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Genie in a Book · Your information

Privacy & Cookies

How Genie in a Book handles your information, family photos, stories and cookies, and the choices you have.

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What we collect

We handle information you provide to Genie in a Book, information created while making your book, and information about how the service is used.

  • Account and contact details: your name, email, sign-in information, communication preferences and messages you send us.
  • Country and waitlist: an approximate country supplied by our hosting service. If you register for the international waitlist, we save the name and email you provide together with that country. We use country information to show international availability messages and manage international waitlist registrations.
  • Your book: photos, character details, story ideas, text, revisions and the illustrations and other content generated from them. These can include information about children you choose to include.
  • Orders: the books or gift cards you buy, shipping details, payment status, discounts and referral information. Stripe processes card payments; our order records include payment references rather than your full card number.
  • Use of the website: page visits, interactions, device and browser information, referral sources and diagnostic events. Analytics can include session recordings and identifiers linked to an account. PostHog also captures heatmaps and can link activity to an internal guest or account identifier. Diagnostics include request and error information, AI generation attempts and related prompts and responses. Network information, including IP addresses, can be used to operate and protect the service.

Photo processing checks content, locates faces and creates face crops. Character appearance details can include age, gender, height, eye color, hair and skin tone, including estimates and details you provide or review. You can review and change those details.

Please only upload photos and information you have permission to use. For photos of children, you must be their parent or legal guardian, as set out in our terms.

How we use it

We use this information to create and save personalized stories and illustrations, manage accounts, process payments, arrange printing and delivery, provide support and send service messages. Creating a book involves sending relevant story instructions, character details and images to AI services.

We review books as part of our quality assurance process.

We also use operational and analytics information to diagnose problems, understand how the website is used and improve it. Referral and campaign information helps us attribute visits and purchases, including purchases associated with partner organizations. Advertising measurement helps us understand whether advertising leads to registrations or purchases. We also plan to use information about your visits for Google Ads remarketing, so our ads can appear on other websites based on your previous visits.

We also process communication preferences for newsletter subscriptions.

Cookies & Google signals

Cookies and browser storage can remember information between visits. We use browser storage for sign-in and session continuity, preferences, referral attribution and measurement. Not all saved information is a cookie: some is held in your browser’s local or session storage, and books and orders are also stored on our servers.

The viewer_country cookie stores an approximate country to show international availability messages. Local storage remembers when you dismiss the waitlist prompt.

Stripe can load when you open checkout, including before a payment can be completed. Shipping quotes can require sharing an address with the printing and shipping provider.

Our website includes Google Analytics and Google Ads measurement, PostHog analytics and session replay, Ahrefs analytics, and the OpenAI advertising pixel. These tools have different storage and data practices; analytics is not limited to anonymous page counts. Payment and sign-in providers also process information to deliver their services.

We and Google use first-party identifiers, such as Google Analytics cookies, together with Google advertising cookies or other third-party identifiers to produce aggregated audience reports and to measure whether advertising leads to registrations or purchases. Our referral cookies, genie_utm and genie_affiliate_ref, are configured to expire after 30 days. This is not a retention period for all cookies or for server records.

Audience reporting

Google signals

We use Google signals to better understand our audience through aggregated demographics and interests reporting. Google can associate Analytics information with signed-in Google information for eligible visitors who have enabled Ads Personalization in their Google account. We do not receive individual Google-account profiles through these reports.

Using Google signals for reporting is separate from using Analytics audiences for personalized advertising.

Read Google’s explanation of signals

Planned advertising based on your visits: We plan to use Google Ads remarketing to advertise online to people who have previously visited our website. When enabled, third-party vendors, including Google, may show our ads on other websites. We and those vendors will use first-party cookies, such as Google Analytics cookies, together with third-party cookies, such as Google advertising cookies, or other identifiers to tailor those ads based on your previous visits. You can opt out of Google’s personalized advertising in Google My Ad Center.

Google explains its processing in How Google uses information from sites or apps that use its services. See your choices below for Google settings and browser options.

Who helps us deliver the service

We use service providers for hosting and storage, authentication, AI generation, payments, printing, email and measurement. Information is shared with the providers involved in the feature you use: for example, Stripe for payments and Lulu for print and shipping services.

Our AI integrations include Google, OpenAI and OpenRouter; the provider used depends on the generation task and configuration. Auth0 supports sign-in. The measurement services described above receive information through their website integrations. Some website fonts are loaded from Google. Partner organizations can receive referral reports containing order identifiers, dates, amounts, status and commissions; these reports exclude customer contact details and payment identifiers.

Resend delivers service emails, and EmailOctopus supports newsletter subscriptions.

For information about measurement providers’ own practices, see Google, PostHog, Ahrefs and OpenAI.

Keeping & deleting information

Different records have different lifetimes. Saved books, orders and account information are separate from browser cookies. Clearing cookies does not delete those server records.

Deleting a book does not necessarily delete every associated file or record. Uploaded photos may remain available for reuse, and deletion of books that are generating, purchased books or books associated with checkout can be restricted. Some AI diagnostic records have scheduled retention. AI prompt and response records flagged for review are excluded from that routine deletion schedule and can be kept without a set deletion date. Other generation records, such as timing, provider and error information, can remain after prompt and response data is removed.

Automatic account deletion is not currently available. Contact us about access or deletion requests. We will explain what can be removed and any records that need to be retained for your order, business records or applicable obligations. This page does not promise immediate or complete deletion of all copies.

Your choices & contact

  • Google advertising preferences: review or change personalization in Google My Ad Center. These are Google-account settings, not a switch for every service on this website.
  • Google Analytics: Google offers an Analytics opt-out browser add-on for supported desktop browsers. It does not block other analytics or advertising tags.
  • Browser storage: use your browser settings to block or clear cookies and other site data. Doing so can sign you out or remove locally saved preferences; it does not delete your account, saved books or orders.
  • Newsletter preferences: review your subscription in account settings.
  • Questions and requests: email [email protected] about your information, a privacy request or removal from a waitlist. Please do not email passwords or full payment-card details.

This notice explains data handling; reading it or using the website is not an affirmative choice to allow optional tracking. Our terms and other policies and returns information are separate.