Privacy Policy

This Privacy Policy explains how Synapse Learning Systems (“Snappy”, “we”, “us”) handles personal information across the Snappy family app (at snappyreading.com) and the Snappy for Schools product. Because Snappy is designed for young children, we hold ourselves to the strictest applicable children's-privacy standards worldwide and treat every user under 18 as a child.

1.Who we are

Snappy is operated by Synapse Learning Systems, a sole proprietorship based in New Delhi, India — we are the “data controller” / “Data Fiduciary” responsible for your information. Our postal address is 12/18, Sarvapriya Vihar, New Delhi - 110016. For any privacy question, request, or complaint, email us at hello@snappyreading.com. We handle these ourselves and act as your privacy and grievance contact.

2.Who this policy covers

Snappy has two products with different legal footings:

• Family app — a parent or guardian creates the account and adds their child. The parent provides consent on the child's behalf.
• Snappy for Schools — a school or teacher sets up classes and student logins. Here the school directs the processing and holds the relationship with parents (see Section 14).
• Blog visitors — adults who ask us for a free reading resource or a short email series on our blog. The email address is the grown-up's own (a parent, carer, or teacher), no child account is created, and we never ask for a child's name.

3.What we collect

Family app

• Parent account: email address, display name, chosen country, and marketing attribution captured at signup (e.g. which link brought you to us). Sign-in is handled by our authentication provider. You may sign in with an email address and password, with Google, or with Sign in with Apple, and you can connect or disconnect these from Settings (we always keep at least one). When you use one of these, we receive only your email address and, on the first sign-in, the name you choose to share — never your Google or Apple password. If you use Apple's Hide My Email, we only ever see the private relay address Apple gives us, and that relay address is what we store.
• Child profile: a display name and avatar you choose, plus learning preferences (such as audio sensitivity). We never ask for a child's full date of birth. You may optionally share a birth month and year so Snappy can match its speech expectations to your child's age — you can change or remove it at any time from the child's profile. Removing it stops any further age stamping; past practice records keep the age they were stamped with (all of it is deleted with the profile). Children have no email or login of their own.
• Learning activity: progress, streaks, words practised, and per-attempt pronunciation analytics (which sound was expected, what was heard, quality scores, clarity, region, the child's age in months at practice time when a birthday is on file, and the app/model version that graded it). These analytics are numbers and text only — never audio.
• Voice recordings of your child speaking — only if you turn recording on (see Section 8).
• Billing: subscription status and identifiers from our payment processor. We do not receive or store your card details (see Section 16).
• Approximate country, derived from your network's country signal to set the right currency and support regional accuracy. We do not store your IP address in our database.
• Signed-in devices. When you sign in, Snappy gives that phone, tablet or computer a random identifier and records the device type (for example “Snappy app on iPad”), when it first signed in and when it was last used. This is what lets you see every device signed in to your account under Settings, sign any of them out, and receive an email if a new device signs in. The identifier is created by Snappy, is not an advertising identifier, is never shared, and is never a precise location. A country name may appear in the new-device email; it is not stored.

Snappy for Schools

• School staff (admins, teachers): name and email.
• Students: a name and class-based login (class code + name + a password managed by the teacher). Students have no email and no full date of birth on file; a school may optionally record a birth month and year for age-appropriate practice. Their learning activity is as above.
• Sales enquiries: if you use a “contact us” form, the details you submit (name, email, phone, school, role) are emailed to our team so we can reply.

The Snappy mobile app — keeping it up to date

This applies to the Snappy app installed from an app store, on a family account or a school one. When you open the app, it asks Snappy's own server whether a newer version of its screens is available, and downloads it if there is one. The app also reports back whether an update worked and, each time a screen in the app opens, that it opened. Those reports automatically include technical information about errors and crashes inside the app — for example an error message, the place in the app's code where it happened, and which screen it happened on — and details about that screen visit: an identifier for the visit and for the one before it, the previous screen's address, and how long each was open. They also carry an installation identifier the app generates for itself. That identifier is kept on the device: on an iPhone or iPad in the device's Keychain, where it can survive deleting and reinstalling the app; on Android in the app's own private storage, which is removed when the app is uninstalled.

Snappy's server counts how many updates succeeded or failed and discards everything else without reading it, storing it or passing it on. None of this goes to anyone but Snappy. It contains no voice recordings, no names, and nothing about your child's reading.

Blog & free reading resources

If you ask us for a free printable, take the Reading Readiness Quiz, or sign up for our reading mini-course on the Snappy blog, here is everything we hold:

• Your email address — the one thing we need to send you what you asked for.
• Your first name, if you give one. It is optional, and it is only used to say hello in the emails.
• Your role — parent, teacher, or homeschool — if you tell us, so we send you the right kind of help.
• Approximate country, so we can keep spelling and examples appropriate to where you are.
• Which resource you asked for, and the article and campaign link (UTM) you came from, so we know which writing is actually useful.
• If you take the Reading Readiness Quiz: your answers are scored in your browser, and only a broad age band (3–4 / 5–6 / 7+) and a broad skill band ever reach us. Individual answers, your child's name, and your child's exact age never do.
• Whether our emails were opened or clicked, bounced, or reported as spam — so we stop mailing an address that no longer works or no longer wants us.
• The account match: if you later create a Snappy account with the same email address we match the two, as a count only — it never changes what you see or what you pay.

4.Why we collect it, and our legal bases

Where we rely on consent, you may withdraw it at any time without affecting processing already carried out. Voice data is treated as sensitive/biometric and processed only on explicit parental consent.

5.What we never do

6.Parental consent

For the family app, a parent or guardian creates and controls the account, adds each child, and agrees to this policy before any child data is collected — this is how we obtain verifiable parental consent for children under 18. You can review your child's information, refuse or stop further collection, and delete it, at any time (see Section 13). If we ever materially change how we handle children's data, we will seek fresh parental consent.

7.Children's data — our defaults

• High privacy by default: voice recording is off until a parent enables it; we collect the minimum needed to teach reading.
• No behavioural profiling or nudging of children, and no location tracking — we only infer approximate country for currency and accuracy.
• Plain language: we write for parents and children in clear terms, and keep a short summary at the top of this page.

8.Voice recordings

Snappy listens to your child speak so it can give reading feedback. Whether a recording of that speech is saved is entirely your choice:

• Off by default, opt-in only. No audio is stored unless a parent (or, for schools, the school) has switched recording on. If consent is missing for any reason, nothing is recorded (“fail-closed”).
• What is captured: the short clip of your child saying a sound or word. Nothing else.
• What we use it for: (a) real-time pronunciation feedback, and (b) improving and training Snappy's speech-recognition models so it hears children more fairly and accurately. We treat voice as sensitive / biometric data.
• How it's stored: recordings are saved under opaque, non-identifying file names (no name, word, or result in the file reference) with strict, least-privilege access. The file name identifies nobody on its own, but each clip is linked to your child's profile in our database — that link is how a recording can be found and deleted when you ask, and how we know which sound was being practised. It is never used to identify your child.
• Who processes it: our cloud storage provider (Google Cloud), and — when we train models — AWS (see Section 9 and Section 10). We never sell it and never use it for ads.
• Your control: turn recording off at any time in Settings to stop new recordings, and ask us to delete existing recordings. Deleting your child or your account also removes the associated recordings — automatically, and from storage, within 7 days.

9.Who we share data with (our processors)

We share personal data only with the service providers that help us run Snappy, under contracts that require them to protect it and use it only on our instructions. We do not sell data or share it with advertisers.

10.International data transfers

Snappy's application and database are hosted in India (Google Cloud, Mumbai, and our database provider Supabase). Some processing happens elsewhere — in particular, when we train our speech models, opt-in voice recordings may be processed on AWS in the United States. If you choose to sign in with Google or with Sign in with Apple, that sign-in is handled on their own infrastructure, which is largely in the United States, under their own privacy policies. Where we serve users in the EU, UK, or other regions, cross-border transfers to India and to our service providers rely on recognised safeguards — in particular the Standard Contractual Clauses (and the UK International Data Transfer Agreement) included in our providers' data-processing agreements. Hosting data in India is fully compatible with these rules when such safeguards are in place. You may request details of the safeguards we use.

11.How long we keep data

We keep personal data only as long as needed for the purposes above:

• Account, profile & learning data: kept while your account is active, and deleted when you delete your account or child, or (for schools) when the school requests deletion.
• Voice recordings: kept no longer than necessary and, in any case, no longer than 24 months. When you delete a child or your account, the associated recordings are removed from storage within 7 days. Turning recording off stops any new recording immediately; recordings already saved are removed when you delete the child or the account, or if you ask us.
• Signed-in devices. A device record is kept while that device is signed in and for 90 days after it is signed out, then deleted. Deleting your account deletes them immediately.
• After you delete your account: we keep one stripped billing record for any subscription you had — the payment provider, the transaction identifier, which plan it was, and roughly how long the subscription ran. It holds no name, no email address and no account identifier. We keep it for one reason: so we can answer your bank or an app store if a past payment is ever queried or disputed after the account is gone.
• Blog sign-ups that are never confirmed: deleted within 30 days — the email address, and the coarse bands with it. No confirmation click means no consent was ever given, so we do not keep the request.
• Confirmed blog subscribers: kept until you unsubscribe or ask us to delete you. Unsubscribing stops every marketing email immediately.
• We do not keep children's personal data indefinitely.

12.How we protect data

• Encryption in transit (HTTPS/secure WebSockets) for all traffic.
• Row-level access controls so each family sees only its own data, and least-privilege separation between everyday and administrative access.
• Opaque, non-identifying storage keys for recordings, and consent checks that fail closed.
• One device at a time for practice. A child's exercise runs on one device at a time. Opening the same child on a second device asks before taking over, so two screens never record or grade the same child at once.
• We maintain internal security practices and will notify you and the relevant authority of a personal-data breach where the law requires.

13.Your rights & how to use them

Depending on where you live, you (and, for a child, the parent) have rights to access, correct, delete, and receive a copy of personal data, to object to or restrict processing, to withdraw consent, to limit the use of sensitive data, and to nominate someone to exercise your rights (India). We do not sell or “share” data for advertising, so there is nothing to opt out of there — and our marketing emails are opt-in only, with a one-click unsubscribe in every message.

• In the app: parents can delete their whole account, delete a child, toggle voice-recording consent, and correct profile details (such as name and country) directly in Settings.
• Voice recordings: recordings are not viewable or editable in the app. You can have them deleted by deleting the child or account, or by asking us; turning recording off stops new recordings from that moment on. You can request a copy by email.
• By email: for a copy of your data, or any other request, email hello@snappyreading.com. You do not have to email us to delete your account — you can do it yourself, in the app under Settings → Delete account, or from the web at https://snappyreading.com/delete-account, which still works if you have removed the app. We may verify that you are the account holder before acting, and we respond within the timelines required by law.
• Blog emails: every email from our blog carries a one-click unsubscribe link — no sign-in needed. Your mail app's own Unsubscribe button works too, or email us and we'll do it for you.
• School students: requests are directed through the child's school (see Section 14).

14.Snappy for Schools (student data)

When a school uses Snappy, the school controls the student data and Snappy acts on the school's behalf (as a “school official” providing an educational service). For student data we commit that we:

• use it only for the educational purpose the school authorised;
• do not serve targeted advertising to students, sell student data, or build profiles for non-educational purposes;
• delete student data on the school's request; and
• make a data-processing agreement available to schools.

Student logins are created and managed by teachers (students have no email); parents' access and consent for the school product are handled through the school.

15.Cookies & similar technologies

Snappy uses only what's essential to run — for example, keeping you signed in. We do not use advertising or cross-site tracking cookies, and we do not run third-party ad or behavioural-analytics trackers. The one third-party script we run anywhere is Cloudflare Turnstile, the “are you human?” check on our blog's sign-up forms. It loads only on those forms, and it is designed not to track people across websites.

16.Payments

Subscriptions are processed by Razorpay. Your card details are entered directly with Razorpay and are never received or stored by Snappy. Payment data is not children's data and is never used for profiling.

17.Changes to this policy

We'll update this page when our practices change and revise the “last updated” date. If a change materially affects children's data, we'll seek fresh parental consent before it applies.

18.Contact & complaints

Reach us any time at hello@snappyreading.com — this is also our grievance and complaints contact. You also have the right to complain to a data-protection authority — for example the Data Protection Board of India, your EU supervisory authority, the UK ICO, or the US FTC / your state Attorney General.

Regional annexes

These annexes restate specific disclosures required in particular regions. They add to, and do not replace, the policy above.