Children's Privacy

Parents are in control

SpeechStep is used through a parent or guardian account. Before any feature records your child, you have created that account, proved you control its email address with a one-time code (email verified) and confirmed that you are the child’s parent or legal guardian and at least 18 (parent attested). We do not check identity documents; where a country requires a stronger method before a choice, we add it before offering that choice there. You can review, change, or withdraw your choices at any time.

Recordings are analysed and discarded; saving is off until you turn it on

During practice, each recording is sent to our scoring service for feedback, analysed in memory and discarded. Nothing is saved unless you turn on Save recordings, which is off by default, as are the three other optional choices (Share with my SLP, Help improve SpeechStep, Allow SpeechStep team review). Declining them never limits practice or feedback. Discarding the audio does not discard the result: the practice result and progress (clear, keep practising, not sure; which words; when) are kept in your account even when the recording itself is not.

The first check. Before you have an account, the check is a questionnaire about your child and records nothing. The listening part, in which your child says a few words and a sentence, comes after you have created your account and attested that you are the parent, in every country. Our servers refuse any child audio sent without a signed-in parent account, the app does not ask for the microphone before then, and the same rule applies to the optional AI check on our free lisp tool (Privacy Policy §7.7).

We do not have a version of the real scorer that runs inside the browser, and we will not describe one until we do.

What we collect from or about a child — and only with your consent

• Voice recordings — only if you turn on cloud feedback. We verify your consent on our servers before a recording is stored, and you can turn it off at any time.
• Age (in months) — optional, used to give age-appropriate feedback. We do not collect a full date of birth.
• Practice results — scores and progress, stored against a random identifier, not your child’s name.

Saved recordings are stored under a random identifier rather than your child’s name, and access is restricted. You can access them in your account; an SLP can access them only when you authorise sharing recordings with that SLP; and authorised SpeechStep team members can listen only when you enable team review, with every access logged. We never make recordings publicly accessible.

Two things sit outside this list because they are not about a child: our own page counting, which attaches no visitor, device, advertising or account identifier to a page view (see How we count page visits below), and our hosting provider’s ordinary request logs, which record an IP address and the page requested for security and debugging, for a short time, and are not joined to accounts or children.

If you give us a phone number, it is yours — not your child’s

We ask parents for an optional phone number so that a member of the SpeechStep team can call you about your child’s speech, or about a Welcome Session you asked for, rather than trading emails. Three things about it, plainly:

• It is the parent’s number. We never ask for a child’s phone number, and there is nowhere in SpeechStep for a child to enter one.
• It is optional, and how we may use it depends on where you gave it. You can create an account, let your child practice, and book a session without giving one at all.
  • In your account, permission to call you is its own unticked box — giving us the number there is not the same as saying we may ring it.
  • When you ask for a Welcome Session, we do not put a box in front of you, and we want to be straight about why: contacting you about the session you just asked us to arrange is the thing you requested, and a box you cannot proceed without is not a real choice. So we say plainly on that form what we will use the number for instead of asking permission we would not accept a “no” to. Text or WhatsApp is separate, is genuinely optional, and is an unticked box that only appears once you have typed a number.
• It is not marketing, and it stays with us. We use it to talk to you about your child’s speech and nothing else — no promotions, no selling. The number is used by the SpeechStep team member who calls you; it is not given to an SLP you connect, to a referral partner, or to any other company, and it is never sold. Remove it in your account at any time and the number itself is deleted.

Four separate choices, all off by default

Save recordings keeps practice recordings for 90 days so your child can listen back, track practice or share with their SLP. Share with my SLP is chosen separately for each SLP you connect. Help improve SpeechStep lets us use saved recordings, automatically and pseudonymised, to improve and test our speech feedback; it needs Save recordings. Allow SpeechStep team review lets authorised team members listen to saved recordings to evaluate and improve feedback, with every access logged; it needs Help improve. Turning one off turns off the choices that depend on it. Declining any of them never limits your child’s practice or feedback. Each time you turn a choice on we email you a record of it.

What withdrawing cannot undo. Turning Help improve off keeps your child’s recordings out of every future training or test set, and any working copy made for improvement is deleted within 30 days. A model that was already trained on a recording is not un-trained: we do not retrain models to remove a single recording, and we will not claim otherwise (Privacy Policy §7.5).

We minimize what we collect

We ask only for what a feature needs. We never require a child’s real name, and we never ask for a child’s phone number or address. We use no advertising trackers and no ad pixels. One analytics service, PostHog, runs only if a parent accepts optional cookies, and it never receives anything about a child — no name, age, sound, score, result or recording — with session recording switched off (Privacy Policy §4). The embeds we do load from other companies — the cal.com booking calendar and the payment checkout, both parent-facing — load only when a parent chooses to open them. We do count our own page views; that is described next. We do not sell or rent children’s data.

How we count page visits — and what that never includes

We count page views on our own website so we can see which pages and guides actually help families. This counting is cookieless: it sets and reads no cookie, writes nothing to the device, and attaches no visitor, device, advertising or account identifier and no fingerprint to a page view. It records limited page-level information: the page address, how the visit arrived (a referring site’s address and any campaign details in the link, once per visit), a two-letter country, and the time. Anything after a ? or # in our own page addresses is discarded before the record is written, so a link cannot smuggle a name or an email address into it. It is not intended to identify, and is not used to identify or profile, your child.

It runs on every page of the site, and we would rather say plainly that this includes the pages your child practices on. What it records there is the page address and nothing more. No recording, no score, no sound or word practiced, no name, no age, and no child or account identifier ever travels with it; it is not linked to your account or to your child’s profile, and it is never sold or shared. A page view tells us that a page was opened, not who opened it, and nothing about the child using it. Our hosting provider’s request logs are separate (above). The full detail, including what it deliberately does not store, is in §4 of our Privacy Policy.

Your rights as a parent

• Review your child’s recordings and data.
• Delete recordings at any time in your account, or ask us to delete your account and all associated data.
• Withdraw consent at any time, which stops further recording and, for the training choice, further use.

Manage these in your account. If you never created one — you used a free tool, or asked for a Welcome Session — delete what we hold for your email address at speechstep.com/erase. Either way you can also email support@speechstep.com. We respond to verified parental requests within 30 days (or sooner where required by law). If you believe a child has provided us information without your consent, contact us and we will delete it.

Deleting your account removes your family’s data within 30 days, including saved recordings, practice history and the activity records tied to that account. Three things are not erased by it: purchase and invoice records, which tax and accounting law make us keep (in India, eight years), with no child data in them; models already trained on recordings you had allowed for improvement (above); and the page counts described above, which carry no identifier of any kind, so no part of them refers to you or to your child.

How this connects to our other policies

This page summarizes the child-specific protections in our Privacy Policy. Our security controls are described on the Security page, and the terms governing use are in our Terms of Use.