How we protect your child’s photos

You are about to send us photographs of your child. That is a significant thing to ask of anyone, so this page tells you exactly what happens to them — including the parts that are less convenient for us to say.

What we use them for

We use the photographs for one purpose: to create an illustrated character that resembles your child, which then appears throughout the story. That is the whole use. They are not used for anything else, and there is no secondary purpose hidden in this policy.

What we never do

We never use your photographs, or the illustrations made from them, to train an artificial intelligence model. Our AI provider is contractually bound not to train on data submitted through its interface either.
We never sell, rent or share them with advertisers or data brokers.
We never show them, or your child’s character, to another customer.
We never use them in our own marketing. If we ever want to, we will ask you separately and specifically, and you are free to say no.
We never run face recognition, and we never try to infer your child’s race, health, religion or any other special category from a photograph.

Who else sees them

To draw the character, the photographs are sent to our artificial intelligence provider, which processes them and returns illustrations. They are also stored, encrypted, with our cloud storage provider, in private storage with no public address — there is no link to one of your child’s photographs that would work for anyone else, and they are served only through a route that checks the request belongs to your order. Those two companies are the only third parties involved, and both are bound by written agreements limiting them to processing on our instructions.

There is no staff dashboard. We have not built any interface that lets a person browse orders or photographs, so nobody can casually look at your child’s pictures. If you ask us for help with an order, or where we are required to review content for safety, access is by direct query to our systems and is limited to the company’s own officers. We are not able to log an individual photograph being opened that way, and we would rather say so than imply an audit trail we do not have.

Where they go

Our AI provider processes data outside South Africa. This means your child’s photographs are transferred across the border. South African law permits this where the recipient is bound by an agreement that upholds principles of lawful processing substantially similar to POPIA, including a restriction on onward transfer, and we rely on such an agreement. You can ask us for the details of it.

How long they are kept

With us: we delete the original photographs from our storage as soon as your character is approved and the book is delivered, and immediately if you ask us to sooner.
If you do not finish and do not come back: we delete the photographs, and everything we had generated from them, 14 days after you last touched your book — or 30 days if you got as far as approving your child’s character or starting a payment. You do not have to ask, and we do not email you first to try to talk you out of it. If you come back after that, everything is gone and you start again.
With our AI provider: we send the photographs with storage switched off, so the provider does not keep them once the illustration has been returned. It may still log requests for up to 30 days to detect abuse of its own service. That part is outside our control and we cannot shorten it on your behalf. We would rather tell you this than claim a deletion that is only half true.
Your child’s approved character: the one illustration you approved is kept with your finished book as the record of your order — it is the picture you accepted, and our proof of what you accepted, for as long as a card payment can be disputed. The candidate illustrations you did not choose are deleted with the photographs. If you want the approved character deleted too, email us and we will do it.

Your rights

As the parent or guardian, you may ask us at any time to tell you what we hold, to correct it, or to delete it. We will act on a deletion request without asking you for a reason. Write to info@mybooki.co.za.

You may also complain to the Information Regulator of South Africa if you believe we have handled your child’s information unlawfully: inforegulator.org.za.

Only a parent or guardian may upload

A child cannot consent to this themselves. Before you upload anything, we ask you to confirm that you are the child’s parent or legal guardian and that you agree to us processing their photographs for this purpose.

If you are buying this for someone else’s child, you must not upload their photographs. Not even with the parent’s permission by message: the consent has to be given by the person giving it, on the screen where the photographs are uploaded, or it is not the record the law asks us to keep.

What to do instead: ask the child’s parent to make the book. Send them the link and tell them it is on you — they choose the adventure, they upload the photographs, they approve the character, and the book is theirs. It is a better gift that way round in any case, because the person who knows which photographs look like their child is the one choosing them.

Family members in the book

If you add a family member to the book, their photos are stored, protected and deleted the same way as your child’s, on the same timetable. What you confirm when you add them is in our terms.

If something goes wrong

If your child’s personal information is ever accessed by someone who should not have it, we will notify you and the Information Regulator as soon as reasonably possible after establishing what happened, as the law requires.

This page sits alongside our full privacy policy, which covers the rest of the information we hold. Where the two differ about children’s photographs, this page governs.