Privacy notice

Updated 21 October 2026. Also: Noted’s terms.

Noted is made for children, so it is built to know as little as possible. There are no adverts and no tracking, and signing in is optional. This notice says what stays on the device, what goes to your Sparks family account if a grown-up signs in, what is sent to our server to write lessons, and why.

Without signing in: it all stays on this device

Unless a grown-up signs in, these are saved on the phone or tablet only and are never sent to us:

• each person’s first name or nickname, and their school year
• their lessons, progress, stars, coins and stickers
• their notebooks, including anything written or drawn
• everything from the School Supermarket (coins are pretend and can’t be bought)
• the grown-up’s PIN

You can erase all of it at any time in Grown-ups, under “Erase everything on this device”. Deleting the app erases it too. Because nothing is kept anywhere else, it can’t then be brought back, or moved to another device.

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 makes a Sparks family account: one sign-in for all the Sparks apps (Noted, Sparks, SparkTrails and News), so the same email works in each. Children never sign in themselves.

Signed in, Noted keeps a copy of everything for each person in the account, so it is safe if a device is lost and can be brought back on another one:

• their first name or nickname, the colour of their initial, their school year, and what a grown-up lets them do
• their stars, stickers and loyalty stamps, and everything from the School Supermarket, with when each was earned, bought, given or given back
• their coins, with a few words about what earned or spent each lot (“Finished Pythagoras’ theorem”, “Bought the froggy gel pen”)
• their lessons and progress, including the courses written for them on request with the topic they asked for, their practice cards, and the days they learned
• their notebooks: the notes saved in them, and everything written or drawn on their pages

Each child in the account has one purse of coins, shared by Noted and Sparks: coins earned in either can be spent in either, and both apps can see the purse and what earned it. When you sign in, you say whether a child in Noted is the same child as one already in Sparks.

It also notes which Sparks apps each child uses (only which, not when or how much), so the grown-ups’ area in each app can show your family at a glance.

Notebooks and drawings are a child’s own work, and can hold anything they chose to write or draw. They are kept privately: only someone signed in to your family account can see them, and we don’t look at them or use them for anything else.

Your email is used only to sign you in: Noted doesn’t send you any other emails. Signed in, your PIN for the grown-ups’ areas is kept in the account too, scrambled so that nobody can read it, and the same PIN works on all your devices and in every Sparks app.

If you use other Sparks apps with the same email, their privacy notices say what each of them keeps in the account.

What is sent to our server to write lessons

Three things in the app are written on request by an AI model, so the request has to leave the device:

• asking for a course: the topic and the school year
• looking up a word in the dictionary: the word and the school year
• the homework helper: the question as typed, or the photo of it, and the school year

Nothing else goes with it, whether or not you are signed in: no name, no email, no account, no location and nothing that identifies the device. Photos are made smaller on the device first.

A grown-up can switch off asking for any topic, and the homework helper, for each person in Grown-ups.

Who handles it

Our server passes requests for lessons to Anthropic, whose Claude models write the answer. Anthropic handles them for us only to do that, and its terms for this service say it does not use what is sent to train its models. It keeps requests for a limited time, for safety and to prevent misuse, and then deletes them.

Supabase stores the Sparks family account, sign-ins included, in Ireland, in the EU, and a usage log for our server. Resend sends the sign-in codes. Expo runs our server. Like any website, each of them sees the internet address a request comes from while they handle it.

What our server keeps

It does not keep the topic, the word, the question or the photo. Once the answer has been sent back, they are gone from our server. (A course written for someone who is signed in is kept in their family account, as above.)

To stop the service being overused, it keeps a short log line for each request: the time, the kind of request, the subject and school level, whether it worked, and a scrambled form of the internet address it came from. The scrambling means we can count requests without being able to tell who sent them.

Keeping and deleting

Signed in, Grown-ups has “Delete account and erase everything”. It deletes the whole Sparks family account, everything every Sparks app keeps in it, and the sign-in itself, and then erases everything on the device. It needs an internet connection, and it can’t be undone. Your other devices then stop saving to the account, and ask a grown-up whether to keep what’s on them, on that device only, or erase it. You can also delete one person from the family, on every device.

Signing out takes everyone off that device; their things stay in the account until you sign in again.

We keep a family account until you delete it. If nobody signs in to it for two years, we delete it and everything in it.

Camera and photos

The app asks to use the camera or your photos only when someone chooses to take or pick a picture of a homework question. The picture is sent once to be read and is not stored by us. A small copy may sit in the app’s temporary files on the device until the device clears them.

What we don’t do

• no adverts
• no analytics or tracking tools
• no selling or sharing of information
• no chat between users, and nothing a child makes is shown to anyone outside your family account

Children

Noted is designed for children of about 9 to 14 (Year 5 to Year 9, or Grade 4 to Grade 8). A parent or carer sets it up, and only a parent or carer signs in. We suggest a first name or a nickname only. Because children can type anything into a topic, a homework question or a notebook, remind them not to put in personal details such as full names, addresses or phone numbers.

Your rights and how to reach us

You can ask what we hold about your family, ask for a copy, ask us to correct it, or ask us to delete it. Signed in, you can delete everything yourself in Grown-ups. Without a sign-in we hold nothing that identifies you or your child, but we will always answer.

Noted is run by Studio Darling. Write to privacy@sparksforkids.app.

Changes

If the app starts handling information differently, this notice will change before it does, and the date below will show it.