from our storage as part of our routine clean-up, and in any case within 30 days of an account deletion request.
• Orders, invoices and payment records are kept for seven years to meet tax and accounting rules.
• Support and contact messages are kept for up to three years so we can help with follow-up questions.
• Analytics data is kept for the standard retention period of each provider.
• After you ask us to delete your account we remove your data from our live systems within 30 days. Encrypted backups roll off within a further 30 days.

In the app you can edit your profile and delivery address, delete characters and stories, turn marketing emails off in settings or via the unsubscribe link, and change or cancel a subscription through the billing portal in your account.

By email you can ask us for a copy of the personal information we hold about you, ask us to correct or delete it, ask us to restrict or stop a particular use, object to processing based on our legitimate interests, withdraw consent where we rely on it, or ask us to delete your whole account. Write to hello@turtletime.ai from the email address on your account so we can verify it is you. We reply within 30 days (45 days for requests under California law, which we can extend once if we tell you why).

UK, EEA and Swiss residentshave these rights under the UK GDPR and GDPR and can complain to their supervisory authority. In the UK that is the Information Commissioner's Office (ico.org.uk). We would appreciate the chance to help first.

California residentshave the right to know, delete and correct personal information, to opt out of the sale or sharing of personal information, and not to be discriminated against for using these rights. We do not sell personal information. The advertising measurement cookies described above may count as “sharing” under California law; you can opt out using the controls in the cookies section or by emailing us. We do not use or disclose sensitive personal information for purposes other than providing the service.

Everyone can ask us questions about this policy or how we handle information at hello@turtletime.ai.

Data is encrypted in transit and at rest by our providers. Passwords are hashed by our authentication provider and card details are handled entirely by Stripe. Access to production systems is limited to our founding team. Photos and artwork are stored under your own account's folder and served through long, unguessable links that are not listed or indexed anywhere.

No online service can promise perfect security. If you believe your account has been accessed without permission, or you find a security problem, please email hello@turtletime.ai straight away.

We are based in the United States and our providers process information mainly in the United States. If you use TurtleTime from the UK, the EEA, Switzerland or elsewhere, your information is transferred to the United States. Where required we rely on the UK International Data Transfer Addendum and the EU Standard Contractual Clauses with our providers, and on the EU-US Data Privacy Framework where a provider is certified under it.

When we change this policy we update the date and version number at the top. If a change is significant, for example a new purpose for using children's information, we will email account holders before it takes effect.

Privacy questions and requests: hello@turtletime.ai. Post: Social Panda LLC d/b/a TurtleTime, 75 Port City Landing, Suite 110, Mount Pleasant, South Carolina 29464, United States.