Privacy notice
This is a service used by young children, so this page matters more than most. It says what we hold about your family, why we hold it, how long for, and how to make us delete it.
The short version
- We ask for as little as we can: your email, your mobile number, your child's first name and year group, and how they are getting on.
- There are no advertising cookies and no tracking on this site. There is no analytics service watching your child use it.
- We do not sell anything about your family to anybody, ever.
- Ask us to delete it and we delete it.
1. Who we are
The Phonics Fun Studio is operated by Quantum Theta Inc FZC LLC. We decide what is collected and why, which makes us responsible for it.
2. What we collect
| About the adult | Your email address, your password in a scrambled form that cannot be turned back into the original, and the times you signed in. Your mobile number, which we ask for when you register so we can reach you about your account. |
|---|---|
| About each child | A first name, or whatever name you choose to type, their year group, and the short PIN that picks them out on a shared device. We do not ask for a surname, a date of birth, an address, a photograph or a school record. |
| How they are getting on | Which activities they have done, scores, rewards earned, and which phase they are working in. Also the times your child signs in and the minutes they spend playing, which you can see in the Parents area. |
| Voice recordings | In some practice activities a child can record their own voice reading a sound or a word, so they and you can hear it back. A parent or teacher can also record a word, so a child hears a familiar voice instead of a computer one. Nothing is recorded unless somebody presses record, and the microphone is never listening on its own. You and your child's teacher can listen to the recordings; nobody else can. |
| If you write to us | Whatever is in your message, and your email address, so we can answer. |
| If a school enquires | The details typed into the school form: school name, contact name and role, email, phone, city, number of children and year groups. |
You can type anything you like into a child's name box. Please do not put a surname or anything else identifying there. A first name is all the service needs.
3. Parental consent
A child does not open an account and a child is never asked to agree to anything. An adult does that. By adding a child you are confirming that you are their parent or legal guardian, or that you are a school with the permission it needs.
You can withdraw that consent whenever you want, by asking us to delete the child's record. See deleting your data.
4. Why we use it
- To let you sign in and to keep your children's progress apart from each other.
- To show a child the right activities for the phase they are in, and to show you and their teacher how they are getting on.
- To play back a recording a parent or teacher made.
- To answer you when you write to us.
- To keep the service working and to stop abuse of it.
- To take payment for a plan, through our payment provider.
We do not use any of it to build an advertising profile, and we do not use your child's work to train anything.
5. How long we keep it
| Your account and your children's progress | For as long as the account is open. Delete the account and it goes. |
|---|---|
| Voice recordings | Until you delete them, or until the account is deleted. |
| Sign-in and session history | 12 months, then deleted automatically. The IP address kept in the sign-in security records is deleted after 30 days. See IP addresses. |
| Application logs | 90 days, then deleted automatically. |
| Technical access records | 30 days, then they are deleted automatically. See IP addresses. |
| The short anti-spam record of a form | About 10 minutes. See IP addresses. |
| Emails you send us | As long as we need them to deal with what you asked, and any period the law requires for a payment record. |
When we delete data it is removed immediately from the service; copies in our backups expire within 35 days.
6. Children's rights, and yours
A child has the same rights over their information as anyone else. Because they are young, you exercise those rights for them. You can ask us to show you everything we hold about your child, correct it, or delete it. We will not ask you to justify the request.
7. Deleting or downloading your data
Email hello@phonicsfunstudio.ae from the address on the account and tell us what you want:
- Send me what you hold and we will send you a copy of the account, each child's record and their progress.
- Delete my child and that child's name, PIN, progress and recordings go.
- Delete everything and the whole account goes with it.
Deletion is real deletion, not hiding. The only things that survive are records we are legally required to hold, such as a record of a payment, and those are kept for no other purpose.
We reply as soon as possible, and in any case within the time UAE law allows.
8. IP addresses
An IP address is the number your internet connection uses. Two parts of the service record one, both briefly and both for a reason.
Technical access records
Every request to our systems writes a short technical line: a request number, the time, the method, the path, the status code, how long it took, and the IP address it came from. No part of the request or the reply is written down. Not what a child typed, not what came back, not the sign-in token. These lines exist so we can see that the service is healthy and investigate a fault or an attack. They are deleted automatically after 30 days.
Stopping form spam
When the school enquiry form is used, the IP address is noted for about 10 minutes so the same connection cannot flood us with submissions. It is then deleted automatically. The automatic deletion is a background sweep and can occasionally run a little later than the 10 minutes. The enquiry record itself does not include the IP address, on purpose, because once the form is submitted there is no use for it.
9. Cookies and browser storage
This site sets no cookies at all. There is no cookie banner here because there is nothing to consent to.
What the site does use is browser storage, which stays on your own device and is never sent to us as a file. It holds two kinds of thing:
- Your sign in. If you tick "keep me signed in" this is kept until you sign out. If you do not tick it, it is thrown away the moment you close the tab.
- Your child's progress and settings, so the activities still work if the connection drops, and so a sibling does not land in the wrong progress. This is a copy of what is already on our side.
Clearing your browser's site data clears all of it. Nothing on the site is used for advertising, and nothing follows you to another website.
10. Who else sees it
We do not sell your family's information, and we do not share it for anyone else's marketing.
We use a small number of service providers in order to run the service at all, and they only ever get what they need to do their part:
- a provider that sends our emails, such as a password reset;
- a provider that hosts and runs the service;
- a payment provider, which handles card details so that we never have to. That provider is Stripe.
Each of them is bound to use the information only on our instructions. We may also disclose information where the law requires it, or to protect someone's safety.
If your child uses the service through a school, the school's teachers and leaders see that child's progress. That is the point of a school account.
11. Security
- Everything between your device and us travels encrypted.
- Passwords are stored scrambled in a way that cannot be reversed. Nobody here can read your password, including us.
- A child's PIN is checked on our side, not in the browser, and repeated wrong guesses lock the picker for a while.
- Access to family records is limited to the few people who need it to run the service.
- Stored information is encrypted, and we keep backups so that a fault does not lose your child's progress.
No service can promise it will never have a security problem. If one happens and it affects you, we will tell you and tell you what to do.
12. Your rights under UAE law
The UAE Personal Data Protection Law gives you rights over information about you and your child. You can ask for a copy of it, ask us to correct it, ask us to delete it, ask us to stop using it in a particular way, and object to how we use it. You can also complain to the UAE Data Office if you think we have got it wrong, though we would be grateful for the chance to put it right first.
Using any of these rights costs nothing and will never affect how your child is treated on the service.
13. Contact
For anything on this page, email hello@phonicsfunstudio.ae. Other ways to reach us are on the contact page.
If we change this notice we will change the date at the top, and if the change is significant we will tell account holders directly.