Legal
Privacy Policy
Last updated · Effective
This policy explains what information GenKid collects, why, who we share it with and the choices you have. It is written mainly for parents, guardians and other adult account holders. There is also a version for young people.
1. Who we are
GenKid (genkid.app) is run by SEQUEL AI LTD, a company registered in England and Wales with company number 16897137. Our registered office is 128 City Road, London, EC1V 2NX, United Kingdom.
SEQUEL AI LTD is the controller of the personal information described in this policy, which means we decide how and why it is used. For anything about privacy, your data or a complaint, email hello@genkid.app or use our contact form.
2. Who this policy covers
- Account holders: parents and guardians who create a family or individual account, and adults (for example a teacher or club leader) who run a group account.
- Learners: young people, usually aged about 9 to 18, who use GenKid through a login created by their account holder.
- Visitors and contacts: people who browse our website or email or message us.
3. What we collect
About account holders
| Information | Where it comes from |
|---|---|
| Name, email address and password (stored only as a secure hash) | You, when you sign up |
| If you choose Google sign-in: your name, email address and Google account ID | Google, with your permission |
| Country where you live, and your household or group name | You, when you sign up |
| Records of what you agreed to and when (terms, privacy, learner accounts, the AI helper, using your own AI key) | Created when you agree |
| Plan, seats, subscription status, and the customer and subscription references Stripe gives us | You and Stripe |
| Your own AI provider key, if you add one (stored encrypted and never shown again) | You |
| Messages, requests and complaints you send us | You |
We never see or store your full card number. Payments are handled by Stripe, which collects your card details, billing address and similar information directly under its own privacy policy.
About learners
| Information | Why |
|---|---|
| Display name, username and password (stored only as a secure hash) | So the learner can sign in. We ask account holders not to use a child’s real full name in usernames. |
| Age band (9–10, 11–12, 13–15 or 16–18), not a date of birth | To set reading level and apply the right consent rules |
| Display preferences (for example simpler explanations, larger text, reduced motion) | To make GenKid easier to use |
| Lessons completed, check and quiz results, skills shown and placement results | To track learning and suggest what to do next |
| Projects and portfolio notes, plus the last 20 saved versions of each project | So the learner can keep and improve their work |
| AI helper and coding agent usage records: date, whether a request was answered or blocked, the reason category, model, tokens and cost. Not the text of the conversation. | Fair-use limits, cost control and safety oversight |
| Safety records: the category of a safety event (for example ’wellbeing’), never the message itself | Safeguarding (see section 7) |
Learners are asked not to put personal information in their projects or questions.
About everyone who uses GenKid
- Sign-in and security data: a session cookie and a hashed copy of its token, a short-lived counter of failed sign-ins (to stop password guessing), and an audit log of important actions such as account changes and deletions.
- Technical data: like any website, our hosting provider processes your IP address, browser type and the pages requested in order to deliver the site and protect it from attacks. We don’t use this to build profiles.
- Notifications shown inside GenKid (for example about your plan).
What we don’t collect
We don’t collect precise location, contacts, photos, voice recordings, device fingerprints or advertising identifiers, and we don’t use third-party analytics, advertising or tracking cookies.
4. The AI helper and coding agent
Plans that include them give learners an AI helper (which explains, gives hints and helps debug) and, on some plans, a coding agent (which proposes changes to a project that the learner then reviews line by line). An account holder must agree before learners use them, and can switch them off at any time on the Your data page.
What is sent to the AI model
- The learner’s question and up to the last few turns of the same conversation.
- When relevant, the learner’s current project code and any error message, and the title of the lesson they are working on.
- GenKid’s own instructions to the model (for example “give a hint first” and reading level).
We do not send the learner’s name, username, email, age, country or any GenKid account ID with a question. (When a request goes to Anthropic, we include a random-looking reference made from a one-way hash, which Anthropic uses to detect abuse and which cannot be used to identify the learner.)
Checks before anything is sent
- Questions and code are checked for personal details such as email addresses, phone numbers, postcodes, street addresses, statements like “my name is” or “my school is”, and secret keys. If any are found, the message is not sent and the learner is asked to remove them.
- If a message suggests a learner may be upset or unsafe, it is not sent to the model. The learner is shown where to get help instead (see section 7).
- Answers are checked again before they are shown, contact details or keys are removed, and every answer is labelled as AI-generated.
Saved answers
Many questions are the same for everyone, such as suggested questions in a lesson. We save the answers to these and to identical first questions, together with the question text, without any link to who asked. Later learners who ask the same thing get the saved answer, so their question never leaves GenKid. For suggested questions, the learner’s code is never sent.
What we keep
GenKid does not store the text of AI helper conversations (apart from the saved answers above, which are not linked to anyone). We keep only the usage records described in section 3. When the coding agent proposes changes, we keep the proposed files for 7 days so the learner can review them.
Who provides the model
- Default model: DeepSeek (Hangzhou DeepSeek Artificial Intelligence Co., Ltd. and its affiliates), whose servers are in the People’s Republic of China. DeepSeek processes the request to produce an answer and may keep request data for a period under its own terms. See section 9 for how we protect this transfer.
- Other providers by country: we can send requests from particular countries to a different provider, for example a host of the same model outside China. Where we do, that provider receives the same information described above.
- Your own key: an account holder can add their own AI provider API key (for example DeepSeek, OpenAI, Anthropic, Fireworks AI or Together AI). The household’s AI requests then go to that provider under the account holder’s own agreement with it, and that provider’s privacy terms apply. Your key is stored encrypted, is never shown to learners and is used only for your household.
Where the coding agent runs
Each coding agent run takes place in a separate, temporary, isolated environment provided by Vercel (Vercel Sandbox). It receives a copy of the project’s files and the task, can reach the AI model only through GenKid’s servers, and is deleted when the run ends. Learners’ own code otherwise runs only in a sandbox in their browser, never on our servers.
5. Why we use it (our lawful bases)
UK and EU data protection law requires us to have a lawful basis for each use of personal information. Ours are:
| What we do | Lawful basis |
|---|---|
| Create and run accounts, learner logins, lessons, projects and progress | Contract with the account holder; for learners, our legitimate interests in providing the service their parent or guardian chose for them |
| Take payments, manage subscriptions and keep tax records | Contract; legal obligation |
| Provide the AI helper and coding agent | Contract and the account holder’s consent (which is also how we meet country rules on parental consent). You can withdraw consent at any time. |
| Use your own AI key with your chosen provider | Your consent and our contract with you |
| Keep GenKid secure, prevent abuse and fraud, and limit costs | Legitimate interests |
| Safeguarding learners (section 7) | Legitimate interests; where special category data could be involved, the substantial public interest in safeguarding children (Data Protection Act 2018, Schedule 1); in an emergency, vital interests |
| Answer questions, requests and complaints | Legitimate interests; legal obligation for data-rights requests |
| Improve lessons and the service using aggregated figures (for example which lessons learners find hard) | Legitimate interests. We don’t use this for advertising or to profile individual children. |
| Send service messages about your account or billing | Contract |
We don’t send marketing to learners. We don’t currently send marketing emails to adults either; if that changes, we’ll ask first. We don’t make decisions about anyone based solely on automated processing that have legal or similarly significant effects. Placement and skill results only suggest where a learner might start, and can be retaken.
6. Children and parental consent
- Accounts can only be opened by adults aged 18 or over. Learner logins are created by a parent or guardian (or a group organiser), not by children themselves.
- We ask for your country so we can apply local rules, including the age below which a parent must consent for a child (for example 13 in the UK and US, 16 in Germany and Ireland, and 16 where we haven’t yet researched the rules). Where consent is needed, we ask the account holder.
- Group organisers (for example teachers or club leaders) must have the permission needed from parents or their organisation before creating learner logins.
- We design GenKid to follow the UK ICO’s Age Appropriate Design Code (the Children’s Code): high-privacy defaults, no nudges, streaks or leaderboards, no profiling for marketing, and no geolocation.
- Account holders can see their learners’ progress and projects. Learners are told this.
7. Safety and safeguarding
Some events create a short safety record containing the learner, the type of event, the time and its severity, but never the learner’s words. These are: a message suggesting a learner may be upset or at risk; a request the AI model refuses as harmful; and repeated attempts to send personal details.
- When a wellbeing concern is detected, the learner immediately sees a message encouraging them to talk to a trusted adult, with Childline’s details (0800 1111 in the UK) and emergency numbers.
- Trained GenKid staff review safety records. Where appropriate, we contact the learner’s parent or guardian.
- If we believe a child is at risk of serious harm, we may share relevant information with the police, emergency services or child protection authorities, as the law allows.
Safety records are deleted when the learner’s account is deleted.
9. International transfers
Our database is in the EU (Ireland) and our server functions run in London. Some providers are based in, or may access data from, other countries, including the USA and, for the default AI model, China. When personal information leaves the UK or EU, we use a recognised safeguard:
- a UK or EU adequacy decision where one exists (for example the EU, or US companies certified under the EU-US Data Privacy Framework and its UK Extension); or
- the UK International Data Transfer Agreement or Addendum, or the EU Standard Contractual Clauses, together with an assessment of the risks of the transfer.
China has no UK or EU adequacy decision, and its laws can allow public authorities to access data. To reduce the risk for AI requests sent to DeepSeek, we stop messages containing personal details before they are sent, send no names or account identifiers, answer many questions from saved answers so they never leave GenKid, and can send requests from particular countries to a provider outside China. If you would rather your household’s requests did not go to China, you can add your own key for a provider elsewhere, switch the AI helper off on the Your data page, or contact us.
You can ask us for more information about the safeguards we use by emailing hello@genkid.app.
10. How long we keep it
| Information | How long |
|---|---|
| Accounts, learner logins, progress, projects, consent records and safety records | While the account is open. Deleted when you remove a learner or delete your account. |
| Project version history | The last 20 versions of each project |
| Sign-in sessions | Up to 14 days, then deleted |
| Failed sign-in counters | 1 day |
| AI helper and coding agent usage records | 90 days |
| Files proposed by the coding agent | 7 days |
| Saved AI answers (not linked to anyone) | Until they expire or are replaced |
| Notifications you’ve read | 180 days |
| Audit log of important actions | 2 years |
| Requests and complaints | 2 years after we close them |
| Payment and invoice records | Kept by Stripe, and by us where needed, for as long as tax and accounting law requires (usually 6 years in the UK) |
When you delete something, it is removed from our live database straight away. Copies may remain in our providers’ encrypted backups for a short time until those backups are overwritten.
11. Keeping it secure
- Passwords are stored only as strong one-way hashes; sign-in attempts are rate-limited.
- Sessions use secure, http-only cookies. Secrets such as AI provider keys are encrypted (AES-256-GCM) and never sent to browsers.
- All traffic is encrypted with HTTPS. Access to personal information is limited to staff who need it, and important actions are logged.
- Learner code runs in an isolated browser sandbox that cannot read GenKid’s pages, cookies or sign-in.
No online service can be perfectly secure. If a personal data breach puts you at risk, we’ll tell you and the regulator as the law requires.
12. Your rights
Depending on where you live, you have the right to:
- access your information and get a copy in a portable format;
- correct information that is wrong;
- delete your information;
- object to or restrict some uses, including those based on legitimate interests;
- withdraw consent at any time (this doesn’t affect what we did before);
- complain to a data protection regulator.
How to use them
- Download your data: Family → Your data → Download my data. You get a file with your household’s accounts, progress, projects, plans and consent records.
- Delete a learner: from the family dashboard. Delete your whole account: on the Your data page. Remember to cancel any paid subscription too.
- Switch off the AI helper: withdraw AI consent on the Your data page.
- Correct details in your settings, or ask us.
- For anything else, use the contact form or email hello@genkid.app.
Parents and guardians can exercise these rights for their learners. Learners can also ask us themselves, and we’ll involve their parent or guardian where appropriate. We’ll reply within one month (we may extend this by up to two more months for complex requests, and we’ll tell you if so). We may need to check your identity first. Exercising your rights is free.
Complaints
Please tell us first so we can try to put things right: we acknowledge complaints within 30 days at the latest. You can also complain to the UK Information Commissioner’s Office (ico.org.uk, 0303 123 1113), or, if you live in the EU or elsewhere, the data protection authority in your country.
13. United States residents
Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA). GenKid is directed to children, and we collect personal information from children under 13 only with a parent’s consent, given when the parent creates the learner login. We collect only what is reasonably needed for the activity, and we don’t require a child to give more information to take part. A parent can at any time:
- review the personal information we hold about their child (download it from the Your data page);
- ask us to delete it, and refuse further collection or use, by deleting the learner or the account or contacting us;
- agree to us collecting and using their child’s information without agreeing to disclosure to third parties other than the service providers we need to run GenKid. We don’t disclose children’s information to third parties for any other purpose.
State privacy laws. We don’t sell personal information, share it for cross-context behavioural advertising, or use it for targeted advertising or profiling of minors. Depending on your state, you may have rights to know, access, correct and delete your information, and to appeal a decision we make about a request. Contact us to use them; we won’t treat you differently for doing so.
14. Other countries
GenKid is available worldwide. We apply the rights in this policy to everyone, and we follow additional local rules where they apply to you, including stricter parental-consent ages. If your local law gives you further rights, contact us and we’ll help.
16. Changes to this policy
We’ll update this policy when our service or the law changes. The date at the top shows the latest version. If a change is significant, we’ll tell account holders by email or in GenKid before it takes effect and, where the law requires, ask for consent again.
17. Contact us and complaints
SEQUEL AI LTD, 128 City Road, London, EC1V 2NX, United Kingdom. Email hello@genkid.app or use our contact form for any privacy question, data request or complaint.