1. What this covers

This is a plain description of what Ellinica collects when you use the service, why, and what you can do about it. It applies to the website and account you sign up for. It doesn't apply to other sites you might reach by clicking a link from here.

2. What we collect

Account info: your name, email address, and password (stored as a secure hash, never in plain text). If you sign up for Book Studio family names or personalization details, that's part of your account too.
What you generate: the topics, levels, and preferences you choose for stories, and the stories themselves, so you can find them again in your library.
Personalization: if you use the "put yourself in the story" feature, the names, places, and interests you save so future stories can use them. This is optional and only used for that purpose.
Photos: if you upload a photo to a Book Studio book, it's stored privately and only used to render your own book.
Scanned documents: if you upload a document or photo for Scan & Translate, it's transmitted for processing and deleted immediately afterward. We never store the file itself, only the resulting translated text, which is saved to your library. You're responsible for the sensitivity of what you choose to upload.
Photo-to-story: the same applies to Photo-to-Story (on the homepage and at Book Studio → Photo). We never store the uploaded photo itself, only the story text it produces. You're responsible for the sensitivity of what you choose to upload.
Usage: which features you use and how often, so we can enforce plan limits fairly and figure out what's actually useful to build next.
Billing: if you subscribe to a paid plan, Stripe handles your card details directly; we never see or store your full card number. We keep a record that you're a Stripe customer so your subscription stays linked to your account.

We don't sell your data. A handful of vendors process it on our behalf to make the service work:

Stripe for payment processing.
Google Gemini (via OpenRouter) to generate story text from the topic and level you choose.
Cloudflare for photo storage (Book Studio) and bot protection at signup.
Resend to send account emails like verification and receipts.
Railway, our hosting provider, which runs the servers and database.

Each of these only receives what it needs to do its specific job. If you choose to publish a story to the public library or make your profile public, that content is, by design, visible to anyone, as described in our Content Policy.

4. Kids and family accounts

Ellinica is built with families in mind, but accounts are created and managed by an adult. If you're a parent generating stories for your kids, the account, email, and billing stay under your name and control. We don't knowingly collect account information directly from children.

5. Your choices

Your public profile is private by default. You choose if and when to make it public, from your Account page.
You can delete individual stories, saved personalization details, or uploaded photos at any time.
You can permanently delete your account and private data from Account → Settings. Published library stories stay online re-attributed to “Deleted author” so other readers aren't left with broken links.
You can cancel a paid plan any time; you keep access until the current billing period ends.

Before you have an account

You can use the homepage tools without signing up. When you do, we set one cookie in your browser holding a random number. It contains no name, no email and nothing about you, and it means nothing on its own.

That number lets us record which homepage tools were used, and, if you later create an account, join the two together once. What we keep on your account afterwards is a summary: how many times you used the tools before signing up, and when you first arrived. The random number itself is deleted at that moment. We do not keep a way to identify you from it after that.

Why we do this: to see whether the homepage is doing its job, and whether people who try it find it useful enough to come back. Nothing is sent to any other company. We use no advertising trackers and no third-party analytics.

If your browser sends Global Privacy Control or Do Not Track, we set nothing and record nothing. You are not counted at all. You can also delete the cookie at any time in your browser settings, and the tools keep working.

The cookie lasts 90 days. Separately, we count anonymous uses per day to stop abuse, using a one-way scrambled version of your IP address that cannot be traced back to you or joined to your account.

Your writing practice

When you submit written answers to story comprehension questions, we collect and store them along with the feedback we provide.

What we store: Your answers to writing questions and the feedback we generate for them (language notes, spelling and accent suggestions, encouragement).
Why we store them: So you can review your own progress and see how your writing has improved over time. This progression is the heart of deliberate practice.
How long we keep them: Indefinitely, with your control. You can delete any answer or all of your writing history anytime in your Account settings.
Who can see them: Only you. Your answers and feedback are never shown to a Family Circle owner, co-members, teachers, or anyone else, even if the story is shared with your circle.
Not used for training: Your writing is never used to train, fine-tune, or improve any AI model. It exists only for your own learning.

6. Security

Passwords are stored as secure hashes, never as plain text. Traffic to the site is encrypted. No system is perfectly secure, but we treat your account and content the way we'd want our own family's treated.

7. Changes to this policy

If this changes in a way that matters, we'll update the effective date above and, for significant changes, let you know directly.

8. Questions

Reach us through the support ticket system on your Account page.