App privacy policy

This policy applies to the app listed as “Speech Therapy - For Children” on the Apple App Store and “Help me talk - Speech Therapy” on Google Play, published by Yousef Zuriqi. If you have a question about anything here, email usefz89@gmail.com — a person answers.

Your child’s voice

This is the most important section, so it is the first one. The app records your child saying a word so it can tell them how close they got.

• The recording is saved to temporary storage on the device while it is being used, and deleted afterwards.
• To produce a score, the recording is sent over an encrypted connection to our own server in Europe, which passes it to a specialist speech-analysis service that measures how closely the word was pronounced. Only the results come back — accuracy, pronunciation and the words that were recognised.
• We do not keep the audio. Our server holds it in memory only for the length of that one request. It is not written to a database, a storage bucket or a log.
• The speech-analysis provider processes the recording solely on our behalf, under contract, in order to return a score. It is not permitted to use it for its own purposes, and we do not allow it to be used to train anyone’s models.
• When scoring is unavailable — you are offline, or the request fails — the app falls back to the device’s own built-in speech recognition, set to on-device mode. On that path the audio never leaves the device at all.
• We never listen to recordings, and we have no way to. There is no account to attach them to and nothing is retained.

Camera and photos

• Speech Mirror shows a live camera preview so your child can watch their own mouth. Nothing is recorded, saved or transmitted.
• You can take a photo or choose one from your library to use as a picture card. Those images are stored on the device only. They are never uploaded.

Practice history and progress

Scores, streaks, which sounds have been practised and the answers to the setup questions are stored on the device. There is no account, no login and no cloud sync — which also means practice history does not move between devices, and deleting the app deletes it.

Analytics

The app uses a standard third-party analytics service so we can see which features get used and where people get stuck. It is deliberately set up to be as unintrusive as it can be while still being useful:

• No advertising identifiers. We do not use the IDFA, we show no ads, and we run no advertising or attribution SDKs. That is why the app never shows you Apple’s “ask app not to track” prompt — there is nothing to track.
• No names, emails or accounts are collected, because none exist. Events are tied to a random app-instance identifier that resets if the app is deleted and reinstalled.
• What is sent: app opens, screens viewed, features used, whether a practice day was completed, and general device information such as model, OS version and country.
• The setup questions: we record that a question was answered and whatkind of answer it was (a choice, a toggle, free text, or skipped). We do not send what your child’s answer actually said — free-text answers in particular are never transmitted.
• One thing that is sent: when a practice plan is created, the app reports which speech sounds it selected — for example “R, S, TH”. This tells us which sounds families work on most. It is not linked to any person.
• We do not sell data, and we do not share it with advertisers or data brokers.

Subscriptions and payment

Subscriptions are handled through a subscription-management service, which records the purchase against a randomly generated identifier — again, no account and no name. The payment itself is taken entirely by Apple or Google, depending on where you downloaded the app, and that is also where you manage or cancel it. We never see your card number, billing address or any payment detail.

Security

Requests to our scoring server are protected by device attestation, which verifies that a request genuinely came from the real app rather than from someone impersonating it. It is an anti-abuse measure and collects no personal information. All network traffic is encrypted in transit.

Children

Help Me Talk is designed for children, and we expect it to be set up and supervised by a parent, carer or therapist. We have built it so that using it does not require giving us anything about the child:

• No account, no sign-up, no name, no email, no date of birth.
• No advertising, no ad networks, no behavioural profiling, no data selling.
• No social features, no chat, no user-to-user contact, and no user-generated sharing.
• Purchases sit behind the store’s own payment authentication, and the grown-up areas of the app are separated from the child-facing ones.

We do not knowingly collect personal information from a child. If you believe a child has provided us with personal information, email us and we will delete it. To remove everything stored locally, delete the app; to stop analytics entirely, delete the app or turn off usage sharing at the device level.

Who processes data for us

We use a small number of established service providers to run the app. Each one works only on our instructions, under contract, and none of them is permitted to use your information for its own purposes or to sell it. They fall into four categories:

• Cloud hosting — runs our server, which sits in Europe.
• Speech analysis — scores a recording and returns the result.
• Analytics — anonymous usage statistics.
• Subscription management — keeps track of whether a subscription is active.

These providers may process data in the United States and elsewhere; where the law requires it, those transfers rely on standard contractual protections. We keep the specific providers commercially confidential, but if you are a parent, a school, a clinic or a regulator and you need to know exactly who they are, email us and we will tell you. Payments are handled separately, by Apple or Google.

How long things are kept

• Voice recordings: not retained. Deleted from the device after use; held only in memory during the scoring request.
• Practice history and photos: on your device until you delete the app.
• Analytics events: kept by our analytics provider for the retention period we have set, and not tied to an identifiable person.
• Subscription records: kept while the subscription is active and for as long as tax and accounting rules require.

Your rights

Depending on where you live you may have the right to access, correct, delete or object to the use of personal information, or to ask for a copy of it. Because we hold no account and no directly identifying information, most of that is in your hands already: deleting the app removes the local data, and reinstalling resets the analytics identifier.

For anything else, email usefz89@gmail.com and we will do what we can with the identifiers you can give us.

Changes

If this policy changes we will update this page and the date at the bottom. Material changes will also be noted in the app’s release notes.

Contact

Yousef Zuriqi · usefz89@gmail.com

See also: app terms of use, website privacy, website terms.