🌱 BrightSprouts Academy › Privacy Policy

Privacy Policy

Last updated: 28 July 2026. This policy covers the website at brightsprouts.academy and the BrightSprouts Academy apps for iOS and Android, which show the same content.

Short version: we do not ask children for anything about themselves, we do not sell or share anyone's data, there are no advertisements, and there is no tracking of individual people. The longer version below says exactly what happens, including the few places where information leaves your device.

We never ask a child for personal information. Not a name, not an age, not a birthday, not a school, not a photograph, not a location. Nothing a child types into a lesson, a game, the chat helper or the code terminal is sent to us or stored anywhere but their own device.

1. What stays on your device and never reaches us

Almost everything. The app keeps the following in your own browser or device storage, and it is never transmitted to BrightSprouts or to anyone else:

Your account: the email address and password you choose, your plan, and whether you are signed in.
Progress: stars, badges, streaks, which lessons have been opened, and rewards.
Anything typed into the app: answers on worksheets, custom stories, creature designs, and code written in the Code Terminal.
Settings such as whether the sound is muted.

Because this lives on the device, clearing your browser data or deleting the app erases it, and it does not follow you to another device. That is a deliberate trade: we would rather hold nothing than hold your family's data.

Code written in the Code Terminal runs inside a sandbox on the device. It is not uploaded, not saved by us, and not seen by anyone else.

2. What you can choose to send us, and why

If you do this	What is sent	Where it goes
Use the contact form	Your name, email address, optional phone number, topic and message	To our email inbox, through Web3Forms. Used only to reply to you.
Ask for free printable packs by email	A parent's email address and the one grade level chosen	To our email inbox, through Web3Forms, then to our mailing list. Used only to send the packs.
Subscribe to Premium	Payment details, entered on Stripe's own page	Stripe. We never see or store card numbers.

These are the only three things that leave your device because you asked them to, and each one is started by an adult pressing a button. We do not send marketing to anyone who did not ask, and every email has an unsubscribe link.

3. The microphone

Sprout, the chat helper, has a microphone button so a child who cannot yet spell a word can still ask about it. This is worth explaining carefully, because the two halves of the feature behave very differently.

Reading aloud (Sprout's voice, lesson audio, the Spelling Bee) happens entirely on the device, using a voice that is part of the operating system. Nothing leaves the device.
Listening does not. When a child taps the microphone, the browser turns their speech into text. In Chrome and Edge that recording is sent to the browser maker's own speech service to be transcribed. Safari does more of this on the device itself.

BrightSprouts never records, stores, receives or transmits any audio. We do not have access to it. What we do control is how little of it there is: the microphone is never on when the app opens, it starts only when someone taps the button, it stops as soon as it has heard one question, and it stops when the chat window is closed. Browsers that do not offer speech recognition simply do not show the button, and typing works everywhere.

If you would rather it were never used, decline the microphone permission when your device asks, or simply do not tap the button. Everything in the app works without it.

4. Other companies involved

We keep this list as short as we can. These are all of them:

Who	What for	What they receive
GoatCounter	Counting page views so we know which lessons are used	No cookies and no personal data. It records the page address, the referring site and the country. It does not build a profile of a visitor or follow anyone between sites.
Web3Forms	Delivering the contact form and the mailing-list signup	Only what you typed into that form.
Stripe	Taking subscription payments	Payment details, entered on Stripe's page. Subject to Stripe's own privacy policy.
flagcdn.com	The flag pictures in the Flag Quiz game	The ordinary request your browser makes for an image.
Wikimedia	Some plant and animal photographs	The ordinary request your browser makes for an image.
Google Fonts	The rounded display typeface	The ordinary request your browser makes for a font file.
Apple, Google	Only if you installed the app from their store	Whatever the store itself records about a download. We receive only anonymous totals.

There is no advertising network, no Google Analytics, no Facebook pixel and no third-party tracker anywhere in this app. We chose a cookieless counter precisely because this is a site for children.

5. Children's privacy (COPPA and similar rules)

BrightSprouts is made for families and is used by children, so we treat it as a children's service and design accordingly.

We do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 13, and we do not ask children for any.
Where an email address is needed at all, it is a parent's address, asked for in plain words, and used only for the thing it was given for.
The mailing list asks which grade level the packs are for. A grade band is not information about a particular child, and we do not ask for a name, an age or a birthday.
There is no chat with other people, no user-to-user messaging, no public profiles and no way for a child to publish anything. Sprout, the chat helper, only answers from this site's own lessons; it is not connected to any outside service or AI.
There is no behavioural advertising and no profiling.

If you believe a child has given us personal information, email us and we will delete it. Because almost nothing is stored on our side, in most cases there is nothing to delete.

6. Your choices and your rights

See or delete what is on your device: clear the browsing data for this site, or delete the app. That removes the account, the progress and everything typed.
Leave the mailing list: use the unsubscribe link in any email, or ask us.
Ask what we hold about you: email us. In practice this is limited to a mailing-list entry and any messages you sent us.
Delete what we hold: ask us and we will remove it.
Turn off the microphone: decline the permission, or do not use the button.

If you are in the UK, the EU, California or another place with data protection laws, those rights apply to you here regardless, and we will honour them.

7. Security, and an honest limitation

The site is served only over an encrypted connection (HTTPS), and payments are handled by Stripe rather than by us.

Please know this: accounts in the current version are stored in your own browser, not on a server, and the password is not a security barrier in the way a bank's is. Do not reuse an important password here. Nothing sensitive is stored, but that is a fair thing to know before you type a password anywhere.

8. Changes, and how to reach us

If this policy changes in a way that matters, we will change the date at the top and, for anything significant, say so on the site. We will not start collecting something new without saying so first.

Questions, requests or concerns: use the contact form on the website. We read everything a parent sends.

Please note: BrightSprouts Academy is a supplemental learning resource for families. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or a replacement for any official school curriculum, school district, state education agency, or the U.S. Department of Education.