Buju Privacy Policy

Effective date: June 1, 2026
Last updated: June 1, 2026

Buju is built for children, and we wrote this policy to be readable by the parents who care about them. We're a small team and we mean what we say here. If you have questions, email us at xia@buju.ai or call 628-294-5184.

This policy describes how Buju AI, Inc. ("Buju," "we," "us") collects and uses information when children use our voice companion app and when parents use our parent app and dashboard. It is written to comply with the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), including the 2025 amendments effective April 2026.

1. Who we are

Buju AI, Inc.
809 Cuesta Dr, Suite B PMB 1214
Mountain View, CA 94040
Email: xia@buju.ai
Phone: 628-294-5184

We are a Delaware corporation operating out of California. Buju is a voice companion designed for children ages 5–12 that engages them in co-creative storytelling and conversation, with a separate parent app that surfaces developmental insights from those interactions.

2. We collect information about your child only with your verifiable consent

Before your child uses Buju, we ask you — the parent or legal guardian — for verifiable consent under COPPA. On iOS, we verify that you are an adult by processing your subscription purchase through Apple's App Store, which requires authentication by the Apple ID holder. If you sign up through our website, we verify your identity through a payment transaction processed by Stripe. Both methods are approved by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission as valid means of obtaining verifiable parental consent.

You can review this policy in full and our shorter direct notice during the consent flow before consenting.

3. What information we collect

Information about your child

When your child uses Buju, we collect:

• First name and age. Provided by you during setup. No last name, no photo, no birthdate beyond age.
• Voice during conversations. Your child's spoken audio is sent to Google Cloud Speech-to-Text for transcription. Google processes the audio in memory and does not store it. The audio never reaches Buju's own servers as a stored file.
• Conversation transcripts. The text of what your child says and what Buju says back. Stored on our servers, tied to a child identifier we generate.
• Things your child invents during play. Characters, stories, ideas your child creates. Stored so Buju can remember them across sessions and so you can see them in the parent app.
• Developmental signals derived from conversations. Indicators related to social-emotional skills, language development, and science curiosity, mapped to established developmental frameworks (CASEL, NGSS-aligned items, age-typical milestones). These are summaries we generate from transcripts — not separate observations.
• Session metadata. Conversation ID, timestamps, session length.
• Avatar. Auto-generated. We do not collect or store user-uploaded images of your child.

We do not collect: device identifiers, IP address, precise location, photos, video, browsing history, contacts, or app diagnostics from your child's sessions.

Information about you (the parent)

• Email address and first name. Provided at signup.
• Payment information. Handled entirely by Apple (App Store) or Stripe. We never see or store your full card number.
• Dashboard activity. Which sections of the parent app you visit.
• Your messages to Buju. When you ask Buju questions about parenting or your child via text (or optionally voice), we store your messages. If you use voice, we send your audio to Google Cloud Speech-to-Text under the same conditions described above.
• City-level location (optional). Only if you opt into the Parent Lounge feature for connecting with other parents in your area.

What we don't do

We do not place advertising in Buju and we do not allow third parties to advertise to your child through Buju. We do not sell or rent any personal information. We do not use behavioral data to build advertising profiles.

4. How we use this information

We use the information we collect to:

1. Run the conversation in real time. Your child's spoken words are transcribed, sent to a large language model that generates Buju's response, and converted back to speech.
2. Maintain continuity within and across sessions. Buju remembers characters and stories your child has invented, so play can pick up where it left off.
3. Generate insights for your parent dashboard. We analyze transcripts to surface what your child is exploring developmentally and present this to you in age-appropriate ways.
4. Send you summaries by email or in the app (with your consent).
5. Improve Buju's safety and quality. We use transcripts internally to review whether Buju is responding appropriately, to identify failures, and to fix problems. A limited number of authorized Buju employees may review specific transcripts on a need-to-know basis (for example, when investigating a safety incident or quality issue). This is what COPPA calls "support for internal operations" of the service.
6. Build evaluation datasets. We construct synthetic test conversations to evaluate Buju's responses against developmental and safety standards. We may reference real transcripts internally as private spot-check material to confirm our synthetic data reflects how children actually talk. We do not build persistent datasets of your child's real conversations for external sharing, and we do not use your child's data to train our underlying AI models.

What we will not do without separate consent

If, in the future, we want to use your child's voice or transcripts to train or fine-tune AI models, we will ask you for separate, specific consent before doing so. Initial consent to use Buju does not grant us permission to use your child's data for model training.

We also commit not to use voice for biometric identification, voiceprint analysis, or any purpose beyond transcription.

5. Who we share information with

We use a small number of vendors to operate Buju. Every vendor on this list is contractually prohibited from using data we send them for their own purposes (such as training their own AI models) and is required to retain it only as long as needed to deliver their service. We do not share information with anyone else except as described below.

Vendors that may process your child's data

• Google Cloud Speech-to-Text — converts your child's spoken audio to text. Audio is processed in memory and not stored by Google. Transcripts are not stored by Google for streaming requests (which is the only method we use).
• Anthropic (Claude API) — generates Buju's responses from your child's transcripts. Commercial terms: not used for training, deleted from Anthropic's systems within 7 days.
• Google Vertex AI (Gemini) — alternate response generation for certain scenarios. Commercial terms: not used for training.
• ElevenLabs — converts Buju's generated text into spoken audio. ElevenLabs receives text only, not your child's audio. Not used for training.
• Google Cloud Platform — hosts our servers and databases. Acts as a data processor; does not access content.

Vendors that process parent (not child) data

• Apple App Store and/or Stripe — payment processing. We never receive your full card number.

When we may share without a vendor relationship

• Legal compliance. If required by law, subpoena, or to protect against imminent harm.
• Business transfer. If Buju is acquired or merges with another company, information would transfer subject to this policy. We would notify you before any change in how your data is handled.
• With your direction. If you choose to share something (e.g., a printed storybook) outside Buju.

We do not use third-party advertising networks, analytics services, or social plugins inside the child's app.

6. How long we keep information

• Voice audio: never stored. Discarded after transcription.
• Transcripts and child-invention memory: retained as long as your account is active and you have not deleted them. You can delete any conversation or piece of remembered content at any time from the parent app; deletion is reflected in our database and internal telemetry immediately.
• Developmental insights: retained as long as your account is active and you have not deleted them.
• Parent account information (email, name, dashboard activity): retained as long as your account is active.
• Payment records: retained by Apple or Stripe under their own policies. We retain only the metadata needed for subscription management.
• After account deletion: all data associated with the child and parent account is permanently deleted within 1 day, except where we are legally required to retain specific records (e.g., tax records of payments).

7. Your rights as a parent

You can, at any time, through the parent app or by emailing xia@buju.ai:

1. Review all information we have about your child, including all stored transcripts, remembered inventions, and developmental insights.
2. Delete any specific conversation, memory, or insight, or all of them.
3. Refuse to allow further collection. You can stop Buju from collecting new information about your child by pausing or deleting the account.
4. Revoke your consent and delete the account entirely. When you do this, your child's account and all associated data is permanently removed within 1 day.

We will respond to requests sent by email within 30 days, and usually much faster. There is no charge for any of these requests.

We do not require you to provide more information than is reasonably necessary to participate in Buju in order to exercise these rights.

8. Security

We protect your information through:

• Encryption in transit (TLS) between all clients, our servers, and our vendors.
• Encryption at rest for our PostgreSQL database.
• Access controls. Identifiable transcripts and parent information are restricted to authorized personnel on a need-to-know basis.
• Self-hosted voice infrastructure. We run our real-time voice transport on our own servers rather than a third-party voice cloud, reducing the number of parties that ever see voice data.
• Minimization. We do not collect device identifiers, IP addresses, location, or diagnostics that aren't necessary to operate Buju.

No security is perfect, and we don't claim ours is. If a breach affects your information, we will notify you promptly and tell you what happened.

9. California residents

If you live in California, you have additional rights under the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) and California Privacy Rights Act (CPRA), and the protections that apply to children under 16.

• We do not sell or share personal information. Buju does not sell or share (as those terms are defined under CCPA/CPRA) any personal information about you or your child. We have not done so in the preceding 12 months.
• Right to know, delete, correct. You may request that we disclose what personal information we have collected, request that we delete it, or request that we correct inaccurate information. These rights overlap with the COPPA rights described in Section 7.
• Right to limit use of sensitive personal information. Voice recordings (which we don't retain) and information about minors are considered sensitive. We already limit our use of these to what's described in Section 4.
• No retaliation. We won't deny service, charge a different price, or provide lower quality if you exercise your rights.

To exercise California rights, email xia@buju.ai.

10. Children outside the United States

Buju is offered only in the United States at this time. We do not knowingly accept signups from outside the U.S. If you believe a child outside the U.S. has used Buju, please contact us and we will delete the account.

11. Changes to this policy

We may update this policy. If we make material changes — particularly any change in how we use your child's information — we will notify you by email and through the parent app before the change takes effect, and we will obtain new consent if the change is material under COPPA. Non-material changes (clarifications, typo fixes, new vendor names in an existing category) will be posted here with an updated "Last updated" date.

12. Safe harbor and certifications

We are currently pursuing certification through the kidSAFE Seal Program, an FTC-approved COPPA Safe Harbor. Until certification is granted, we comply with COPPA directly. We will update this policy when certification is granted.

13. Contact

For any privacy question, request, or complaint:

Buju AI, Inc.
809 Cuesta Dr, Suite B PMB 1214
Mountain View, CA 94040
Email: xia@buju.ai
Phone: 628-294-5184

You can also contact the Federal Trade Commission at ftc.gov/privacy or 1-877-FTC-HELP with questions or complaints about COPPA compliance.

Quick reference for parents