StoryHug Privacy Policy
Effective date: 17 September 2026 Last updated: 17 September 2026
This policy covers the StoryHug website at storyhug.ai and the StoryHug apps for iOS and Android. It is written for parents and guardians, because in StoryHug the parent holds the account — children do not sign up, log in, or give us anything directly.
StoryHug is currently available in India only.
1. The short version
We built StoryHug for young children, so we collect as little as we can and we do not treat your family as an audience to be sold.
- There are no ads in StoryHug. None. We do not use any advertising SDKs, ad networks, or ad identifiers.
- There are no third-party trackers. We do not use advertising or behavioural analytics SDKs in the app.
- We never sell or rent your data, or your child’s, to anyone, for any purpose.
- We do not build advertising or behavioural profiles of children.
- We do not ask for your child’s date of birth. An age band — 3–4, 5–6 or 7–8 — is all we need.
- We never see your card details. All billing is handled by Apple and Google.
- We do not use your family’s data to train AI models. Our stories, images and narration are made in advance by our team, with the help of AI tools, and reviewed by people before you ever see them.
- You can see, correct or delete everything we hold, at any time, and ask us for a copy of it.
The rest of this policy explains the detail, because a summary is not a substitute for it.
2. Who we are
StoryHug is operated by Mind Civics Private Limited, a private limited company incorporated in India on 27 March 2026 under the Companies Act, 2013.
- Corporate Identity Number (CIN): U85500TS2026PTC213766
- Registrar: ROC Hyderabad
- Registered office: 9th Floor, Survey No. 113, Golden Mile Road, Kokapet, Rajendra Nagar, K.V. Rangareddy, Hyderabad, Telangana 500075, India
Under the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 (“the DPDP Act”), we are the Data Fiduciary for the personal data described in this policy. That means we decide what is collected and why, and we are answerable to you for it. On Google Play, StoryHug is published under the developer name StoryHugAi-MindcivicsPvtLtd.
Contact: hello@storyhug.ai Grievance Officer: Kranthipriya Mule, hello@storyhug.ai, at the registered office address above
3. Who this policy applies to
StoryHug is a service for parents and guardians. You must be 18 or over to create an account. All personal data about a child is provided by you, the parent, and sits inside your account under your control.
Under the DPDP Act, anyone under 18 is a child. StoryHug content is made for ages 3 to 8, so every child using it is well inside that definition, and we process child profile data only with your consent as parent or lawful guardian. By creating a child profile, you confirm that you are the child’s parent or lawful guardian, that you are 18 or over, and that you agree to this policy.
StoryHug is currently offered in India only. If we make it available in other countries, we will update this policy first, because other countries have additional requirements we would need to meet.
4. What we collect
4.1 Your account (the parent)
You can create your StoryHug account in one of three ways: with Google, with Apple (on iPhone), or with your email address and a password. If you choose Google or Apple, we receive from them only:
- Your name, as held on that account
- Your email address
- A stable identifier linking your sign-in to your StoryHug account
If you use Apple’s Hide My Email feature, we receive only the relay address, never your real one. StoryHug works exactly the same either way.
If you create your account with your email address, we store that email address and your password. When you create an account this way, we email you a six-digit code to confirm that the address is yours. Your password is kept only in scrambled (hashed) form, so no one at StoryHug can see it. If you forget it, we email you a link or a code to reset it. We also store your timezone and your language preference. We do not ask for a profile photo; your profile simply shows the first letter of your name or email address.
4.2 Your child’s profile
You create one child profile so stories can be matched to the right age and language:
- Child’s first name or nickname. This is shown in the app so StoryHug feels like your child’s own (for example, “Chosen for Aarav” on the home screen). Our stories do not say your child’s name in the narration today. If we add that in future, we will update this policy before it goes live. You may use any name you like; it does not have to be their real one, and StoryHug works just as well with a nickname.
- Age band: 3–4, 5–6 or 7–8.
- Preferred story language.
- Emotional needs or preferences you select during setup.
We do not ask for your child’s date of birth. We never have. The age band is what decides which version of a story your child hears, and a precise birth date would tell us nothing more that we need.
We do not collect your child’s gender, school, address, photograph, or any government identifier.
4.3 How StoryHug is used
- Night emotional check-ins: the feeling selected at the start of an evening, so we can suggest three to five stories that suit it.
- Listening activity: which stories were started and completed, how many times, and when a story was last listened to.
- Favourites: stories your child has marked.
- Notification preferences: your chosen morning and night times, your timezone, and which reminders you have switched on.
- Device token: an identifier issued by Apple or Google so we can deliver a notification to your phone. It is not an advertising identifier and cannot be used to track you across other apps.
How we treat check-in data. A check-in is information about a child’s emotional state, and we treat it as sensitive. It is used to pick tonight’s story suggestions and to show you your own dashboard. It is not used to profile your child, to target anything at your family, or to draw any conclusion about your child’s health or development. There is no machine-learning or ranking engine behind these suggestions — a check-in simply filters our published library by age, feeling and language, using rules our content team wrote. StoryHug is a storytelling product, not a diagnostic or clinical tool, and nothing in the dashboard is an assessment of your child.
4.4 The Parent Reflection Test
The Reflection Test is for you, not your child. If you complete it, we store your answers, the version of the questionnaire, and the result shown to you, so you can return to it later.
Your reflection results never silently change what your child is shown. They do not overwrite the preferences on the child profile. Any change to what your child hears is one you make deliberately in settings. You can delete your reflection history without deleting your account, by writing to us.
4.5 Subscription and payment
StoryHug offers a free trial that lets you listen to any 30 stories from our library. Paid subscriptions are not available yet. We plan to offer a paid subscription that unlocks more stories from our library; its plans and pricing are yet to be decided. The plan details will be shown in the app before you pay, and we will update this policy before a paid plan launches if it changes how we handle your data.
All billing happens through the Apple App Store or Google Play. We never receive, see, or store your card number, UPI ID, CVV or bank details. Apple and Google process your payment under their own privacy policies, send your receipts directly, and tell us only whether your subscription is active.
4.6 Technical information
Even without analytics tools, our servers necessarily log some information in order to deliver audio and keep accounts secure:
- IP address, used for security, fraud prevention and delivering media — not to build a location profile
- Device type, operating system version and app version
- Timestamps of requests, and error information where the app fails
These logs are deleted on the schedule in section 9.
4.7 The website
storyhug.ai is a marketing and information site. It uses essential cookies only — the ones needed to keep the site working. We do not use advertising cookies, tracking pixels, or cross-site trackers, and we do not share website visitors with any ad platform.
If you join our waitlist or write to us through the site, we keep your email address and message so we can reply and tell you when StoryHug launches. We will not add you to a marketing list on the strength of a waitlist signup — if we want to send you anything beyond launch news, we will ask you first.
If we ever add optional analytics to the website, we will ask your permission before setting anything, and update this policy.
4.8 What we do not collect
- We do not access your contacts, photos, camera or files.
- We do not collect precise location.
- We do not use advertising identifiers (IDFA, GAID) or any ad network SDK.
- The app does not use your microphone and does not record any audio.
- We do not collect your child’s date of birth.
- We do not collect a phone number, and StoryHug does not use SMS. The only one-time codes we send are by email, to confirm your email address or to reset your password.
4.9 A note on voice features
StoryHug does not include any voice recording or voice cloning feature, and the app does not ask for access to your microphone.
If we do build parent voice narration, we will not enable it silently. We will ask for your separate, explicit consent, explain exactly what a voice recording is used for and how long it is kept, give you a one-tap way to delete the recording and anything built from it, and update this policy before the feature goes live.
5. Why we use this information
We process your and your child’s personal data on the basis of your consent as parent or lawful guardian, given when you create the account and the child profile, except where the law requires us to keep certain records.
| What we use it for | Data involved |
|---|---|
| Creating and running your account | Name, email, sign-in identifier, password (stored hashed) if you use one |
| Matching stories to the right age and language | Child’s age band and language |
| Showing your child’s name in the app | Child’s first name or nickname |
| Suggesting stories that suit tonight’s feeling | Emotional check-ins |
| Showing your dashboard and Continue Listening | Listening activity, favourites |
| The Parent Reflection Test | Your answers and results |
| Sending morning Brain Bites and bedtime reminders | Notification preferences, timezone, device token |
| Managing your trial and subscription | Entitlement status |
| Keeping the service secure and working | Technical logs |
| Answering your emails and support requests | Whatever you send us |
| Service emails and notices about this policy | Email address |
You can withdraw your consent at any time, as easily as you gave it, by deleting your account in Settings or by writing to us. Withdrawing consent stops future processing; it does not undo anything lawfully done before.
We do not use children’s data for tracking, behavioural monitoring, or targeted advertising. This is prohibited by the DPDP Act, and it is also simply not something we want to build.
We do not use your family’s data to train AI models, our own or anyone else’s. Our stories, images and narration are created by our content team, with the help of AI tools, and reviewed by the team before publication. Nothing about your child feeds back into making them.
6. Who we share information with
We share personal data only with service providers who need it to run StoryHug, under contracts requiring them to protect it, use it only on our instructions, and never for their own purposes.
| Provider | What they do | What they receive |
|---|---|---|
| Amazon Web Services | Hosts our database, servers, media and logs, and sends account emails such as verification codes and password-reset messages | Account (including your hashed password, if you use one), child profile and activity data |
| Google / Apple sign-in | Authenticate you | If you choose them, they confirm your identity to us; we receive your name, email and an identifier |
| Apple App Store / Google Play | Process subscription billing | Your payment details, directly from you — never through us |
| Apple Push Notification service / Firebase Cloud Messaging | Deliver notifications to your phone | A device token and the notification content |
| Google Workspace | Hosts our email so we can write to you and answer your messages | Your name and email address |
Story audio and images are produced before they ever reach you, by our content team using AI voice and image tools, and delivered as finished files. No parent or child data is sent to any narration, translation or AI vendor at any point.
Our internal content system is used only by our content team and founders. It holds stories and categories, not families. Every change to published content is logged with who made it and when.
We may also disclose information where the law requires it — for example in response to a valid court order or lawful request from a government authority — or to establish or defend legal claims, or to protect the safety of a child or any person. If we are ever required to hand over data about your family and we are permitted to tell you, we will.
If StoryHug is ever acquired or merged, personal data may transfer as part of that transaction. We will tell you by email beforehand, and the acquirer will be bound by this policy until you are given a real choice about any change.
We have never sold personal data, and we will not.
7. Where your data is stored
Our database, media and servers are hosted on Amazon Web Services in the ap-south-1 (Mumbai) region, in India.
Some of our service providers process data outside India — in particular Apple and Google, which handle sign-in, billing and notifications, and may do so from the United States. If the Government of India restricts transfers of personal data to any country, we will follow that restriction.
8. How we protect it
- All traffic is encrypted in transit over HTTPS; data is encrypted at rest.
- If you use a password, we store it only in scrambled (hashed) form, never as plain text, and no one at StoryHug can see it. If you sign in with Google or Apple, we never receive your Google or Apple password.
- Story audio and images sit in a private storage bucket. The app never gets direct access to it; media is delivered through short-lived links that expire.
- Our database is not reachable from the public internet, and the app cannot query it directly. Every request for a child’s data is checked against the parent account that owns it.
- Keys and secrets are held in a managed secrets store, never in the app or our source code.
- Access to live data is limited to the few people who need it, protected by multi-factor authentication, and logged.
- Backups are taken automatically and restore procedures are tested.
No system is perfectly secure. If a breach ever affects your personal data, we will notify you and the Data Protection Board of India as the DPDP Act requires.
9. How long we keep it
| Data | Retention |
|---|---|
| Account and child profile | While your account is active |
| Listening activity and favourites | While your account is active, so Continue Listening and your dashboard stay meaningful |
| Emotional check-ins | 12 months rolling — a check-in is about one evening, not a permanent record |
| Reflection Test answers and results | While your account is active, or until you ask us to delete them |
| Device tokens | Until you turn off notifications or uninstall the app |
| After you delete your account | Removed within 30 days from live systems, and within 90 days from backups |
| Subscription and invoice records | As long as tax and company law requires (currently up to 8 years) |
| Server and application logs | 90 days |
| Support and waitlist emails | 24 months after the matter is closed |
You do not have to wait for these periods. You can ask us to delete your data sooner, and we will, except where the law requires us to keep a record.
10. Your rights
Under the DPDP Act you have the right to:
- Access a summary of the personal data we hold about you and your child, and what we do with it
- Correct, complete or update anything wrong or out of date
- Erase your data when it is no longer needed or you withdraw consent
- Grievance redressal — a clear route to complain to us, and an answer
- Nominate another person to exercise these rights on your behalf if you die or become incapable of acting
You can delete your account from within the app, in Settings. Deleting the account removes the child profile, listening history, check-ins, favourites and reflection results along with it. You do not have to email us to do it, and we will not put an obstacle in the way. If you can no longer use the app, you can ask us to delete your account and all related data by writing to hello@storyhug.ai from your account’s email address. The steps are also explained at storyhug.ai/delete-account.
To exercise any of these rights, or to raise a grievance, write to Kranthipriya Mule, Grievance Officer, at hello@storyhug.ai from the email address on your account. We will acknowledge your request within 48 hours and resolve it within 30 days. We will never charge you, and we will never ask you to justify a deletion request.
If you are not satisfied with our response, you may complain to the Data Protection Board of India. We would much rather hear from you first, and fix it.
11. Our design commitments to children
Beyond what the law requires, we hold ourselves to these:
- Privacy is the default. The most protective settings are on when you install, not something you have to find.
- Nothing plays by itself. A story starts when someone presses Play. There is no autoplay into the next story, no endless queue.
- No dark patterns. No streaks, no guilt, no “your child hasn’t listened in three days” messages. StoryHug is meant to end, and bedtime is meant to arrive.
- No profiling of children. Ever, for any purpose.
- No algorithmic feed. What your child sees is a library curated by people, filtered by age, feeling and language.
- Minimal data. If a feature works without collecting something — as story selection works without a date of birth — we do not collect it.
- Plain language. Anything a child could see is written in words a child could understand.
12. Changes to this policy
If we change this policy in a way that materially affects you or your child — a new kind of data, a new purpose, a new recipient, or making StoryHug available in another country — we will email you and show a notice in the app before the change takes effect, and where consent is needed we will ask again rather than assume it. The “last updated” date at the top always reflects the current version.
13. Contact us
Mind Civics Private Limited 9th Floor, Survey No. 113, Golden Mile Road, Kokapet, Rajendra Nagar, K.V. Rangareddy, Hyderabad, Telangana 500075, India CIN: U85500TS2026PTC213766
Email: hello@storyhug.ai Grievance Officer: Kranthipriya Mule, hello@storyhug.ai
If you have a question about your family’s data, please write to us. A real person will answer.