Privacy notice

Updated 20 October 2026. Also: News’s terms.

News by Sparks is made for children, so it is built to know as little as possible. There are no adverts and no tracking, and every child gets the same news: the app never tells us who is reading, or what.

What stays on this device

These are saved on the phone or tablet only, and are never sent to us:

• each person’s first name or nickname, their school year, and the kinds of stories they like
• which stories they have read and saved, and their answers to the quick checks
• the grown-up’s PIN, unless you sign in (below)

You can erase all of it at any time in Grown-ups, under “Erase everything on this device”. Deleting the app erases it too.

Getting the news

To get the day’s news, the app asks our server for the latest edition. The request says which day, and nothing else: no name, no account, no location and nothing that identifies the device. Like any website, the server sees the internet address the request comes from in order to answer it; we don’t keep it.

Story photos come from Wikimedia Commons, where people share photos for anyone to use, and each is credited under it. The app gets them through our server too, so a device never connects to anyone else.

How the news is written

Each morning, an AI model (Claude, made by Anthropic) searches reputable news sources, chooses the day’s stories, and writes them for children of 8 to 12. A second pass, by the same model, reads every story again for accuracy and suitability, and leaves out any that don’t pass. Every story lists the organisations its facts came from.

We work hard to keep it accurate and suitable, but it is written by a computer, and it can get things wrong. If you see a mistake, or a story you think shouldn’t be there, tell us at hello@sparksforkids.app and we’ll look at it the same day.

Each story has a picture: a photo from Wikimedia Commons that the AI model chose by looking at it and checking it is suitable, or an illustration it drew. Stories about hard news always have an illustration. A photo shows the story’s subject, not the event itself, and its caption says what it shows.

No child’s information is ever sent to the AI model. It sees only the news.

If a grown-up signs in: the Sparks family account

A parent or carer can sign in, in Grown-ups, with their email and a code we send to it. That is the Sparks family account: one sign-in for all the Sparks apps (Sparks, Noted, SparkTrails and News). Children never sign in themselves.

Signed in, News keeps only two things in the account: the PIN for the grown-ups’ areas, scrambled so that nobody can read it and the same on all your devices and in every Sparks app; and the fact that your family uses News, so the other Sparks apps can show it. Children’s names and reading stay on the device.

Your email is used only to sign you in. Other Sparks apps’ privacy notices say what each of them keeps in the account. You can delete the account, and everything every Sparks app keeps in it, in Grown-ups.

Links and other apps

Stories name their sources, but children can’t open links from the app. The other Sparks apps are named on the first screen, and can only be opened from the grown-ups’ area.

Who we are, and your rights

News by Sparks is run by Studio Darling, under the law of England and Wales. For anything about personal information, write to privacy@sparksforkids.app. You can ask what we hold about your family, ask us to correct or delete it, and complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ico.org.uk).