Privacy Policy

News Owl is a daily news-reading app made for children aged 6–14. We have designed it to collect as little information as possible. This policy explains what the app does and does not do with data.

The short version

Information stored on the device

To make the app work, the following is saved locally on your device and is not sent to us:

• The interests/topics you choose (e.g. Sports, Space, Music).
• Your chosen reading level (Simple, Medium or Harder) and region preference.
• Reading and quiz streaks, XP, levels, and earned badges.
• Articles you have read or bookmarked.
• When the free trial started.

The trial start date is also kept in your own iCloud key-value storage so the same free-trial period applies across your iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch. That is your private iCloud storage, not ours — we cannot see it. Purchase entitlement is verified from the App Store; your other preferences and reading activity listed above remain local to each device.

Deleting the app erases its local preferences and reading activity. The trial start may remain in your iCloud storage, and Apple retains your purchase history so a permanent unlock can be restored.

Information sent to our servers

To show you news, the app connects to our own server over a secure (HTTPS) connection. In doing so it sends only what is technically necessary to deliver content:

• Article requests. The app asks our server for stories matching your chosen reading level, region, and topics. These preferences are sent with the request but are not tied to any identity and are not stored as a personal profile.
• Word lookups. If a reader taps a word to see a simple, kid-friendly definition, that single word is sent to our server, which uses a third-party AI service to generate the definition. We do not attach any identity to these requests and do not use them to build a profile of the reader.
• Words read aloud. To play a word or its meaning out loud, the app asks our server for the audio, sending only the word or sentence to be spoken. The audio is generated on our own server — nothing is sent to any other company for this — and it is stored only so the same word doesn't have to be generated twice. As with the requests above, nothing identifies the reader.

Standard, short-lived technical information (such as an IP address) may be processed by our hosting provider to deliver the request and protect the service from abuse, as happens with any website. We do not use this to identify or track individual children.

Reading aloud

Words and their meanings are read aloud using a voice generated by software running on our own server (Piper, with the “Amy” voice, used under its open licences — see Credits & licences in the app's Settings). No recordings are made, no microphone is used, and the app never listens to anything.

Where the news comes from, and how it is rewritten

News Owl gathers stories from around 30 reputable, publicly available news sources (such as the BBC, The Guardian, NPR, The New York Times, NASA and the Smithsonian). Those stories are not shown to your child as their original publishers wrote them.

Once a day, on our own server, each story is passed to a third-party AI service, which:

• decides whether the story is suitable for children at all, discarding anything violent, frightening, explicit or otherwise unsuitable;
• rewrites the stories that pass into three separate versions, one for each reading level (Simple, Medium and Harder), so children of different ages can read the same news;
• writes the short comprehension quiz and the list of tricky words that go with each version.

Two things about this matter for your privacy:

• It happens before anyone opens the app. The rewriting is a scheduled job that works only from the publicly published news article. Nothing about your child is involved — no reading history, no preferences, no device information. The AI service never receives anything about who will read the story, because at that point nobody has.
• The only thing we ever send while your child is using the app is a single word, when they tap it for a definition (see Information sent to our servers above). That word goes to the same AI service with nothing attached to it, and the answer is saved so the same word is never sent twice.

We may change which AI provider we use. Whichever it is, the same limits apply and are the point of this section: it receives the published news article, or a single word, and never anything that identifies your child.

We should also be straightforward about the limits of this. The rewriting and the safety filtering are automatic, and no person reviews each story before it appears. The filtering is deliberately cautious — some subjects are withheld from the youngest reading level entirely rather than being simplified into something misleading — but no automated system is perfect. Every story links to the original article so that a grown-up can always read the source, and you can tell us about anything that looks wrong at hello@newsowl.app.

Every story credits and links to the publisher it came from. News Owl is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or a partner of any of them.

There is no chat, messaging, social networking, or user-generated content, so children cannot communicate with strangers or post anything publicly.

Links that leave the app

Each story links to its original source. Because those external websites are outside our control and not designed for children, any link that leaves the app is protected by a parental gate (a simple challenge an adult can pass) so young children cannot open external websites unsupervised.

This website

Everything above describes the News Owl app. This website (newsowl.app) also counts page views, so we can tell whether anyone is finding it.

We use Umami, which runs on our own server rather than a third party’s. It sets no cookies, and it does not follow you across other websites or build a profile of you. What it records is the page you viewed, the site that linked you here, and general details of your browser, operating system, device type and country. Visitors are counted using a value derived from your IP address and browser, which is discarded and regenerated daily; your IP address itself is not stored.

None of this happens inside the app, and none of it is connected to any child.

Children's privacy

News Owl is intended to be safe for children. Consistent with the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) and the GDPR, we do not knowingly collect personal information from children. Because the app does not collect personal information from anyone, we do not create profiles of children or use their data for advertising.

Changes to this policy

If we change this policy, we will update the “Last updated” date above and post the new version at this address.

Contact

If you have any questions about this policy or your privacy, please contact hello@newsowl.app.