Privacy policy
Last updated: October 20, 2026
Dotty keeps as little as it can. There is no sign-up, no ads, no analytics and no tracking. The 25 bundled poems and your child's voice recordings never leave the phone. A poem you add goes to our server so Dotty can draw it.
This policy covers the Dotty app for iPhone (“the app”) and this website. Dotty is published by Anton Shpakovskiy, a private individual, who decides what data the service processes and why. Write to [email protected] with any question about your data.
Who the app is for
Dotty is for children learning poems with a grown-up nearby. Buying dots, printing, deleting and the settings sit behind a grown-up question. Please do not paste texts with personal information about a child or anyone else, such as full names, addresses or phone numbers.
What stays on the phone
- The bundled poems and their pictures, and your child's progress (stars).
- Voice recordings made in Tell. They are played back on the phone, Dotty's parrot voice included, and are never uploaded. The app keeps the newest three for each poem.
- Settings: language, vibration, whether the first-launch cards were shown.
What goes to our server, and why
- An anonymous account. On first use the app signs in to Supabase, our sign-in provider, as an anonymous user: a random identifier with no name, email or phone number. The app keeps the session in the iPhone Keychain, so the dots survive a reinstall. The account holds your dots and your poems.
- Poems you add and their pictures. We store the text, its title, the detected language and the picture style. From the text we make a plan of scenes: the lines under each picture, English descriptions of the characters and scenes, and the prompts used to draw them. The pictures are stored on our server until the app has downloaded them, and afterwards so that a picture can be redrawn.
- Dots. Every change to your balance is a ledger row: the welcome dots, each purchase, each poem and each refund, with the time.
- Purchases. Dots are bought through Apple. The app sends us the purchase as Apple signed it, and we check that signature ourselves. We keep Apple's transaction id and the product, so a purchase is never credited twice. We never see your name, Apple ID or card details.
- DeviceCheck. The 3 welcome dots go once per iPhone. To know that, the app sends a one-time token from Apple's DeviceCheck service, and our server asks Apple about one bit Apple keeps for this app on this device and sets it after the grant. We do not store the token or any device identifier.
- Usage records. We record when a poem is requested, drawn, refused or fails, and when a picture is redrawn, with the account identifier, the poem identifier, the time and a few details (picture style, number of scenes, cost, the reason a text was refused). No poem text, no IP address, no device details.
- AI request ledger. For each request to an AI provider we record the account identifier, the provider and model, the amount of text or number of pictures, the cost, how long it took and whether it worked. It enforces the daily limits and our spending cap.
Our server does not store IP addresses in its database or logs. Your IP address is still processed in transit: by Cloudflare and the web proxy on our server, and by Supabase when the app signs in. Server logs record errors, not poem texts; they are rotated by size.
The app contains no advertising, analytics, crash reporting or tracking SDKs. We do not sell data or share it for advertising.
Who else receives data
| Provider | What it does | What it receives |
|---|---|---|
| Supabase | Anonymous sign-in and our database, in the EU (Frankfurt) | Everything stored in the database, listed above; your IP address when the app signs in |
| Anthropic | The Claude model that splits a poem into scenes | The text of a poem you add. When a picture is refused by the drawing provider's safety filter, that picture's prompt, to be reworded |
| fal.ai | Draws the pictures | English picture prompts made from the poem: character and scene descriptions. Not the poem itself, and nothing about the account |
| Apple | In-app purchases, DeviceCheck | The purchase, handled by Apple under its own policy; the DeviceCheck token and one bit per device |
| DigitalOcean | The server that runs the service and stores the pictures | Pictures, server logs |
| Cloudflare | Domain name and network proxy | Your IP address and the requests the app and your browser make |
Several of these providers are based in the United States, so data may be processed outside your country, each under its terms for business customers.
Legal basis
Drawing and keeping your poems, your dots and purchases: performing our agreement with you (the terms). Limits, abuse prevention and usage records: our legitimate interest in keeping the service working and its costs under control. Where the law of Kazakhstan on personal data requires consent, using the app is that consent; you can withdraw it by writing to us.
How long we keep data, and deleting it
- Deleting a poem in the app removes its pictures from our server at once. The database record of the poem, with its text and scene plan, is kept marked as deleted, together with the ledger. Write to us if you want it erased completely.
- The account, its ledger, the usage records and the AI request ledger have no automatic expiry yet.
- Deleting the app deletes everything on the phone. The Keychain session may outlive the app, so a reinstall finds the same account and its dots.
- There is no button to delete the account yet. Write to [email protected], ideally with the transaction id of a purchase or the date you started, and we will find and delete the account, its poems, pictures and ledger, and remove its identifier from the usage records.
Children's privacy
The app asks no one for a name, email, age or contact details, and has no ads or tracking. The only content that leaves the phone is the text of a poem someone adds, which is used to draw that poem and nothing else. This is how we aim to meet the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), the GDPR and the App Store rules for apps used by children. If you think a child's personal information reached us, write to us and we will delete it.
Your rights
Under the GDPR and the Law of the Republic of Kazakhstan “On Personal Data and Their Protection” you can ask what data we hold about you and for a copy, ask us to correct or delete it, restrict or object to its processing, and withdraw consent. Write to [email protected]. You can also complain to the data protection authority of your country.
This website
This website uses no cookies, analytics or third-party scripts; its fonts are served from this site. Your language choice is kept in your browser only. The web proxy keeps standard access logs for security, overwritten on a rolling basis.
Changes
When we change how we handle data, we update this page and the date at the top.
Contact
Anton Shpakovskiy, [email protected]