Monkey Box privacy notice
Last updated 29 September 2026
Who we are
Monkey Box is a bedtime story app made in the UK by Charlie Concannon. Questions or requests: CONTACT_EMAIL.
What stays on your phone
- Your child's name. If you choose to put your child in the stories, the story is written with a blank (a placeholder) and this phone fills the name in. The name is never sent to our story service or kept in the shared story store.
- Your settings, the parent passcode and your family code.
- Stories you've heard or written, and stories kept on the shelf.
- Voice recordings you make of yourself reading. These are never uploaded.
- Speech practice cheers (how many words were practised). Speech practice never uses the microphone: nothing your child says is recorded or listened to.
Deleting the app, or clearing its website data, removes all of this.
What is sent to write a story
When the box writes a new story, the app sends our story service the choices on the reels (hero, place, problem), the story settings (age, length, mood, world), any practice words you typed, and the choices made during a "story together". Please don't type a child's full name, address or other personal details into the reels or practice words.
The story service runs on Cloudflare and passes the request to Anthropic's Claude to write the story. Anthropic doesn't use this to train its models. Finished stories are saved without any link to who asked, so another family who spins the same picks can hear the same story for free. Each story gets a quick safety read before it is saved.
What is sent to read a story aloud
If the Leda narrator voice is on, the words of the story are sent to Google Cloud Text-to-Speech, and the audio is saved so it can be replayed. Only story text is sent. If your child is in the story, the sentences that include their name are sent to be read aloud like any other line, but we don't save them. If you pick the "Whispering Moon" voice in the parent settings, reading happens on the phone and nothing is sent.
What we count
The story service keeps monthly totals: how many stories were written new, how many were reused, and how much text was read aloud. These are numbers only, with nothing about who you are.
Children
Monkey Box is meant to be set up by a grown-up. Settings are behind a parent passcode. We don't collect personal information from children, and there are no adverts, links out or chat with other people.
Your rights
Under UK GDPR you can ask what we hold about you and ask us to delete it. Because we don't keep accounts or names, there is usually nothing to find, but get in touch if you have any questions. You can also complain to the Information Commissioner's Office (ico.org.uk).