This page is a draft. It has not been reviewed by a lawyer yet and may change.
The short version
- StudyBuddies is for children, so a parent or guardian makes the account and gives permission.
- We collect what is needed to run it and no more. We ask for a school year, not a birthday.
- We do not sell anybody’s information, we do not show ads, and we do not use a child’s information for advertising.
- You can see what we hold about your child, and have it deleted.
Operator contact for privacy requests: BTF INTELLIGENCE LLC; studybuddies.support1@gmail.com; (832) 436-5701; 19 Southfork Pines Ct, The Woodlands, TX 77381.
1. A parent’s permission comes first
Nearly everybody who uses StudyBuddies is under 13. We do not make an account for a child on their own. A parent or guardian makes it, confirms a phone number, and gives their name and email as a record of their permission for the child to use it. A signup checkbox or parent PIN alone does not verify parental consent for hosted AI teaching. We keep that record for as long as the account is open.
A parent can withdraw that permission at any time by deleting the account, which deletes what we hold with it (section 7). We do not make a child’s use of StudyBuddies depend on giving us more information than running it needs.
2. What we collect
From the parent
- Your email address and a password.
- Your phone number, to send a code that confirms it. The number is used to secure the account and to get back into it, and for nothing else.
- Your name and email, as the record of your permission.
- If you take out a plan: which plan, when it started, when it renews and whether it was cancelled. If you buy a coin pack: which pack and when. We do not see or keep your card number; the app store handles payment.
- If you set a parent PIN: the PIN in scrambled form, never the digits themselves, and how many wrong tries have been made.
About the child
- The name you give them in the app, their school year, the buddy they chose, and what you tell us at setup about what they want to get better at and what is tricky at home.
- Their progress: levels, XP, coins, rewards, activities finished, which questions they found hard, and the mistakes they tend to make again, which the buddy and the parent page use to help.
- What they type to the buddy, and any picture they choose to show it.
- Flags: a message that was stopped, why, and what was said if it was challenged.
If you report a bug
- What you write, and the lines the report adds: where in the app you were, the kind of device and its system version, the app version, the account number, and the child’s first name and school year. The report goes as an email from your own mail app, only when you press Send, so we also get the email address you send it from.
From the device
- Basic technical information when the app talks to our services: the kind of device and its system version, the app version, and the internet address it connected from, which is kept only as long as the security of the service needs it.
- Whether a first-time offer on a plan (the free week or the half-off month) has been taken on this device. The app keeps this note on the device, so that the offer is given once.
What we do not collect
- A child’s birthday, address, school, or a photograph of themselves. Chat pictures stay in the device history until that history or the app data is cleared; they are excluded from hosted AI and cloud saves.
- Where the device is.
- Contacts, or anything from other apps.
- Stories a child writes. They stay on the device they were written on.
3. Why we collect it
- To run the account and keep it yours.
- To fit the games and the buddy’s words to the child’s school year and to what you told us at setup.
- To bring back the questions a child found hard.
- To keep the chat safe, and to let a wrong flag be put right.
- To count the activities a free account has had today, and the chats a plan has had this week.
- To run a plan: to know what was bought and when it renews, to remind you before a free week ends or a plan renews, and to give a first-time offer only once.
- To keep the parent PIN working, so a child cannot open the parents’ settings or buy anything alone.
- To keep the service secure, and to find and fix faults, including the ones you report.
We do not use a child’s information for advertising, we do not build a profile of them for anybody else, and we do not use what they type to train anybody’s artificial intelligence.
4. The buddy, and the artificial-intelligence provider
Local picture lessons and the current scripted general chat do not send a child’s message to a hosted AI model. Optional hosted math teaching uses OpenAI only after the parent’s optional AI choice on the signed parent form has been reviewed, provider setup is complete, and the parent turns Hosted AI on. Parents can prepare the notice and form in Parent → Buddy learning → AI consent and signed form, print and sign it, and return an electronic scan for review.
For hosted math teaching, our server sends only the numeric school stage, arithmetic problem, answer, hint level, object choice, and fixed skill labels and numeric result summaries from scored games, quizzes, flash cards, and checked arithmetic chat. It does not send the child’s name, account or learner ID, school, contacts, chat history, images, recordings, or consent form. This pilot does not pool children’s data or train a model. Hosted AI remains disabled until OpenAI Zero Data Retention has been approved and configured for the API project. This does not remove all account or system metadata.
If Remember is enabled, Buddy retains at most 120 numeric math attempts from the last 90 days plus up to 256 weekly skill-count rows covering the current and previous 11 UTC weeks; daily cleanup also removes old attempts from inactive accounts. Cached plans expire after 30 minutes and cannot be used after expiry; background deletion may take about 24 hours. Parents can turn the feature off, forget Buddy learning memory, or withdraw AI consent from the parent controls. Withdrawal disables hosted AI and remembering, clears the Buddy learning memory and cached plans, and invalidates pending replies. Offline devices apply changes on successful sync. Chat history stays on each device for parent review and is excluded from cloud saves and AI learning summaries. Safety flags and appeals have separate records and controls. Other progress retains its own controls. Declining hosted AI leaves local picture lessons available.
One signature on the parent form can cover app permission and the separate optional AI choice. Signing for app use with the AI choice unchecked does not grant AI permission.
Signed forms are kept in private operator records while permission is active and deleted within 30 days after withdrawal or account deletion. Pending and revoked consent records expire after 30 days plus background deletion time. The operator reviews the signed scan and account/learner references before recording verified consent. Review does not enable Hosted AI automatically.
Every message is checked by us before it is sent on, and one that breaks the rules is not sent.
5. Where it is kept, and for how long
Account details, the consent record, the plan, and each child’s progress and rewards are kept on our servers, so that they are there when you sign in on another device. A copy is sent from the device every few minutes while the app is open, and when it is closed. Deleting the account deletes that copy.
Chat history, attached chat images and stories stay on the device only and are excluded from cloud saves. Safety flags and appeals may include the flagged message text in separate account records. The parent PIN is kept on the device, in scrambled form.
A bug report is kept in our email for as long as it takes to look into the problem.
We keep information for as long as the account is open. When you delete the account, we delete what we hold with it within 30 days, except what the law requires us to keep, such as records of a purchase, which we keep only as long as that requires. Our servers may be in a country other than yours; where they are, we take the steps the law asks for so that your information is protected the same way wherever it is.
6. Who else sees it
We do not sell information, and we do not share it for advertising. We use other companies only to run StudyBuddies, and they may use what they handle only for that:
- Google Firebase, for account authentication, progress, and server control records; a sign-in service, to keep email addresses, passwords and phone numbers safe;
- a text-message service, to send the confirmation code;
- an email service, to send the emails this policy mentions;
- the app stores, to take payment for a plan or a coin pack;
- an email provider, to receive the bug reports you choose to send;
- OpenAI, for optional hosted math teaching after verified parental consent and provider setup (section 4).
We may have to give information to the authorities if the law requires it, or to protect a child, the service or other people from harm. If StudyBuddies is taken over by another company, what we hold goes with it, under this policy, and we will tell you.
7. Your rights and choices
As the parent or guardian you can, at any time:
- see what we hold about your child;
- have it corrected or deleted;
- refuse to let us collect any more, by deleting the account;
- ask us not to share it with anybody, though as section 6 says we share it only to run the service.
Clearing the chat history and deleting the account can both be done from Settings. For anything else, write to studybuddies.support1@gmail.com; we will check that you are the parent or guardian on the account before acting, and answer within 30 days. We will not treat you differently for using these rights.
Depending on where you live - including California and other US states, the UK and the European Union - the law may give you more rights than these, such as a right to a copy of your information, to object to how it is used, or to complain to a data-protection authority. We will honor them. We do not “sell” or “share” personal information in the sense those laws use.
8. This website
The pages of this website do not use advertising cookies and do not follow you to other sites. They remember one thing in your browser: which buddy you picked, and which of the three stars you have found. The app, under Play, keeps its saved data in your browser as described above. We do not respond to “do not track” signals because we do not track.
9. Keeping it safe
We take care to protect what we hold, and we collect little so that there is little to lose. Passwords are stored only in scrambled form, information travels encrypted, and only the people who need to can reach it. No system is perfect. If something goes wrong that affects you, we will tell you, and the authorities where the law requires it.
10. Changes
If we change this policy in a way that matters, we will say so here and email account holders before it takes effect. If a change needs your permission again - for instance, if we wanted to collect something new about a child - we will ask for it before doing so.
Getting in touch
About privacy, or to ask for your child’s information to be seen, corrected or deleted: studybuddies.support1@gmail.com.
BTF INTELLIGENCE LLC
See also the terms of use and the subscription terms.