Privacy Policy

Effective September 18, 2026

Santa’s Helper is operated by Santaslilhelper LLC (“we,” “us”). This page explains what information we collect, why, and how you can control it. We wrote it in plain language on purpose — if anything is unclear, email us at support@santaslilhelper.com.

The short version

• Only a parent can create an account. Kids join a family using a code, their name, and a PIN — never an email address or any way to contact them directly.
• We don’t show ads, and we don’t use ad trackers of any kind.
• We never sell anyone’s information, to anyone, ever.
• A parent can permanently delete their family’s account and all its data at any time, right from the parent dashboard.

Who this app is for

Santa’s Helper is a family app. Parents create the account, and children use a kid-facing view under their family’s account to write notes to Santa and log good deeds. Because children under 13 use part of this app, we handle their information the way the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) requires: a parent is always the one who sets it up, controls it, and can delete it.

What we collect

From a parent, when you sign up:

• Your name and email address
• Your password — we never see or store this ourselves; it’s handled entirely by our authentication provider (Firebase Authentication, part of Google Cloud) using industry-standard encryption
• A PIN you choose, to keep the parent dashboard separate from the kid-facing view — stored only as a one-way cryptographic hash, never as plain text, so even we can’t read it back

From (or about) a child, entered by a parent or the child themselves within the family’s account:

• A first name or nickname, and an optional avatar (a single emoji, not a photo)
• A PIN the child uses to access their own family’s account — also stored only as a one-way hash
• Gift ideas they add to their wish list, and notes describing good deeds they’ve done

We do not ask a child for their email address, real last name, birthdate, photo, or location, and the app gives no way to enter them.

How AI is involved

When a child writes a note to Santa or a good deed, that text is sent to OpenAI to generate a reply and, if requested, to a text-to-speech provider (currently ElevenLabs or OpenAI’s own voice model) to read Santa’s reply aloud. Before any note is sent to generate a reply, it’s automatically screened by a safety filter (OpenAI’s moderation service); anything flagged is rejected and never used to generate a response. These providers process the text to return a response and do not use it to build advertising profiles.

How we use what we collect

Solely to run the app: to show a family their own children, wish lists, and good deeds; to let Santa reply to notes; to let a parent share a read-only wish list link with someone like a grandparent; and to keep the parent PIN gate secure (a lightweight, anonymized log of PIN attempts is kept for 30 days to detect abuse, and never includes the PIN itself).

Who can see it

• A family’s parent can see everything in their own family’s account.
• A child linked to a family can see and add to their own wish list and deeds, not anyone else’s.
• Anyone a parent explicitly sends a share link to can view that one child’s wish list, read-only, until the parent creates a new link.
• Nobody else. We don’t share, rent, or sell any of this information to third parties for their own purposes.

Who we share it with

Only the service providers we use to run the app, and only as needed to provide the service: Firebase / Google Cloud (accounts, database, hosting), OpenAI (generating Santa’s replies and screening content for safety), and, if voice playback is used, ElevenLabs. None of them are permitted to use this data for their own advertising or profiling.

No ads, no tracking

Santa’s Helper has no advertising and no ad-tracking technology of any kind — no ad networks, no third-party analytics pixels, no behavioral profiling. If that ever changes, we’ll update this policy first and, for anything involving children’s data, we won’t make that change without finding a compliant way to ask for parental consent first.

How long we keep it, and how to delete it

We keep a family’s data as long as the account exists. A parent can permanently delete their entire family’s account and everything in it — every child, wish list, deed, and share link — at any time from the parent dashboard. This cannot be undone. You can also email support@santaslilhelper.com to request deletion or ask questions about your family’s data.

Security

Passwords and PINs are never stored as plain text. The parent dashboard requires both a signed-in account and a separate PIN, so a child using the kid-facing view can’t reach parent tools or another family’s data.

Changes to this policy

If we change this policy, we’ll update the effective date above and post the new version here.

Contact us

Questions, concerns, or a request to review or delete your family’s data: support@santaslilhelper.com