Privacy 🔒

For kids: the short version

• You only need a nickname and a password. We never ask for your real name, email, school or where you live.
• Please don't type those things in your chats with Zappy or in your games either, or say them when you talk to Zappy.
• When you talk to Zappy with the 🎤 button, your own device turns your voice into words. We never get the recording, only the words you then send.
• Other players see your nickname, your avatar color, your published games and your best scores. Nothing else.
• There are no ads and nothing that follows you around the internet.
• A grown-up on our team checks every game before other kids can see it.

What we keep for a kid's account

• Account: nickname, avatar color, and the password and recovery code, stored only as scrambled hashes we can't read back.
• Games: each game's code, name, description, tags, cover picture and versions, plus the chat with Zappy that built it and any drawings uploaded to it.
• Playing: likes, star ratings and the best score for each game.
• Zaps: the balance and a history of how Zaps were added and spent.
• Contact form: the message and the optional nickname, so we can read and answer it.

Talking to Zappy (🎤): the mic is off until the kid taps it, the browser asks for permission first, and it stops by itself after a short while. The voice is turned into words by the kid's own device: on the computer itself in Chrome, or by Apple's dictation in Safari and on iPhones and iPads (the same as the mic key on their keyboard). We never receive, hear or keep any recording. The words appear in the chat box, and only what the kid chooses to send reaches us, like typing. In other browsers there is no mic button. Read it to me (🔊) uses a voice built into the device, so nothing is sent anywhere.

We only use this to run Zapademy: building and showing games, leaderboards, Zaps, and keeping the site safe. We don't sell it, rent it, or use it for advertising.

Public: the nickname, avatar color, approved games and leaderboard scores. Drafts, chats and drawings stay private to the kid and our review team.

Parents

Parent accounts are separate from kids' accounts. Your email is never shown to anyone. We keep:

• Your email address, used to sign you in and to write to you about your account.
• If you choose "Continue with Google": your Google account's ID number and email address. Nothing else from your Google account.
• When you signed up and last signed in.
• Which kids you linked, your plan, and what you bought. Payments are handled by Stripe, so your card details never reach our servers.
• If you make games too: the nickname you pick and your games. Like a kid's, your nickname, games and scores are public; your email stays private.

We never send marketing email.

Companies that help us

• Anthropic (makers of Claude, the AI behind Zappy) receives chat messages, drawings and game code so Zappy can build the game. Anthropic does not use this to train its AI models.
• Fly.io runs our server and stores our database and its backups.
• Google Workspace sends our emails (parent sign-in links) and holds our support inbox.
• Google Fonts serves the site's fonts, so your browser asks Google for them like on many websites. Google sees the request but not who you are on Zapademy.
• Stripe handles payments: it gets your email address and payment details, and sends receipts. It doesn't get anything about your child beyond an account number.

Games run inside a locked box in your browser. They can't open other websites or see your account.

Cookies and how long we keep things

• Two cookies only: one keeps a kid signed in, one keeps a parent signed in. Each lasts 30 days. No tracking or advertising cookies.
• If you score before signing in, your browser remembers that score until you sign in, so it can be saved.
• You can try making a game before signing up: 5 messages to Zappy, no nickname or password. The game and its chat are kept under a hidden guest account that only that browser can open (with the same sign-in cookie), and nobody else can see them. Signing up or signing in on that browser moves the game to your account. To stop people from overusing the free tries, we keep a scrambled code made from the network address (never the address itself) for 2 days.
• Sign-in links expire after 15 minutes. Records we use to block too many tries (they include an IP address or email) are deleted after a day.
• Visitor counts: for each page opened we save the page, the rough place (country, region and city, worked out on our own server from the IP address), the kind of network (home, phone carrier, Apple's Hide IP or a data centre), the browser's time zone, the kind of device, the site that linked here, and the name of our ad link if the visit came from one of our ads (like "google / test-1"). Ads never put cookies or trackers on this site. We don't save the IP address or which account it was, and we can't follow a visitor from one day to the next. No outside analytics company is involved. These counts are deleted after 90 days.
• Our server logs record technical events like account numbers, times and sizes, never chats, game code or passwords. They are deleted after 90 days.
• Accounts and games are kept until they're deleted. Backups are kept for 30 days, so deleted data is gone from them after that.

See, change or delete your data

Parents can ask us to show, correct or delete everything about their child's account or their own: write to support@zapademy.com and we'll answer within 30 days. Kids can ask through the Contact page while signed in.

If we ever change this page in a big way, we'll say so on the site and, for parents, by email.

Zapademy is run by an independent developer, not a company. Questions about privacy? Write to support@zapademy.com.