Privacy Policy — Narretta

Narretta is an app that reads picture books aloud: you photograph the pages of a book you own, and a synthetic storyteller voice reads them to you. This policy explains what the app and this website handle, why, who helps us process it, how long we keep it, and the choices you have. We've written it to be read.

Narretta is operated by Advection Software LLC, a limited liability company in Wyoming, USA (“we”, “us”). We are the controller of your personal information. Contact: contact@narretta.com, or Contact support in the app.

The short version

We collect only what the app needs to make and play your books: an account identifier, an identifier for your phone or tablet (kept only in a scrambled form), the photos of the pages you take, the words read from them, the narration made from them, any recordings you choose to make of yourself reading, and a record of what you used.
Page photos and text are processed by Google's Gemini AI to read the words, translate them and make the narration. Google processes them for us and doesn't use them to train its models.
Your books are private to your account. There's no public library and no sharing.
No advertising, no advertising identifiers, no third-party analytics or tracking. We don't sell or share your personal information.
Narretta is for adults aged 18 and over — parents, carers and other grown-ups. It isn't directed to children: a child may listen to a book an adult plays, but doesn't use the app.
You can delete books, and your whole account with everything in it, in the app at any time: see deleting your account.

1. What we collect, and why

What	Details	Why
Account	A random account identifier, created automatically the first time you open the app — no name, email or password needed.	To keep your books attached to you and let only you open them.
Device	An identifier for the phone or tablet the app runs on. On an iPhone or iPad it is a random code the app creates and keeps in the device's Keychain, which stays on that device if you delete the app and is never synced to iCloud or moved to another device. On Android it is the identifier Android gives the app on that device (the Android ID), which changes if the device is reset to factory settings. We never store the identifier itself, only a scrambled form of it (a keyed hash), linked to your account identifier, with the date the device last received free credits.	To give the free plan's monthly credits once per device rather than once per account, which stops them being collected again by reinstalling the app (fraud prevention); and to open your own account again — books, credits and subscription — if you delete and reinstall the app on the same device.
Page photos	The photos of the cover and pages you take or choose. We store a resized copy (at most 1600 pixels wide) and a small thumbnail, not the full-size original. Resizing normally removes the camera's metadata, such as where the photo was taken.	To read the words, show each page while it's read, and let you add pages or narrate the book again later.
Text	The words read from each page, any corrections you make, translations, the book's title, and the directions you give the storyteller (for example “a slow, sleepy pace”).	To narrate the book, show the words while it plays, and translate it.
Your recordings	Only if you choose Record it yourself on a page: that recording of your voice, joined into one audio file for the page.	To play it as that page's reading. Your recordings are never sent to Gemini or any other AI, and never shared.
Audio	The narration made for each page and language, the narrated title, and any whole-book audio files you export.	To play your book and let you take it with you.
Book settings	Your chosen voice, languages, music and reading settings, and a colour taken from the cover (worked out on our own server).	To play the book the way you set it up.
Usage and credits	Your credit balance, when credits were added and when they expire, a history of what each narration cost (which includes the first few words of the page), and simple events such as “a book started playing”, “a book finished”, “the sleep timer stopped playback” or “a narration started or finished”, linked to your account identifier.	To keep your balance correct, show you what you've used, and see which parts of the app work and which don't.
Purchases	If you subscribe: which product, when it started, renewed or ended, and the store's transaction identifier, tied to your account identifier. Never your card details.	To give you the credits you paid for, and to restore your subscription on another phone or tablet. When you restore your purchases on another phone or tablet, the app opens the account that holds your subscription there instead — with its books and credits — so all your devices on the same App Store or Google Play account share one Narretta account. If that device's account already has books, its books, history and credits are added to your subscription's account first, and that device's account is then deleted. (A device whose account is signed in with an email address, or has a subscription of its own, keeps its own account, and the subscription moves to it.) Signing in to your account on a device, where the app offers it, combines that device's books into your account the same way.
Notifications	If you allow notifications, a push token for your device.	To tell you when a book is ready.
Support messages	When you contact us from the app: the email address you give us, your message, its topic, and the app's version, platform (iOS or Android) and language. When you email us: your email and message.	To answer you.
Technical logs	Our server records each request it receives, including your IP address, the time and the address requested, and any errors.	To keep the service running, secure and free of abuse.
Crash reports	If the app crashes or runs into an error, a report of what went wrong: where in the app's code, which screen it was on, the app's version, the device model and operating system version, a random identifier for that installation of the app, and your account identifier. No name, email, photos or book text.	To find and fix what breaks.

What we don't collect: your contacts, your location, advertising identifiers, or payment card details. The app uses the microphone only when you choose to record yourself reading a page, and only while you're recording. If you subscribe, Apple or Google take the payment; we receive only the purchase record described above.

On your device, the app keeps a copy of your books' details, your place in each book, and your preferences (language, appearance) so it opens quickly. It also keeps the narration and pictures of books you've played, so they play again straight away and without internet; you can remove a book's copy from its page, and the oldest are cleared when they take up more than 500 MB. This stays on your phone or tablet.

Your phone's own backup (Android's backup to your Google account, or an iCloud or computer backup of an iPhone or iPad) includes the app's account identifier, login session and preferences — not your books' audio or pictures — so a phone restored from that backup opens the same account and books. Those backups are made and kept by Google or Apple, under your settings with them. Deleting the app and installing it again on the same phone or tablet opens the same account again, through the device identifier described above, even without a backup — unless the device has been reset to factory settings in between (or, on Android, runs a version older than Android 8). A new phone without a backup starts a new account — unless you subscribe: restoring your purchases there opens your subscription's account, as described under Purchases.

Please photograph only book pages. If a photo happens to include a person, it is processed like any other page photo.

Legal bases (for people in the EU, UK and similar places): we process your information to provide the service you ask for (contract); to keep it secure, prevent abuse and improve it (our legitimate interests); with your consent for notifications, which you can withdraw in your device settings; and where the law requires it.

2. How your book is processed

Turning photos into a narrated book takes several steps, run by our server with Google's Gemini models:

the resized page photos are sent to read the words on each page and the title on the cover;
the page text is sent to detect its language, to translate it if you ask for another language, to choose music that fits, and — if you ask — to suggest a direction for the storyteller;
the page text and your directions are sent to make the narration, with the voice you chose.

Google processes this content on our behalf to return the result. Under the Gemini API terms for paid services that we use, Google does not use it to improve its products or train its models, and may keep it for a limited time only to detect abuse and meet legal obligations. The storyteller voices are synthetic — made by AI — not recordings of real people. Narration is machine-made and can contain mistakes; you can correct a page's words and narrate it again.

Music comes from our own library of public-domain and CC0 recordings; choosing it doesn't involve anyone else.

3. Who processes it

We use a small number of service providers, each receiving only what its job needs and each bound to use it only to provide its service to us:

Google Cloud and Firebase (Google LLC): our servers (Cloud Run), database (Cloud Firestore), file storage (Cloud Storage), accounts (Firebase Authentication), crash reports (Firebase Crashlytics), server logs (Cloud Logging) and this website (Firebase Hosting).
Google Gemini API (Google LLC): the AI processing described in section 2.
RevenueCat (RevenueCat, Inc.): to check purchases with Apple and Google and keep the purchase records described above.
Expo (650 Industries, Inc.), with Apple Push Notification service and Firebase Cloud Messaging: to deliver notifications, which contain the book's title, how far its narration has got and the credits it used.
Apple and Google as app stores: they distribute the app and, if you subscribe, handle payment under their own privacy policies.

We don't sell your personal information and we don't share it for advertising. We may disclose information if the law requires it, to protect people's rights and safety, or as part of a sale or reorganisation of our business — in which case this policy would continue to apply to it.

4. Where it is stored

We are based in the United States, and your information is stored and processed there: our servers and file storage are in Google Cloud's us-east1 region (South Carolina) and our database in its United States multi-region. If you use Narretta from elsewhere — for example the EU or UK — your information is transferred to the US. We rely on our providers' safeguards for that, such as the European Commission's Standard Contractual Clauses and Google's certification under the EU-U.S. Data Privacy Framework and its UK and Swiss extensions.

5. How long we keep it

Your books — photos, text, audio (your own recordings included) and settings — for as long as your account exists, so you can listen again, add pages or narrate them again.
When you delete a book, it disappears from your library and its stored page photos, narrations and exported audio are deleted from our servers straight away.
Usage and credit history for as long as your account exists, to keep your balance correct.
The device identifier (in its scrambled form) and the date the device last received free credits, until 12 months after the app was last used on that device. When you delete your account, they are kept, no longer linked to any account, for 12 months — so that a new account on the same device doesn't receive a new month of free credits early — and then deleted. The free credits your account had left (how many, when they were given and when they expire) are kept with them, so that your next account on that device starts with them; they go to that account the first time it is used (free credits don't expire; the record itself goes after 12 months).
When restoring purchases or signing in opens your account on another device, we keep a note linking the account the app was using there to your account, for 12 months, so that the store's late messages about it still reach your account. That account itself is deleted as soon as the app has moved (once its books, history and credits have been added to yours).
Support messages for as long as we need to help you and keep a record of the conversation. Those sent from the app are deleted with your account.
Purchase records for as long as your account exists. Deleting your account deletes ours and RevenueCat's, except an anonymous record of each purchase — the store's transaction identifier, what kind of purchase it was, how many credits it gave and when it was bought, with nothing linking it to you or your account — which we keep so the same purchase can't be credited twice if you restore it on a new account. It also notes how many of that purchase's credits were still unused when you deleted your account, and when they expire, so that restoring the purchase on a new account gives those back, once. Apple and Google keep their own records under their policies.
Server logs for about 30 days.
Crash reports for 90 days.
Database backups are made daily and kept for 7 days.
When you delete your account in the app (Profile → Delete account), the account and everything in it are deleted at once; if you ask us by email instead, we do it within 30 days of your request. Copies in backups disappear within 7 days after that. We keep only a note that the account was deleted — the date, the account identifier and how many books and files were removed — for up to 12 months, and, without anything linking them to the account, your device's record with the free credits you had left and the anonymous purchase records described above.

6. Your choices and rights

In the app you can correct a page's words, delete pages, languages and whole books, export a book's audio, and delete your whole account and everything in it (Profile → Delete account). You can turn notifications off in your device's settings.
Ask us for a copy of your information, to correct it, to delete it or your whole account, or to stop or limit a use of it. Write to contact@narretta.com or use Contact support in the app. We answer within 30 days.
Proving it's you: because most Narretta accounts aren't linked to an email address, the surest way to make a request about your account is from inside the app (Contact support), which tells us which account it is. If you signed in with an email address, email us from that address.
In the EU, UK and similar places you have rights of access, rectification, erasure, restriction, portability and objection, and you can complain to your local data protection authority.
In California and other US states with privacy laws you have the right to know what we collect, to have it deleted or corrected, and not to be discriminated against for asking. We don't sell or share personal information as those laws define it.

7. Children

Narretta is made for parents, carers and other adults. It is not directed to children, and children must not use the app or create, manage or use an account: the adult chooses the books, takes the photos and runs the app; a child may only listen to a book the adult plays. You must be 18 or over to use Narretta (see our terms).

We don't knowingly collect personal information from children under 13 — or under the age that applies where you live, such as 16 in some EU countries. The app has no chat, no social features, no public profiles, no advertising, and doesn't record audio. If you believe a child has given us personal information — for example in a support message — contact us and we'll delete it.

8. Security

Information travels to and from our servers encrypted (HTTPS) and is stored encrypted at rest on Google Cloud. No system is perfectly secure, so if we ever learn of a breach that affects your information, we'll notify the people affected and the relevant authorities as the law requires.

9. This website

This website uses no cookies, no analytics and no trackers. It remembers whether you chose the light or dark look in your own browser's storage, which never leaves your device. Its fonts, pictures, audio and video are served from this site itself. Our hosting provider (Firebase Hosting) receives your IP address to deliver the pages and keeps standard server logs.

10. Changes and contact

If we change this policy we'll update the date at the top. For significant changes we'll give notice on this page, and in the app where we can, before they take effect.

Questions or requests: contact@narretta.com, or Contact support in the app. Advection Software LLC, Wyoming, USA.