We keep the photograph of your child, so we can draw them again.

1. Who this is for

Mini Storyteller is a service for grown-ups. Accounts belong to a parent or guardian, and nothing that involves a child — a profile, a story, a photograph, an order — is reachable until the e-mail address on the account has been confirmed. Children do not have accounts, cannot sign in, and are never asked for anything directly.

The service is operated by MATVAN INC., trading as Mini Storyteller, registered in Delaware, United States. If you would rather ask a person than read a policy, write to hello@ministoryteller.com.

2. Your child’s photograph

This is the part that matters most, so it is first, and it is written in exactly the same words that appear on the home page, in the upload step and in the FAQ:

You upload one photograph of your child, and only a verified parent or guardian may upload it.

We use that photograph for one thing: to draw a character sheet — an original illustration of your child in our house style.

We keep that photograph, for as long as you have an account. Every illustration is drawn from the character sheet rather than from the photograph, and we keep the photograph so that a new picture, or a whole new book, can be drawn for your child later without asking you to upload it again.

The photograph is kept in private storage with no web address of any kind: there is no link to it, nothing on this website can request it, and no search engine can find it. It is never published, and it is never shown to anybody outside our own systems.

The photograph is never used to train any model, ours or anyone else’s, never sold, and never sent anywhere except the image provider that draws the character sheet.

Illustrations are generated by an AI image model from your photograph, art-directed and reviewed by us against a fixed house style.

You can have the photograph deleted at any time, and you do not have to close your account to do it: uploading a different photo destroys the old one, and removing a child from your account destroys their photograph with their character sheet. Deleting your account deletes the photograph, the character sheet and every illustration made from it, and the deletion receipt counts them.

If any sentence on this website contradicts the six above, the six above are the ones we are bound by, and the contradiction is a bug we want reported.

3. What else we collect

Everything in this table exists because a specific feature needs it. Nothing is collected in case it turns out to be useful later.

Your e-mail address

To create the account, to send the six-digit code that confirms somebody controls the inbox, to send a reset code if you ask for one, to tell you when a book you started is ready, to send the receipt for a keepsake you buy and to tell you what is happening to a printed order, and to send the receipt that counts what was destroyed when you delete the account. Those are the only messages we send you: no newsletter and no marketing. Our own administrators are also told, by e-mail, when an account confirms its address, when an order is placed, and when a book you started could not be finished; those notes carry your address so that we can answer you about it, and they go to nobody outside the company. You state that you are the child’s parent or guardian when you create the account, and we record that agreement against this policy’s version the moment the address is confirmed.

Your password

Stored only as a slow, salted hash. We cannot read it, and neither can anyone who reads our database.

Your child’s first name and birthday

The name is printed in the book. The birthday sets the reading level, now and as they grow, and is stored encrypted like the name. We do not collect a last name, a home address for the child, or a location.

What you volunteered for the story

A dedication, if you write one — printed on its own leaf and used for nothing else. Optional, and a blank one produces a complete story.

Which story your book is

Which of the two worlds you picked, and the identifier of the exact version of it your book was made from — the thing a print approval is bound to, so that if a single word changed afterwards the approval would be void.

A shipping name and address

Only if you order a printed book, and only then. Held encrypted, shared with the printer to get the parcel to you, and used for nothing else.

Payment details

Never seen by us. Card details go directly to Stripe; we receive a token, the last four digits and whether the charge succeeded.

Ordinary server logs

IP address and browser type, to operate and secure the service. Not joined to your child’s data, not sold, and not used to build a profile.

4. Children’s privacy, and parental consent

We treat a child’s first name and a photograph of a child as information about a child, because that is what they are, and in several places a face counts as biometric information. We keep that photograph, which is the most significant thing this policy has to tell you: it is not a transient upload, it stays with your child’s profile until you or we destroy it, and everything below about consent, access and deletion exists because of it.

So: sign-up links you to the clauses above, in these words, and will not create an account until you tick a box stating that you are the parent or legal guardian of the child it is for and agreeing to this policy and our terms; the upload step is unreachable until the address on that account has been confirmed by a code; and the upload step itself states plainly that only a parent or guardian may upload a photograph of a child.

“Verified”, in the first clause of the section above, means exactly that and nothing more: an address confirmed by a code, and a statement made by whoever confirmed it. It is not proof of adulthood and it is not proof of parenthood — neither can be established from here, and we would rather define the word than let it carry weight it has not earned.

If you ask us to show you or delete a child’s information, we will first verify that you control the account e-mail. That check protects your child from anybody who has merely learned their name.

5. How the illustrations are made

Every illustration in your book is generated by an AI image model from the photograph you upload, then checked page by page against your child’s character sheet so the same child appears in every scene.

The photograph goes to one company, the provider named below, and to no other third party at any time. It goes there twice: once so a model can find the faces in it, which is how you tell us which person in the photograph is your child, and once to draw the character sheet. It is not used to train that provider’s models or ours. We then keep our own copy — see “How long we keep things” below, which says where it sits and how to have it destroyed — and it goes to that provider again only if you ask us to draw something new for your child.

The stories are not machine-written. Every word was written by a person before you arrived, which is why nothing your child reads was invented on the fly and two children given the same story get the same words.

6. Who else touches your data

The complete list. Each of these is a company that processes something on our behalf, and each is here because a feature would not work without it.

OpenAI

Image generation, and the model that finds the faces in a photograph so you can point at your own child. Receives the photograph twice — once to find the faces, once to draw the character sheet — and thereafter receives only the character sheet and our written art direction. The photograph goes to them again only if you ask us to draw your child afresh, and it is not used to train their models or ours.

Stripe

Payments and sales tax. Receives your card details directly and the amount to charge. We never see the card.

Lulu

Printing and shipping. Receives the finished book file and the shipping name and address for a printed order. Nothing else, and nothing at all unless you order print.

Resend

Transactional e-mail, and there are seven messages to you: the verification code, a password-reset code, a note to an address somebody tried to reset a password for when no account exists on it, the book-ready note, the receipt for a keepsake you buy, a note when a printed order is sent to the press and when it ships, and the receipt for a deleted account. Three more go to our own administrators — a note that an account confirmed its address, a note that an order was placed, and a note that a book could not be finished — and nothing else is sent through them, because nothing else is sent.

Vercel

Hosting and the database. Everything above runs on their infrastructure.

7. How long we keep things

The photograph you upload

For as long as you have an account. This changed, and it changed in the direction that asks more of you: we used to delete the photograph within minutes of drawing your child from it, and we now keep it, so that a new picture or a whole new book can be drawn for them later without you uploading it again. It is held on our own storage, outside the part of our systems that serves this website, under a name derived from a secret key — so it has no web address, nothing here can request it, and no search engine can reach it. Three things destroy it, and any of them is enough: uploading a different photo of that child, removing that child from your account, or deleting your account. In each case the bytes are overwritten before the file is removed, and the code then asserts that it is gone. Ask us at any time and we will do it for you.

The character sheet and illustrations

For as long as you have an account, because they are your book. Deleted when you delete your account.

Your books

For as long as you have an account, and no longer: deleting the account deletes every one of them, with the character sheet and the illustrations.

Order and tax records

As long as the law requires us to keep a record of a sale, and no longer.

Share links

Fourteen days at the outside, and instantly when you revoke one. Only a hash of the link is stored, so we cannot reconstruct a revoked link.

Server logs

A short rolling window for security and debugging.

8. Nothing about a child is ever public

Nothing about a real child ever appears on this website, in an advertisement, or on social media. Every illustration you see here is from a house demo book about a made-up child.

There is no public gallery, there are no child accounts, and there is no feed of other people’s books. Those are not features we have turned off; they are features we have ruled out, because a service that shows you other children’s faces has to have collected them for that purpose.

The one exception is a share link you create yourself. It shows the book, including your child’s first name, to whoever you send it to. It expires within fourteen days, you can revoke it from your shelf in one action, and it is served with instructions not to index it and not to pass on a referrer.

9. Your control, and deletion

• See what we hold: your account page lists everything we hold about you as an adult and says so in as many words, the children page lists each child’s first name, birthday and derived reading level, your shelf lists every book, and opening a book shows you every illustration in it.
• Correct it: a child’s first name and birthday are editable from the children page at any time, and the reading level follows the birthday. A book that is already made is a sealed copy of the story it was made from, so a correction changes the profile and the next book rather than rewriting a finished one.
• Remove a child: one action from the children page. Books already made for them stay on your shelf, under a heading that says the profile is gone.
• Delete everything: one action from your account page. It removes the account, the children on it, every book, every character sheet and every illustration — and we send you a receipt that counts what was destroyed.
• Declining a new policy version does not close the exit: deletion needs you signed in and never needs your consent, because making the way out require an agreement you are refusing would be a dark pattern. If you never confirmed your e-mail address you cannot sign in at all, so that exit is a message to hello@ministoryteller.com — and an account in that state holds your address and the hash of your password, and nothing about a child.

10. Security

Account and library data is encrypted at rest. E-mail addresses are stored in a form that lets us look you up without keeping a plain-text list. Sessions are signed, expire, and are revoked by a sign-out, a password reset or an account deletion.

We do not claim to be unbreachable. We claim to hold as little as the product can function with, which is the only security measure that cannot fail.

Our own staff can see a child’s photograph and the drawing made from it only on the internal page for your account, only to provide support, and every such view is recorded against the staff member’s name and written into your account’s own activity log.

11. Cookies, and the tracking we do not do

A signed session cookie keeps you logged in. Beside it sit a few short-lived ones that carry a single step across a redirect — the address waiting to be confirmed, a share link at the moment it is minted, the deletion receipt, which story you were making, the last message a form showed you — plus the ones our sign-in library sets to make a form submission safe. Every one of them is ours, every one is part of a page working, and not one of them is a tracker, so there is no consent banner to click past.

There is no advertising pixel, no third-party analytics, no session recording and no heat mapping on this website. These marketing pages load no JavaScript from any other company, which is why they are fast and why there is nothing here to opt out of.

12. Changes, and how to reach us

This policy last changed on 18 August 2026. If we change it in a way that affects what we collect or who touches it, you will be asked to read and accept the new version before you can create another book — and you will still be able to see and delete everything we hold if you decline.

Questions, requests and complaints all go to the same place: hello@ministoryteller.com. We answer every message within one business day, Monday to Friday.