Privacy Policy
Stories come down to this phone. Nothing about your child ever goes back up.
The short version
Adventure Mutt has no accounts, no sign-in, no advertising and no third-party analytics. Your child's name, the choices they make and the books they finish are written to your device and stay there — we never receive them, and there is no cloud copy of them anywhere.
The app downloads stories from us. That is the only thing it fetches, it happens outside the story itself, and the request carries nothing about who is asking.
The rest of this page is the detail behind those three paragraphs.
1. Who we are, and what this covers
Adventure Mutt is made and operated by Symphony Works, LLC, a Delaware limited liability company. For anything on this page, write to support@adventuremutt.com.
This policy covers the Adventure Mutt app for iPhone and iPad and the website at adventuremutt.com. The app and the website collect very different amounts of information, so they are described separately below.
2. Children
Adventure Mutt is made for children, and it is listed in the App Store's Kids Category. We designed it so that there is nothing about a child for us to collect.
The app does ask for your child's first name, and this is exactly what happens to it. During setup a grown-up types in one or two first names, so that Mutt can use them in the stories and letter them onto the covers. Those names are written to your device's own storage, are used only on that same device, and are never transmitted to us or to anyone else. There is no copy on any server, because the app has nothing that would carry one there.
Apart from those first names we ask for nothing else about a child: no age, no birthday, no email address, no photograph and no location. There is no account to create and no profile anywhere.
A child is never the one typing. The name is entered in the grown-up part of setup, and there is no free-text field anywhere a child can reach — the whole app is answered by tapping — so a child cannot send us something even by accident.
We do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 13, and because the app has no way to send us any, we do not hold any. This is how we meet the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) and equivalent rules elsewhere: not by promising to delete children's data, but by building an app that never gathers it. If you believe we somehow hold information about your child, write to support@adventuremutt.com and we will look and delete anything found.
3. What the app stores on your device
The following are written to the app's own private storage on your iPhone or iPad, and nowhere else:
The first names you entered. Every story your child has started or finished, including which doors they chose and the pages that resulted. The downloaded story files themselves. Your settings, including the voice chosen for read-aloud and whether stories read themselves aloud automatically.
None of it is uploaded, synced or backed up by us. We hold no copy and there is no way for us to retrieve any of it.
If your device is backed up to iCloud or to a computer, that backup is made by Apple's software under your own settings and is governed by Apple's terms, not ours. Deleting the app removes everything above from the device permanently — there is nothing to restore it from, so export anything you want to keep first.
4. What the app sends, and to whom
The app makes network requests for exactly two purposes.
Downloading stories. The app fetches a catalogue and the story files themselves over HTTPS from content.adventuremutt.com, which is hosted for us by Cloudflare. These are ordinary anonymous requests for a file. They carry no identifier, no name, no account, no device id and no advertising id, and they never happen while a story is being read — the app checks for new stories when it opens, in the background, and the reading itself is entirely offline.
As with any request on the internet, your device's IP address is visible to Cloudflare in order to route the file back to it. We do not store it, log it or receive it. What we receive is a count of how many times each story file was downloaded in total, which tells us which stories are popular and nothing whatsoever about who read them.
Purchases. Buying, restoring or managing the subscription talks to Apple's App Store, using Apple's own StoreKit framework. That conversation is between your device and Apple. We receive no payment details, no card number, no billing address and no Apple Account identifier — ever. The app reads only one thing back, on the device itself: whether this device currently holds an active subscription.
There is nothing else. The app contains no advertising, no advertising identifier, no third-party analytics or attribution SDK, no crash-reporting service, no social media SDK and no tracking of any kind. It does not track you or your child across apps or websites, and its App Store privacy declaration says so.
5. Read-aloud and Personal Voice
Stories can read themselves aloud using the voices built into iOS. Speech is produced on the device by Apple's own speech framework. No audio is recorded, and no text is sent anywhere to be spoken.
If a parent has created a Personal Voice on the device, the app can use it, and iOS will ask your permission the first time. That permission is between you and iOS. The voice itself never leaves the device, we never receive it, and the app has no microphone access and records nothing.
6. The website
adventuremutt.com is a marketing site. It sets no cookies and loads nothing from any other company — no fonts, scripts, pixels or embeds from anyone else.
Measuring visits. We count pageviews with our own first-party collector on our own domain. For each visit it records the page path, whether the visitor came from another site or from within ours, and whether the device is a phone, tablet or desktop. To tell one visit from another it stores a short one-way hash of the IP address, the browser's user-agent string and the current date, combined with a secret. Because the date is part of the hash, the value changes at midnight on its own: we cannot follow a visitor from one day to the next, and we do not try. The raw IP address is never stored or logged. If your browser sends a Do Not Track or Global Privacy Control signal, nothing is recorded at all.
The mailing list. If you give us your email address on the site, we store the address, the time you submitted it, and a one-way salted hash of your IP address, which exists only to stop the form being abused. The raw IP is not stored. We use the address for one purpose — to tell you when Adventure Mutt is available — and we do not sell it, rent it, or pass it to anyone else. Ask us at support@adventuremutt.com and we will delete it.
7. Who else sees anything
We do not sell personal information, and we do not share it for advertising or for anyone else's purposes. We have no advertising partners and no data brokers.
Three companies handle information on our behalf, as service providers, and none of them may use it for their own purposes: Apple, which runs the App Store and processes every payment; Cloudflare, which hosts our website and serves the story files; and our email provider, which delivers messages to the mailing list.
We may disclose information if the law requires it, or to establish or defend a legal claim. Given what we hold, that would amount to a mailing-list address and nothing else.
8. How long anything is kept
Everything the app stores is on your device, and it lasts until you erase it in Settings or delete the app.
Website visit counts are held by our analytics provider for three months and then expire automatically. Mailing-list addresses are kept until you ask us to remove one, or until we close the list.
9. Your rights
Wherever you live, you may ask us what we hold about you, ask for a copy, ask us to correct it, and ask us to delete it. Write to support@adventuremutt.com. In almost every case the honest answer will be that we hold nothing but a mailing-list address, and we will delete it on request.
If you are in the European Economic Area or the United Kingdom, our legal basis for the pageview count is our legitimate interest in knowing whether the site works, and our basis for the mailing list is your consent, which you can withdraw at any time. You also have the right to complain to your local data protection authority.
If you are in California, we do not sell or share personal information as those terms are defined by the CCPA, and we have not done so in the past twelve months. We do not use personal information for cross-context behavioural advertising, and we do not knowingly collect the personal information of anyone under 16.
10. Where information is processed
We are based in the United States, and Apple and Cloudflare process information for us there and on servers around the world in order to deliver files quickly. Where personal information is transferred out of the European Economic Area or the United Kingdom, our providers rely on the European Commission's Standard Contractual Clauses and the UK Addendum.
11. Security
Story files are delivered over HTTPS and are cryptographically signed; a device refuses any file whose signature does not verify, which is why a story cannot be substituted in transit. The mailing list is stored in a Cloudflare database that only we can reach. The app holds no credentials and there is no account to break into.
No system is perfectly secure, but the strongest protection here is structural: for the overwhelming majority of what a family does in this app, there is nothing on our side to breach.
12. Changes to this policy
If we change this policy we will change the version and date at the top and publish the new version at adventuremutt.com/privacy. If a change means we start collecting something we did not collect before, we will say so in the app before it takes effect, and the app's own settings will carry the switch.
13. Contact
Symphony Works, LLC — support@adventuremutt.com