Privacy Policy

Effective: August 10, 2026 · Last updated: August 10, 2026

The short version. BookAPresent is a service for grown-ups. You must be 18 or older to use it. We ask for a few details about a child — their first name, age, gender, interests and optionally a photo — only so we can make that child the hero of a story. We use that information to create and deliver your book. We do not sell it, we do not use it for advertising, and we delete it on request or when it is no longer needed. Children cannot create accounts, upload anything, or communicate through this service.

1. Who we are

This Privacy Policy explains how BookAPresent Inc. (“BookAPresent”, “we”, “us”) collects, uses, discloses, retains and protects personal information when you use bookapresent.org and the related book creation, printing and delivery services (the “Service”).

We are the operator and data controller for the Service. You can reach us at:

Operator: BookAPresent Inc.
Postal address: Tel Aviv, Israel
Privacy contact: privacy@bookapresent.org

2. The Service is for adults

The Service is intended for and directed to adults — parents, guardians, relatives and friends buying a gift. It is not directed to children, and it is not designed for children to use.

You must be at least 18 years old (or the age of majority where you live) to create an account, place an order, or submit any information.
Children do not create accounts, log in, upload content, post publicly, or communicate with anyone through the Service.
All information about a child reaches us because an adult chose to type or upload it.

Because the personalized book is about a child, we handle that information under the standards described in Section 8 (Children's privacy and COPPA), even though the Service itself is not a child-directed site.

3. Information we collect

a. Account information

Your name and email address.
A password, which we store only as a salted one-way hash, or a one-time sign-in code sent to your email.
Your account role and settings.

b. Information about the child, provided by you

When you build a book you may give us the following about the child the book is for:

First name (or nickname — a nickname works just as well, and we encourage it).
Age and gender, which shape the reading level and the illustrations.
Optional photo of the child, used to draw a character who resembles them. A photo is never required — every book can be made without one.
Optional descriptive details you choose to add: appearance, interests, favorite things, and any lesson or personal message you want the story to carry.
Optional names and photos of family members (for example a parent) if you want them to appear in the story.

Please give us only what is needed to make the book. Do not include a child's last name, school, address, birth date, medical information, or any other sensitive detail — none of it improves the story, and we do not want it.

c. Book content

The story text, illustrations, cover, art style and layout we generate for you, along with your edits, drafts and regenerations.

d. Order and delivery information

Order details, book format, and order history.
Shipping recipient name and postal address for printed books.
Payment is processed by our payment provider. We receive a confirmation, the last four digits of the card and its brand. We never receive or store full card numbers, CVC codes, or bank credentials.

e. Technical information collected automatically

IP address, browser type, device type, operating system, referring page, and pages viewed.
Server logs, error reports and timestamps, used for security, debugging and abuse prevention.
Cookies and similar technologies — see Section 12.

f. Information we do not collect

We do not collect precise geolocation, biometric identifiers, contact lists, or information from a child directly. We do not knowingly collect a child's last name or contact details, and we do not build advertising profiles of anyone.

4. How we use information

Purpose	Information used
Generate the personalized story and illustrations	Child details, optional photo, your story choices
Show, let you edit, and save your book	Account information, book content
Process orders, print and ship books, handle refunds	Account, order, payment confirmation, shipping address
Send service messages — sign-in codes, generation status, order and shipping confirmations	Name, email address, order status
Provide customer support	Account information and the specifics of your request
Keep the Service secure, prevent fraud and abuse, and debug failures	Technical and log information
Understand aggregate usage so we can improve the product	Technical and analytics information
Meet legal, tax and accounting obligations	Order and transaction records

We do not sell personal information, share it for cross-context behavioral advertising, use children's information for marketing or profiling, or use your book content or your child's photo to train our own models or to promote the Service publicly without your separate, explicit permission.

5. How AI is used to create your book

Your book is generated with third-party artificial intelligence models. To create it, the details you entered — and, if you uploaded one, the child's photo — are transmitted to Google (Gemini API), which generates the story text and the illustrations and returns them to us. This transmission is necessary to provide the Service; without it, no book can be made.

We send the minimum needed for generation, we access these providers under their business API terms, and we do not authorize them to use your content to train general-purpose models. Providers may retain content briefly for abuse monitoring under their own terms. If you would rather no photo ever leave our systems, simply create the book without one — the descriptive fields alone produce a complete book.

AI-generated output can be imperfect. Illustrations are an artistic interpretation, not an exact likeness, and text may occasionally need your edit. You review and approve every book before it is printed.

We disclose personal information only to the categories of service providers below, only for the purposes listed, and only under contracts that require them to protect it and forbid using it for their own purposes.

Recipient	Purpose	What they receive
Google (Gemini API)	Generate story text and illustrations	Story inputs, child details, optional photo
Stripe	Process payments, prevent payment fraud	Name, email, billing details, payment data (direct to Stripe)
Resend and SendGrid	Send transactional email	Name, email address, message contents
Google Analytics	Aggregate usage measurement	Technical and usage data; no child details
Print and fulfillment partners	Print and ship physical books	Final book file, recipient name and shipping address
Hosting and infrastructure providers	Run and store the Service	Data stored on our behalf

We may also disclose information:

To you, and to anyone you choose — if you create a share link for a book, anyone holding that link can view it. You control whether to create one and can disable it at any time.
For legal reasons — to comply with a valid legal request, enforce our terms, or protect the rights, safety and property of our users or the public.
In a business transfer — if we are involved in a merger, acquisition or sale of assets, information may transfer to the successor, which remains bound by this policy. If the new operator would handle children's information materially differently, we will notify you and obtain consent where required by law.

You can generate a private link to show a book to family. Share links use a long, unguessable token, are off by default, may carry an expiration date, and can be revoked by you at any time from your dashboard. We do not index shared books, list them publicly, or make any child's book public ourselves.

8. Children's privacy and COPPA

We take the U.S. Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (“COPPA”) and equivalent protections elsewhere seriously, and we apply the following commitments to every piece of information about a child that passes through the Service.

We do not collect information from children

The Service is not directed to children under 13 and we do not knowingly permit anyone under 18 to register or submit information. Information about a child is entered only by an adult. If we learn that a child has created an account or submitted information to us directly, we will delete it promptly.

Your consent as a parent or guardian

By entering information about a child, you confirm that you are the child's parent or legal guardian, or that you have obtained that parent or guardian's permission. You consent to our collecting and using that information, and to disclosing it to the providers listed in Section 6 — in particular to our AI provider, which is required in order to generate the book. We use that information solely to create, show, print and deliver the book you asked for, and for no other purpose.

We ask for no more than we need

We do not condition a child's participation on disclosing more information than is reasonably necessary. A photo, appearance details, interests and personal messages are all optional; a first name or nickname, an age and a gender are enough to make a book.

No public disclosure, no advertising, no profiling

We never make a child's information publicly available, never use it for targeted advertising or marketing, never permit third-party behavioral advertising anywhere in the book creation flow, and never sell it. Children's information is not used to build profiles.

Your rights as a parent or guardian

At any time you may:

Review the information we hold about your child.
Correct anything inaccurate.
Delete your child's information, including any uploaded photo, and the books made from it.
Refuse further collection or use by asking us to stop and to close your account. Note that deleting a child's details means we can no longer generate or reprint books built from them.

You can delete a profile, a photo or a book directly from your dashboard, or email privacy@bookapresent.org with the subject line “Parental Request”. We respond within 30 days. To protect against wrongful deletion, we will verify that you are the account holder before acting, typically by confirming control of the account email.

Published retention policy for children's information

We retain personal information about a child only for as long as reasonably necessary to fulfil the specific purpose for which it was collected — creating, delivering and reprinting your book — and never indefinitely. Specific periods are in Section 9. When the period ends, or when you ask us to delete, we delete the information or irreversibly anonymize it, including from our routine backups on their normal rotation cycle.

9. How long we keep information

Information	Retention period
Uploaded child or family photos	Deleted within 30 days of the book being finalized, or immediately on request. Photos are used only to generate illustrations and are not needed afterwards.
Child profile details (name, age, gender, interests)	Kept while your account is active so you can reorder or make another book; deleted on request, or within 90 days of account closure.
Books and illustrations	Kept while your account is active so you can access or reprint them; deleted on request, or within 90 days of account closure.
Unfinished drafts	Deleted after 12 months of inactivity.
Account records	Deleted within 90 days of account closure.
Order, invoice and tax records	Retained as long as required by tax and accounting law (typically 7 years), then deleted. These contain purchaser and shipping details, not child profile details.
Server and security logs	Typically 90 days.

Deletion requests are honored across live systems immediately and propagate out of backups as those backups age out on their normal rotation.

10. How we protect information

Traffic is encrypted in transit with TLS.
Passwords are stored only as salted one-way hashes and are never recoverable in plain text.
Access to production data is restricted to personnel who need it to operate the Service.
Payment card data goes directly to our PCI-compliant payment provider and never touches our servers.
Share links use long, unguessable tokens.

No online service can promise perfect security, but we take reasonable measures appropriate to the sensitivity of the information. If a breach affects your personal information, we will notify you and the relevant authorities as required by law.

11. Your privacy rights

Depending on where you live, you may have some or all of the rights below. They apply to your own information and, as a parent or guardian, to your child's.

Access a copy of the information we hold about you.
Correct information that is inaccurate or incomplete.
Delete your information.
Port your information to another service in a machine-readable format.
Object to or restrict certain processing, and withdraw consent at any time without affecting processing already carried out.
Not be discriminated against for exercising any of these rights. We will not deny service, charge a different price, or reduce quality because you exercised a privacy right.

To exercise any right, email privacy@bookapresent.org. We verify your identity through your account email and respond within the time the applicable law allows (30 days under COPPA and GDPR, 45 days under California law). You may use an authorized agent where the law permits.

California residents

In the past 12 months we collected the categories of personal information described in Section 3(identifiers, customer records, commercial information, internet activity, visual information, and inferences limited to product preferences), for the purposes in Section 4, from you and from your device. We disclosed them for business purposes to the providers in Section 6. We have not sold personal information, and have not shared it for cross-context behavioral advertising, in the past 12 months, and we do not do so with the personal information of anyone under 16.

EEA, UK and Swiss residents

Our legal bases for processing are: performance of a contract (creating and delivering your book, managing your account and orders); consent (uploading a photo, optional analytics cookies, and processing information about your child — withdrawable at any time); legitimate interests (security, fraud prevention, and improving the Service, balanced against your rights); and legal obligation (tax and accounting records).

We are based in, and use providers located in, countries that may be outside your own, including the United States. Where we transfer personal information out of the EEA, UK or Switzerland, we rely on the European Commission's Standard Contractual Clauses or another approved transfer mechanism. You have the right to lodge a complaint with your local supervisory authority.

12. Cookies and analytics

We use two kinds of cookies and similar technologies:

Strictly necessary — to keep you signed in, maintain your session, secure forms, and remember your progress through the book wizard. The Service cannot function without these.
Analytics — Google Analytics, to understand in aggregate how the Service is used so we can improve it. These load only if you accept them. We do not use advertising or cross-site tracking cookies, and no child profile information is sent to analytics.

The first time you visit, we ask for your choice in a cookie banner. If you choose “Essential only”, the Google Analytics script is never loaded and no analytics cookies are set. You can change your mind at any time using the Cookie Settings link in the footer of every page.

You can also block or delete cookies in your browser settings, and opt out of Google Analytics everywhere with Google's opt-out browser add-on. We honor Global Privacy Control signals where required by law. Blocking strictly necessary cookies may break sign-in.

13. Changes to this policy

We may update this policy as the Service evolves. We will post the revised version here and update the “Last updated” date. If a change materially affects how we handle information about children, or expands how we use information already collected, we will notify you by email and, where the law requires it, obtain your consent before the change applies to information we already hold.

14. Contact us

Questions, requests, or concerns — including any parental request under Section 8 — can go to:

Email: privacy@bookapresent.org
Post: BookAPresent Inc., Tel Aviv, Israel

If you are not satisfied with our response, you may contact your local data protection authority, or in the United States, the Federal Trade Commission at ftc.gov.