HeyGilli — Privacy Policy
1. Who this covers
HeyGilli is operated as an independent project, not a company. Throughout this policy, "we," "us," and "HeyGilli" refer to that project, reachable at hello@heygilli.com.
Only a parent or guardian creates a HeyGilli account and signs in. A child never signs in to anything, is never asked to enter information, and is never shown a way to leave their own screen without the parent's PIN. Everything in this policy about "you" refers to the parent.
2. Information we collect
2.1 Account identity
HeyGilli offers two ways to start a household, and what is collected differs between them.
| Sign-in method | What is collected |
|---|---|
| Continue with Google |
Your Google account's basic profile only (name, email address,
profile photo — the standard openid, email,
and profile scopes). HeyGilli does not ask for access to
your YouTube account: sign-in tells us which household you are, and
nothing more.
|
| Set up without Google |
A random identifier generated on your device (for example
trial-3c994baf52eab4ec…). No name, email, or Google
account is collected. This identifier is stored only on your device
and sent to our server to find your household on later visits.
|
2.2 Your child's profile
You create this; your child does not enter any of it themselves.
- Nickname — whatever you choose to call them in the app. We do not ask for a legal name.
- Age (3–12), which we convert into a fixed age band (4–6, 7–8, 9–11) used to decide what Gilli says and whether text is shown at all.
- Language preference(s) for the videos and for Gilli's speech.
- An avatar choice (a small set of built-in options — no photo of your child is ever collected).
- Settings you choose: which channels are approved, daily time limits, break timing, and whether the search box is shown to them.
2.3 Channels and viewing history
HeyGilli never reads your YouTube account. Channels reach your household in one of three ways, all initiated by you:
- Suggestions — a fixed list of children's channels that ships with HeyGilli, filtered by your child's age and what you say they like. Nothing is approved until you approve it.
- A channel you paste — a link, an @handle or a video URL.
- A Google Takeout export you upload — the standard export Google itself produces from takeout.google.com, which can include separate YouTube Kids profiles a live sign-in cannot see. Before anything leaves your device, the app strips this export down to just the subscription lists (channel IDs and names) — watch history, search history, comments, and everything else in the export is discarded on your device and never uploaded, unless you separately opt in below.
Watch history is opt-in, every single time, and is never stored as a list. If you tick the history option during an import, we read the exported "watch-history.json" only long enough to compute a small aggregate — total videos, the date range, a per-hour-of-day pattern, and the channels most and least watched — and then discard the underlying list of individual videos entirely. We do not retain a video-by-video watch history for any child, on our servers or otherwise.
2.4 What happens while your child is watching
- Session records — which video was shown, for how long, on what date, and on which type of device (phone, tablet, web). This is how time limits and the parent digest are built.
- Spoken answers, as text — never as audio. When Gilli asks a question and your child answers out loud, speech recognition happens on the device itself. Only the recognized text (for example, "giraffe") is sent to our server to check understanding; the audio recording itself is not sent anywhere and is not retained by the app.
- Words said and heard — short word lists (for example, words a pre-reader successfully echoed back) used to build the daily summary you see as a parent.
- Gilli's own spoken lines are synthesized as audio by Amazon Polly (see §4) each time they're needed — this is generated speech, not a recording of anyone.
2.5 What never leaves your device
- Your parent PIN, used only to leave a child's device — it is never transmitted to our servers in any form.
- Which physical device belongs to which child (so a tablet handed to a child opens straight into their videos).
- Whether you've already seen the intro screens.
3. How we use this information
- To screen new uploads from approved channels before they can ever appear to your child (age-appropriateness and language screening).
- To run Gilli's spoken questions and check understanding during and after a video.
- To enforce the daily time limits and breaks you set.
- To build the digest and progress views shown only to you, the parent.
- To operate basic account functions — signing you in, remembering your household, keeping your children's settings.
We do not use your or your child's information to build advertising profiles, and we do not run any advertising or third-party analytics or tracking SDKs of any kind in the app.
4. Who we share information with
We do not sell personal information, and we do not share it with anyone for their own marketing purposes. Information passes through the following service providers, strictly to run the app:
| Provider | What it handles |
|---|---|
| Google (Sign-In) | Authenticates the parent, and nothing else. No access to your YouTube account is requested. |
| Amazon Web Services — Bedrock | The AI model that screens videos and drafts Gilli's questions. It sees video metadata and transcripts, not your account identity. |
| Amazon Web Services — Polly | Converts Gilli's scripted lines to speech audio. |
| Amazon Web Services — DynamoDB | Stores household, child, and session records described above. |
| Render & Vercel | Host the server and the app itself. Standard web server logs (IP address, timestamp, requested address) are generated at this layer, as with any web service. |
We may disclose information if required to by law, or to protect the safety of a child, ourselves, or others — this is a standard reservation, not something we expect to need.
Google API Services User Data Policy. HeyGilli's use and transfer of information received from Google APIs adheres to the Google API Services User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements. Your YouTube subscription data is used only to run the features described in this policy — never for advertising, never to train general-purpose AI or machine-learning models, and never read by a person except where the law requires it.
5. Children's privacy
HeyGilli is built around the requirement that a child never creates an account, never signs in, and never provides information directly — every child profile is created and configured by a parent, and every consent to connect a Google account or upload an export is given by that parent. We do not knowingly collect personal information directly from a child.
If you believe a child has provided us with personal information other than through a parent's own account setup, contact us at hello@heygilli.com and we will investigate and delete it.
6. How long we keep information, and how to delete it
We keep household and child records for as long as the account exists, so the app can keep working the way you left it. Some things you can remove yourself right now inside the app:
- Removing a channel from a child (Channels → remove) deletes that approval immediately.
- Removing an imported watch-history aggregate for a child, from that child's history screen.
Full account deletion is not yet self-serve. HeyGilli does not currently have an in-app "delete my account" button. To request deletion of a household, a child's profile, or your connected Google token, email hello@heygilli.com from the address associated with the account (or describe the household so we can locate it) and we will delete the underlying records. We aim to complete this within 30 days of a verified request.
You can also revoke HeyGilli's access to your Google account at any time, independently of us, from myaccount.google.com/permissions . This immediately stops the app from being able to read your subscriptions; existing app data is removed only once we act on a deletion request as above.
7. Security
Data is transmitted over encrypted connections (HTTPS/TLS). This project is at an early, actively developed stage — as with any software at this stage, our security practices continue to evolve, and we do not claim a specific certification or guarantee against every possible failure. We ask that you use a household-specific Google account and PIN you don't reuse for anything sensitive elsewhere.
8. Your choices
- Decide per import whether to include watch history at all — it is off by default, every time.
- Decide per child whether they see a search box.
- Remove any channel or the history aggregate at any time.
- Revoke Google access at any time from your Google account settings.
- Request full deletion by email at any time (§6).
9. International use
Our infrastructure runs on servers located in the United States (AWS
us-east-1). If you use HeyGilli from outside the United
States, your information is transferred to and processed there.
10. Changes to this policy
If this policy changes in a way that meaningfully affects what we collect or how we use it, we will update the date at the top of this page. Continuing to use HeyGilli after a change means you accept the updated policy.
11. Contact
Questions, deletion requests, or concerns about a child's information: hello@heygilli.com.