In short
- We collect as little as we can to make your child’s paper, and nothing more.
- Your child’s birthday, and their pet’s and brothers’ and sisters’ names, stay on your phone and in your own iCloud. They never reach our servers.
- The AI that writes the paper is never told your child’s name.
- Papers are deleted after 30 days.
- No ads, no tracking, no analytics companies. We never sell your information.
- Delete your account in the app and your family’s information is removed straight away.
Who we are
Little Headlines is made by Michael O’Sullivan, an independent developer in New South Wales, Australia. In this policy “we” means Little Headlines. We are responsible for your information under the Australian Privacy Act 1988, the UK GDPR and the EU GDPR.
Questions or requests: privacy@littleheadlines.app.
Who uses the app
Little Headlines is used by parents and carers. You set it up, you make each paper, and you read it before it prints. Children never use the app, never sign in and never give us information themselves. They only read the printed paper.
What we keep, and why
| Information | Why | Where it lives |
|---|---|---|
| Your email address, and the invite code you joined with | To sign you in with a one time code and to run the invite system | Our database |
| Your child’s first name, and a nickname if you add one | To put it on their paper. It is swapped for a stand in word before anything is sent to the AI | Our database |
| Your child’s town, its country, map position and time zone | For local news, weather, tides and the right date. A town, never an address | Our database |
| Whether your child is a boy, a girl, neither, or you would rather not say, and he, she or they | To write about them the right way. Never used to choose stories | Our database |
| Interests, people they follow, reading level, how much real news they get, and how long and how often their paper is | To choose stories and write them in the right way | Our database |
| Their week, and the days coming up that you add | So the paper can mention swimming on Wednesday or the school holidays | Our database |
| The papers we make, including one you turned down, and their age when each was made | So you can read, print and reprint them, and so we can see why a paper missed | Our database, deleted after 30 days |
| Your feedback on papers, story ideas you send, and the short notes the paper learns from your feedback | To make the next paper better. You can see and remove each learned note in the app | Our database |
| Which stories and story series they have already had | So the paper does not repeat itself | Our database |
| Simple usage counts: which days the app was opened, and whether a paper was printed or shared | To understand whether Little Headlines is working for families | Our database |
| Your child’s birthday, a pet’s name, brothers’ and sisters’ names | For the numbers box and personal touches in the story | Only on your phone and in your iCloud |
| A favourite colour and the kind of pet | Personal touches in the story. Sent with each request to write the paper, not stored by us | Your phone and your iCloud |
When you remove a learned note, we keep the removed line with your child’s details so the paper never learns it again. It goes when you delete the reader or your account.
Please do not write your children’s names, or anyone else’s, in notes and feedback. The app reminds you of this.
How a paper is written
Each paper is written by an AI model provided by Anthropic. For each paper we send it a stand in word in place of your child’s name, and their age, whether today is their birthday, country, town, he, she or they, interests and people they follow, reading level and how much real news they get, the week’s plans and coming days you have added, the notes learned from your feedback, anything you wrote when you asked for a paper to be made again, and short extracts of their recent papers so it does not repeat itself. If you have added them, we also send a favourite colour and the kind of pet they have. Your child’s name is taken out of everything first, and the app refuses to send anything that still contains it. We never send their name, birthday or your email address.
Anthropic processes this to write the paper for us. Under its commercial terms it does not use this information to train its models. We do not keep the prompts in our logs. We keep a record of what each paper cost to make, which holds no words from the paper or the prompt.
Who else handles information for us
We use a small number of services to run Little Headlines. Each only receives what it needs.
- Supabase hosts our database and servers, in Sydney, Australia.
- Anthropic provides the AI that writes each paper, as described above.
- Resend sends the sign in code to your email address, and a daily email to us that includes recent feedback notes, story ideas and why a paper was turned down, with the child’s age but never a name or email address.
- Open-Meteo turns the town you type into a place on the map, and provides the weather. It receives the town name, its map position and your phone’s internet address, nothing about your family.
- Stormglass provides tide times. It receives a town’s position, rounded, and nothing about your family.
- Apple delivers the app, keeps the details that stay on your phone in your iCloud if you use it, and may share crash reports with us if you have agreed to that on your iPhone.
- Cloudflare hosts this website, checks the contact form is used by a person (Turnstile), and passes on messages sent through it.
Some of these services are outside your country, including in the United States. Where information leaves the UK or the EU we rely on the safeguards those services provide, such as standard contractual clauses.
What we never do
- We never sell your information or share it for advertising.
- We show no ads, in the app or in the paper.
- We use no analytics or tracking companies in the app.
- We never use gender to choose stories. It is used only for he, she or they.
How long we keep it
Papers, and the feedback on them, are deleted automatically after 30 days. Everything else is kept while you have an account. When you delete a reader, their details, papers, feedback, coming days and story ideas are removed. When you delete your account, everything about your family is removed straight away. What stays is a record of what each paper cost, with nothing linking it to you, and the invite code you used, with our note of who we sent it to. Feedback that already reached us in a daily email stays in our inbox until we delete it.
Your choices and rights
You can see and change what the paper knows about each child in the app, on their About tab, and remove any learned note. To delete everything, go to Settings, then Delete account.
You can also ask us for a copy of your information, or ask us to correct or delete it, by writing to privacy@littleheadlines.app. We will reply within 30 days.
If you are not happy with how we have handled your information, please tell us first. You can also complain to the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner, the UK Information Commissioner’s Office or Ireland’s Data Protection Commission.
This website
This website sets no cookies and uses no advertising or tracking. If we count visits, we use Cloudflare Web Analytics, which does not use cookies or identify you. The contact form uses Cloudflare Turnstile to check you are a person. If you write to us through the form, we receive your name, email address and message by email, use them only to reply, and delete them when they are no longer needed.
Changes
If we change how we handle your information, we will update this page and its date, and tell you in the app before any important change takes effect.