An email address, and nothing about a child

Talebrix is made by Talebrix Ltd, a company registered in England and Wales, number 17551537, whose registered office is at Pipers Green, Hoghatch Lane, Farnham, GU9 0BY. It is the data controller for anything described on this page. If you want to ask about any of it, or exercise any of the rights further down, the address is hello@talebrix.com and a person reads it. The contact form reaches the same person.

Your email address, if you type it into the reservation form. That is the whole of that one — no name, no address, no phone number.

With the address we keep a short note of how you arrived: the labels on the link you followed, whether that link was an advertisement click, the name of the site you came from, and the first page you landed on. We keep it so we can see which channels bring people to the list. It is not your name, and it says nothing about a child.

Once you have joined the first-access list, we ask one optional question: why you did. The answer is a choice from a short list, it reaches us moments after the reservation it came with, and skipping it changes nothing at all about what happens next.

If you write to us on the contact form instead, we get your email address, whatever you wrote, and your name if you chose to give it. The name field says it is optional because it is: a message with nothing in that box is answered the same as any other.

Neither form asks anything at all about a child — not a name, not an age, not a birthday — and the contact form says so above the box for exactly that reason. The age demonstration on the homepage runs entirely inside your browser: it stores nothing and sends nothing anywhere, which is why you can drag it around without ever being asked who you are.

We send you two emails. The first arrives straight away and says your address is on the list, so you know it worked — and so that anybody whose address was typed in by somebody else finds out, and can reply to be taken off. The second comes when pre-orders open. Then nothing else. That is the promise the form makes and it is the entire purpose we hold the address for — we are not building a mailing list to sell you things every fortnight, and if we changed our mind about that we would have to ask you again rather than quietly start.

The lawful basis is your consent, given by submitting the form. You can withdraw it at any time by emailing us, and withdrawing it is not made deliberately difficult.

A message sent on the contact form is used to answer you and for nothing else. It arrives in an ordinary email inbox and is treated like any other email: it is not added to the launch list, and writing to us does not sign you up for anything. The lawful basis there is our legitimate interest in replying to somebody who has asked us a question.

One more thing happens at the moment you join the first-access list. If you arrived from one of our advertisements, our server tells the platform that showed it that it led to a reservation, so we can stop paying for the advertisements that do not work. What it is told is described under “Who else sees it” — it never includes your address in readable form, and it only ever says that a reservation happened. The lawful basis for that measurement is our legitimate interest in knowing which advertisements work. The note of how you arrived is kept for the same reason, including when you did not come from an advertisement.

Five companies are involved in running this site. Here is each one, and exactly what it sees.

A launch-list address: until pre-orders open and the last email has gone out. If you ask us to delete it before then, we delete it when you ask rather than at the end of some cycle. The note of how you arrived is deleted with the address. After that email, staying in touch would be something you opt into, not something you are left in.

A message you sent us: for as long as the conversation is worth having, the way any email sits in an inbox. Ask us to delete it and we delete it, including our reply.

A recording, if you agreed to one: 30 days, and then PostHog deletes it. There is nothing in it that identifies you, so we cannot look one up by name — but you can withdraw your agreement at any time by clearing this site’s data in your browser, and nothing further is recorded after that.

We are trying to find out where this page loses people — which paragraph they stop at, what they read twice, where they give up. The way to see that is to record how a visit goes: what you scrolled past, what you pressed, how the page moved under you. So we ask, in a bar at the bottom of the page, and nothing is recorded unless you say yes.

Saying no is a real answer and costs you nothing — the page works the same, and the visit is still counted the anonymous way described above. Ignoring the bar entirely counts as no. We remember whichever you chose so you are not asked on every page. The lawful basis is your consent, and you can withdraw it whenever you like.

What a recording never contains: anything you typed into a box. The email field and the message field are hidden in your browser before the recording leaves it, and what the two forms send to our server is not recorded at all. So a recording can show that somebody filled the field in and pressed the button; it cannot show us the address they used. That is the same promise the rest of this page makes, kept in the one place it would have been easiest to break.

If you have not agreed to be recorded, there are none. Not a functional one, not an analytics one, not a third-party one — the counting described above runs in a mode that sets nothing and stores nothing, which is why this site can ask you a question rather than presenting you with a wall of switches. The note of how you arrived is carried in the address of the page for the length of the visit. That is not a cookie, and it is not written into the browser’s storage. A link used by the people who build this site can ask a browser to remember that their visits should not be counted. That memory stays on that browser and is not set for anyone else.

If you have agreed, PostHog sets one, to tie the recording of this visit to the rest of it. Nobody else sets one at any point: no advertising cookie, nothing from Meta, nothing that follows you to another website. And whichever you answered, that answer is remembered in your browser’s own storage, because the alternative is asking you again every time.

You can ask us for a copy of what we hold, ask us to correct it, ask us to delete it, or object to us holding it at all. Email hello@talebrix.com and we will do it. There is very little of it, so none of these take long.

If you think we have handled something badly you can complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office at ico.org.uk. We would rather you told us first, but it is your right either way.

This page is about the website. Talebrix will need its own account of what it sends and what it keeps — some of which has not been decided, and none of which we are going to describe in advance of deciding it. What is settled so far is on the specifications page.

One thing is settled and is said here because it concerns a child’s name: when a grown-up starts a book from a child’s drawing and the child has written a name on it, that name may reach the AI model that draws the pictures, as part of the drawing, and may appear in the book’s pictures, and a picture that comes out with writing in it is turned back and drawn again.

One more thing is settled about what Talebrix talks to. To keep its clock right it asks the time of time.aws.com, a time service run by Amazon Web Services, and of no other time server. Like any server Talebrix connects to, it sees your home’s internet address, and nothing else about your family.

A finished book can be read aloud to you. The reading is made by ElevenLabs, a company that turns written words into speech. It is sent the book’s title, the words printed on its pages, and one closing line, “Written by” and the child’s name as you gave it to us, then “Read by Talebrix.” It is never sent your child’s voice or anything your child said. We have told ElevenLabs not to train its AI on what we send, and as soon as each reading is made we delete it from their records. ElevenLabs says it may still keep some details of a reading in its own technical logs for a while, and it does not say how long. ElevenLabs is a United States company, so that is where the words pass through. Our copy of the reading is kept with the book and deleted with it.