Safety & Privacy

The short version

Your child never has an account — you do. Their name and details exist for one purpose: telling their story. Nothing is sold, nothing is advertised, and you can delete everything, any time.

What we store

Only what you type: your child’s first name, an age range, and (optionally) a short description of how they look so the illustrations can match. Plus the stories, artwork, and narration created from them — saved to your library so bedtime favorites can be read again.

We never ask for photos of your child. Portraits and illustrations are painted from your written description alone.

What we never do

We never sell or share your family’s information. There are no ads, no data brokers, and no third-party marketing — our only revenue is subscriptions from parents.

Stories are private by default. A story is only visible to others if you personally choose to share it, and you can un-share it whenever you like.

How every story stays kind

Every input — names, lessons, themes, descriptions — passes through an automated safety review before any story is written. Anything inappropriate is refused with a friendly message.

The storyteller itself works under strict rules written by the founder: nothing scary, no sad endings, vocabulary matched to your child’s age, and every story winds down to a calm, cozy finish. Learning topics stick to simple, well-established facts.

Children, COPPA, and who this service is for

Z Tales is directed at parents and guardians, not at children. Accounts may only be created by adults, the service is designed and marketed to the adult who does bedtime, and there is no part of the product a child signs into, registers for, or uses on their own.

That matters for the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act. Any information about a child here — a first name, an age range, an optional written description used to paint the illustrations — is entered voluntarily by the account-holding parent, held solely to generate and store that family’s stories, and never used for advertising, profiling or model training. We do not request photographs, last names, addresses, phone numbers or location, and we do not knowingly collect personal information directly from a child.

Writing and illustrating a story means sending what you typed to OpenAI, whose models do the writing and painting. Since 2 August 2026 that happens under a signed Data Processing Addendum: OpenAI acts as our data processor, may use what we send only to deliver the service back to us and only on our instructions, and does not use it to train their models. They may hold it for up to thirty days to detect abuse of their own systems, after which it is deleted. No other company receives a child’s name or description at any point.

You can see everything held for your family, delete any story permanently, or delete the entire account and all of its data from the account deletion page or by emailing hello@ztales.com. We recommend using first names only.

If you believe a child has provided information here directly, email hello@ztales.com and it will be deleted promptly. Z Tales does not currently hold a third-party COPPA safe-harbour certification; this section describes how the service is built rather than claiming a seal it has not earned.

The technology, honestly

Stories, illustrations, and narration are generated with artificial intelligence, operating under the rules above. We say this plainly because you deserve to know how the magic works — and because the magic isn’t the technology. It’s your child hearing their own name in a story you chose for them.

Deleting your data

Delete any story from your library and its pages, artwork, and audio go with it. Want your whole account gone? Email hello@ztales.com and it will be removed — promptly, completely, and without a retention dance.

Questions?

Z Tales is built by one person, and safety questions go to the top of the pile. Email hello@ztales.com and you’ll hear back from the founder himself.