Privacy
Last updated 16 August 2026. Word Safari is operated by RIBEYE GmbH, Switzerland.
The short version
We collect only what is needed to run a parent account and to save what your child has learned. We ask for a first name or a nickname to greet her by, and never for a surname, a birth date, a photo or a location. We never show a child an advertisement. We never sell information about your family, and we never share it with anyone for advertising.
If something below is not clear, or you want anything deleted, write to hello@wordsafari.app and a real person will answer.
What we hold, exactly
Two kinds of thing, and this is the complete list.
About you, the grown-up
- Your email address, which is how you sign in and how we reach you.
- Whether you have a subscription, and when it renews.
- A parent PIN, stored only as a salted hash, never as the digits themselves.
- Anything you write to us in the app's feedback box, with the app version and device model so we can reproduce a problem.
About your child
- The name you type for her, which the app uses only to greet her, and an avatar picture. We ask for a first name or a nickname and never for a surname, and whatever you type is what is stored. If you would rather we held no real name at all, type a nickname.
- A birth year, so the app can start her at roughly the right level. Not a birth date.
- What she has learned: her reading level per language, stars, the animals she has collected, how many rounds she played on a given day, and her streak.
We do not collect a surname, a date of birth, a photograph, a location, any contacts, or anything she types or says inside a game. We never build an advertising profile of anyone, and there is no advertising in the app at all.
The microphone, in the games that read aloud
Some games ask a child to say a word or a colour out loud. Those games are off until a grown-up turns them on, and they work like this:
- The listening is done by your device's own speech recognition, the same one your keyboard's dictation button uses. On an Apple device that means the audio goes to Apple for transcription, under Apple's privacy policy, exactly as it does when you dictate a message.
- We never receive the audio. Nothing records it, nothing stores it, and nothing uploads it to us. Only the transcribed word comes back, it is compared with the expected word on the device, and it is discarded.
- If recognition fails repeatedly, the game switches itself off for the rest of the session rather than leaving a child talking to a dead microphone.
When you create an account
When a grown-up creates an account, we record that a signup happened in our own internal system, together with your email address and, if you arrived from one of our advertisements, the campaign tags that came with the link. It is how a two-person studio knows whether its own marketing works.
It contains nothing about a child, and it is never shared or sold. Ask us at hello@wordsafari.app and we will delete it.
Usage statistics
To know which games families actually use, the app sends a small number of content-free events, such as "a round finished" or "a subject was picked". They carry no name, no email and no answer, and they are never tied to a child.
This runs through Rybbit, which sets no cookie and which we host ourselves on our own server in Europe rather than sending anything to an analytics company. It runs in the website and in the app. An earlier version of this page said the app contained no analytics at all; that stopped being true in August 2026 and this sentence replaces it.
Advertising measurement, on the website only
On our marketing website, and only if you press "Accept" on the cookie banner, we measure whether one of our own advertisements led to a visit, a signup or a payment. That is the whole of it: never anything about a child, and never an advertisement shown to a child.
None of it runs in the iPhone or iPad app. The app is built with the advertising code removed at build time, so it cannot be switched on by accident. Decline the banner and nothing is set on the website either.
Payments
Subscriptions bought on the website are processed by Stripe. Subscriptions bought inside the iPhone or iPad app are processed by Apple. In both cases we receive only that a payment happened and which plan it was. We never see or store your card number.
Buying anything requires passing the grown-up gate first, which is also how we confirm a purchase was authorised by an adult rather than a child.
Who processes information for us
We do not sell information, and we share it with nobody for advertising.
| Who | What they handle |
|---|---|
| Supabase | Your account email, your children's nicknames, birth years and progress. Hosted in the EU. |
| Stripe | Payment details and subscription status for anything bought on the web. We never see card numbers. |
| Apple | Payment and subscription status for anything bought inside the app, and the device speech recognition described above. |
| Vercel | Hosts the website and the browser game. |
| Rybbit | The content-free usage statistics above. Cookieless, and self-hosted by us in Europe. |
| Resend | Sends account and receipt emails to you. Never to a child. |
Built for children first
Anything that could expose a child starts switched off until a grown-up turns it on: the microphone games, and the weekly leaderboard, where a child ever appears only under a randomly generated animal name such as "Swift Leo 47" and never under her own.
We follow the UK Children's Code principle of privacy by default, we do not use location, and there is no "are you sure?" standing between you and switching something off. We do not knowingly collect personal information from a child: the account belongs to the grown-up, and everything about a child is the nickname and birth year you enter yourself.
How long we keep it, and how to delete it
We keep your account and your family's progress for as long as your account exists, so a lost device never means lost progress.
To delete everything: open the app, go to Parents (the gear on the home screen), and use Delete account. Your account and every child's nickname, birth year and progress are removed permanently, and any active subscription is cancelled first so nothing keeps charging. If you would rather we did it, write to hello@wordsafari.app and we will, normally the same day and always within 30 days. Billing records stay with Stripe or Apple under their own legal retention rules.
One narrow exception, stated rather than buried: if we ever gave your family free access by hand, the email address that grant is attached to survives deletion, so that recreating an account does not silently take the free access away. It holds nothing else. Ask us and we will remove that too.
Your rights
You can ask us for a copy of what we hold, ask us to correct it, or ask us to delete it, at hello@wordsafari.app. If you are in the EU, the UK or Switzerland you also have the right to complain to your data protection authority. RIBEYE GmbH, in Switzerland, is the controller of this information.
Changes to this policy
If we change what we collect, we change this page in the same release, and the date at the top moves. Material changes are announced in the app's changelog.