Privacy Policy | EI Signal Stories

Last updated: October 2026

1. Who This Applies To

EI Signal Stories serves two primary audiences:

I Learn (Student) — readers who browse our published Library and EI World seasons.
I Create (Creator) — anyone who submits text, PDFs, URLs, or other source material so we can generate a creative retelling.

The same policy applies to both. Subscription details and what each plan includes are described on the Pricing page.

2. Information We Collect

We collect the following information to provide our services:

Account Information: Email address and name from your Google or LinkedIn account (or the email address you use for a sign-in link) when you sign in.
Content You Provide: Source material (text, PDFs, URLs, paper IDs, DOIs) that you submit so we can produce a creative retelling. We do not claim ownership of this input — see Section 4.
Generated Story Assets: AI-written story text, scene illustrations, key-insight cards, and any narrated/animated outputs produced from your submission.
Usage Data: Stories created, assets generated, preferences, and interaction with our service.
Technical Data: Browser type, device information, and IP address for security purposes.

2A. Founding Members, Library Counts and Requests

Founding-member registration (only if you register your interest): your name, email address, country, phone or WhatsApp number if you give one, the plans you are interested in, the consent wording you agreed to and when, and a one-way hash of your IP address (never the address itself) to stop abuse. We email you a link to confirm; confirmed registrations are also notified to our team. We use this only to run the founding-member offer and to tell you about the launch. You can unsubscribe from any of these emails with the link in them. We keep a registration until 12 months after subscriptions open, or delete it earlier if you ask. See Terms, section 8A.
Library views, likes and shares: we count how often each story is viewed, liked and shared. To count each reader once a day we use a salted, one-way hash of the IP address, held briefly in memory and never stored; likes keep a keyed hash, never the IP address itself.
“Ask the librarian”: when a search finds nothing and you ask for it, we store only the words you searched — nothing about who you are. We refuse requests that look like an email address or a phone number.

3. How We Use Your Information

To generate a creative retelling from the source material you submit
To authenticate and secure your account
To process payments and manage subscriptions (subscriptions are not open yet, so no payments are taken until they open)
To run the founding-member offer and tell you about the launch — only if you registered and agreed
To improve our service and develop new features, including the use of anonymised, aggregated metadata about generations (e.g., genre distributions, quality metrics, completion rates). This aggregated metadata does not contain personal identifiers and cannot be used to identify you or your submitted content.
To communicate important updates about your account

4. Authorship & Creative Retelling

EI Signal Stories is a creative-retelling platform. To be explicit about authorship:

We do not claim authorship of the original work that any story is based on — papers, books, articles, lecture notes, or any third-party source remain the property of their original authors and rights holders.
We do not claim ownership of the source material you submit as input. It is yours; we process it only to produce the retelling you requested.
Stories produced by the Service are AI-generated creative retellings designed to aid imagination and understanding. They are not reproductions, translations, summaries-of-record, or substitutes for the original source.
Where a story is based on another author's work, the original source should be credited whenever the story is shared. See our Terms, Section 7, for attribution guidance.

5. AI Content Processing

EI Signal Stories uses AI to generate story text, illustrations, and other story assets from the source material you submit:

Your content is processed by AI providers to generate the retelling and accompanying visuals or narration
Generated stories and assets are stored in your account library so you can access them later
Where higher-privacy plans are available, encrypted-content options are described on the Pricing page
For narrated or animated outputs, your story text (not the original source) is sent to third-party AI video and audio providers
Generated images and frames are stored on our servers and are accessible only to you and anyone you share the story link with
Content processing is subject to our AI providers' privacy policies
Our editors may use AI to describe a story’s cover picture (for screen readers and search engines) and to suggest and score the short text shown on the library shelf. This uses the story and its cover picture, never your personal data
AI training: Third-party AI providers (Anthropic, Google, OpenAI) operate under their own API terms, which do not include API-submitted content in their model training. We may use anonymised, aggregated metadata and curated story outputs to improve our own systems and to train future models that we develop. We do not use personally identifying information, child-profile data, or verbatim user-submitted source text in our training data.
We use industry-standard encryption for all data in transit and at rest

6. Data Security

We implement industry-standard security measures including:

HTTPS encryption for all data transmission
Secure sign-in via Google, LinkedIn or a one-time email link
Rate limiting and brute force protection
Regular security audits and monitoring

7. Data Sharing & AI Providers

We do not sell your personal information. To deliver the service we share data with the following named processors:

Anthropic (Claude) — receives story text, profile fields (signal word, calm anchor, situation), and refinement instructions to generate or refine stories. US-based.
Google (Gemini) — receives scene prompts and, only in “comic” visual mode for the EI Signal Stories feature, base64-encoded reference photos of the child and parent so the generated illustrations resemble them. For a child’s own activity pictures (paid plan, only with the parent’s tick), it also receives the favourite words and the figure look the parent picked — never the child’s name, photo or notes. US-based.
OpenAI (DALL·E 3, GPT-4o, TTS) — receives scene prompts for image generation and short text passages for voice narration. US-based.
ElevenLabs — receives short text passages for voice narration (primary TTS provider). US-based.
Payment Processors (Razorpay for India, Stripe for international) — will handle subscriptions and one-off purchases once subscriptions open. No payments are taken before then.
Security and delivery network — protects and delivers the website. It sees your IP address and tells us which country a visit comes from (used, for example, to pre-fill the country on the founding-member form).
Hosting and database providers — run the website and keep your account, stories and registrations. Hosted in the Asia-Pacific region.
Email provider — sends our emails (sign-in links, founding-member confirmations and updates).
Legal Requirements — when required by law or to protect rights.

International transfer notice: Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, ElevenLabs, and Stripe are based in the United States. By using the service you understand that the data described above is processed in the US, which has not been the subject of an adequacy decision under India’s DPDP Act or the EU GDPR. We do not retain data with these providers beyond the operational call; please review their respective privacy notices for their own retention practices.

8. Your Rights

You have the right to:

Access your personal data
Request deletion of your account and data
Export your stories and content
Opt out of marketing communications — every founding-member and launch email has an unsubscribe link
Ask us to delete a founding-member registration at any time

Australia

If you are in Australia, we handle your personal information in line with the Australian Privacy Principles (Privacy Act 1988). Some of our service providers (listed in Section 7) are overseas. You can ask to access or correct your information, or complain, by writing to support@ei4aisignals.com; if you are not satisfied with our answer, you can complain to the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (oaic.gov.au).

9. Cookies & Browser Storage

We use two categories of cookies. For full details, see our Cookies Policy.

Essential cookies — httpOnly, Secure, SameSite=Strict cookies for authentication (NextAuth session tokens) and PIN verification. These are required for the service to function and cannot be disabled.
Analytics cookies — Google Tag Manager (GTM-N548RG8Z) loads Google Analytics 4 to collect anonymised usage data: page views, feature clicks, and story creation events. We do not collect the content of your research text or stories through analytics. You can opt out via the Google Analytics Opt-out Add-on.
SessionStorage (not cookies) — browser memory cleared on tab close. Used to remember your PIN unlock status within a session and to preserve your filmstrip card selection across login redirects. This data never leaves your device.

We do not use advertising cookies, retargeting pixels, or third-party social media tracking.

10. Contact Us

For privacy-related questions or requests, contact us at: support@ei4aisignals.com

11. EI Signal Stories for Special Kids (Autism) — Children’s Data

The EI Signal Stories for Special Kids feature is designed for use by a parent or legal guardian on behalf of a child. Because this feature collects information about a minor, the following additional terms apply.

11.1 What we collect about your child

Profile fields: first name (or nickname), age group (and gender, if you gave it before we stopped asking), and short phrases about how the child shows and settles feelings — for example their signal word and calm anchor.
Your child’s signals: how your child shows “too much” (a word, an action or a card) and what helps them calm, including anything you write in your own words. Each update is kept as a dated version, so you can see how they have changed.
Practice records: for each activity you practise, the signal you tapped at each step, whether your child gave their signal and what helped, your optional notes, and the optional “Anything different today?” choices (for example slept badly or visitors) with how strong each was, with the time of day and day of the week, and your optional answer to “Did they use their signal on their own today?”.
Event diary (optional): things you note once for a few days — for example visitors staying, a new teacher, or a fever. Some choices, such as fever or illness and medication changed, are health information about your child: we store only that the choice was made, how strong it was and the dates — no diagnosis, no medicine names. They are used only in your child’s own report, never sent to any AI provider, and deleted with the profile.
Your own activities (paid plan): the activity and scene names you write.
Optional parent notes: a free-text field where you may add context.
Earlier story features: if you used them before, your stories, reading history, readiness checks and journal entries remain in your account. The app no longer offers photo upload for “comic” pictures; photos uploaded earlier were stripped of EXIF metadata (GPS, camera details, timestamps) and are deleted with the profile.

11.2 Parental consent

When you create a child profile, you confirm that you are the parent or legal guardian of that child and that you have authority to provide their information to the service. Consent is recorded with a timestamp. You can withdraw consent at any time by deleting the profile (see 11.5).

11.3 How your child’s data is used

To run practice activities for your child and keep their practice records.
To show you what works over time in the report (for example, which step is hard, what helped, and whether things like sleep or visitors make a difference). A pattern is only shown once there is enough practice to support it.
To improve the underlying story-generation model — only in aggregate, never in a form that identifies your child.
We do not use children’s data for advertising, profiling for targeted advertising, or any form of behavioural advertising.

11.4 Third-party AI processing

See Section 7 for the full list. For Special Kids today: when you create your own activity, its name and scene names go to Anthropic Claude for a safety check and for scene-name suggestions. Scene descriptions go to Google Gemini to draw the pictures — never your child’s name or photo, and the pictures show no faces or names. Your child’s signals, practice records, event diary, notes and report are not sent to any AI provider. A picture is drawn once and reused: if another family or a school uses exactly the same activity and scene names, they see the same pictures (a child’s name is never allowed in those names). Both providers are based in the United States. Photo upload is no longer offered in the app; the earlier story features sent profile fields to Claude and, only in “comic” mode, photos to Gemini.

11.5 Your rights as parent / guardian

Access: view all data attached to a profile in your account dashboard.
Correction: edit any profile field at any time.
Erasure: deleting a child profile removes the profile row, their signals and all their versions, all practice records, all stories generated for that child, all uploaded photos and all journal entries linked to that profile from our database within minutes. A minimal record of the deletion (timestamp + counts, no child data) is retained for compliance audit.
Portability: contact us at the address below to request an export of your child’s data.
Grievance: for any complaint about how we handle your child’s data, write to the same address. We will respond within 30 days.

11.6 Retention

We retain your child’s profile, stories, photos, and reading history while your account is active. If your account is inactive for 24 months, we will email you before any deletion. Deleted data is removed from our primary database within minutes; encrypted database backups retain the data for up to 30 days before being overwritten.

11.7 Age restrictions

A child cannot use this service directly. Only a parent or legal guardian may create an account and a child profile. We do not knowingly let a child create an account in their own name.

12. Changes to This Policy

We may update this policy periodically. We will notify you of significant changes via email or through our service.