Privacy notice

Updated 21 October 2026. Also: SparkTrails’s terms.

SparkTrails is made for families, so it’s built to know as little about you as it can. There are no adverts and no tracking. This notice says what stays on your phone, what the optional family account keeps, what happens when you make a trail, who else handles it, and how to delete it.

What stays on this phone

These are kept only on the phone, even when you’re signed in:

• your family’s place: a town, a point on the map or an area you drew. It’s often near home, so it never goes into the family account. It’s sent to our server only to find places for trails (see “Making a trail”).
• whether the grown-up PIN is asked for purchases and for photo uploads (both are on to start with)
• who’s coming today
• the changes you report on a trail. For now they stay here: this notice will change before they’re sent anywhere.
• the map pictures the phone draws as covers for the trails you make

If you never sign in, everything else stays on the phone too: your explorers, photos, trails and progress.

Photos for home hunts

For home hunts, a grown-up adds photos of places at home, like the sofa or the garden gate. Adding photos asks for the grown-up PIN, unless you switch that off.

Before a photo is kept, the phone opens it and saves it again as a new picture. That leaves behind the details cameras hide inside photos, such as where and when it was taken.

Photos are only used for your family’s home hunts. They’re never shared, and never used to train anything. Home hunts never store locations.

If you sign in, your photos are kept in your family account too (see below).

Signing in: the Sparks family account

Signing in is optional. A grown-up signs in with their email and a one-time code we send to it. That makes a Sparks family account: one sign-in for the Sparks apps (Sparks, Noted, SparkTrails and News), so the same email works in each of them. Children never sign in or make accounts.

For SparkTrails, the account keeps:

• your email address (it’s the sign-in itself) and your name
• each explorer’s first name or nickname, and their age group
• your photo albums, with each photo and its label
• the trails you’ve made: trails made in the app, and home hunts
• how far you are through each trail
• which trails used your free picks
• that your family uses SparkTrails (only that, not when or how much), so each Sparks app’s grown-up area can show which Sparks apps your family uses

That lets you use SparkTrails on more than one phone, and bring everything back on a new one.

Without signing in, the grown-up PIN stays on this phone. Signed in, it’s kept in the account too, scrambled so that nobody can read it, and the same PIN works on all your phones and in every Sparks app.

The account is stored by Supabase. Your photos are kept in a private store and shown only to your family, through links that stop working after a short time. They’re also kept on each phone you’re signed in on, so home hunts work without signal.

If you use other Sparks apps with the same email, their privacy notices say what each of them keeps in the account.

Signing out removes your family’s things from that phone. They stay in the account, ready for next time.

Making a trail

When you ask Glint to make a trail, the app sends our server:

• the place: its name and position on the map, or the outline of an area you drew, or, for a day out, the places you listed
• the explorers’ age groups, never their names
• the interests, walk length and must-haves you picked, such as a buggy-friendly route or a loo stop
• today’s date, so the story can fit the season

No name, email or family account goes with it.

Our server finds real places nearby with public map services: OpenStreetMap servers, Wikipedia and Wikidata. They see the place’s name or position, sent from our server rather than your phone. Then Claude, an AI model made by Anthropic, writes the trail from those places and your answers.

For a day out, each place you type is looked up on Photon, a place search run by komoot using OpenStreetMap’s map. It sees what you typed and, to find the right one, where the place before it is. The first place is looked up on its own, so your family’s place isn’t sent.

Drawing an area, or adding a place to a day out, also asks our server how many places there are to visit there, before anything is written. That sends just the area or the place.

Anthropic’s terms for this service say it doesn’t use what’s sent to train its models. It keeps requests for a limited time, for safety and to prevent misuse, and then deletes them.

What our server keeps

For each trail made, our server keeps a record: what was sent (above), the trail Claude wrote, what it cost and how long it took, and a scrambled form of the internet address the request came from, which is used for the daily limits on making trails.

• After 7 days, the place’s position, any area you drew, the places listed for a day out and the scrambled address are deleted. A day out’s trail is deleted then too, because it names the places you listed. What’s left is the town’s name, the age groups, interests, walk length and must-haves, the trail through public places, and its cost and timings.
• After 12 months, the whole record is deleted.

It also keeps the public places it found near each spot searched, so it doesn’t have to ask the map services again. Each list is deleted after 30 days.

None of this is linked to your family account, or to anyone’s name. Our server’s records are stored by Supabase, in London.

Where you are

“Use where we are now” asks for permission to use the phone’s location, then finds the name of your town. SparkTrails only uses location while it’s open.

During a trail, the map can show where you are (the blue dot). That stays on the phone. If you choose where you are as your family’s place, that point is sent when you make a trail, as above.

Maps are drawn by Apple Maps on iPhone and Google Maps on Android, and directions open in those apps. Finding a town’s name from a point on the map, or a point from a place’s name, uses the phone’s own map service. So Apple or Google see the part of the map being looked at, as they do in their own maps apps.

Buying the pass

The pass is bought through the App Store or Google Play. They take the payment and tell the app whether you have the pass, so we never see your card details.

Who handles it for us

• Supabase stores the family account and our server’s records.
• Expo runs our server and sends app updates.
• Anthropic writes the trails (Claude).
• Resend sends the sign-in codes.
• OpenStreetMap servers, Wikipedia, Wikidata and Photon look up places.
• Apple and Google draw the maps, and the App Store and Google Play take payment for the pass.

Like any website, each of them sees the internet address a request comes from while they handle it. Some of them are based in the United States, so information may be handled there.

Deleting it all

Signed in: in Account, “Delete account and erase everything” deletes your whole Sparks family account, in every Sparks app (everything each app keeps in it, and the sign-in itself), then erases this phone. It says what it will delete before it starts, and it needs an internet connection.

Not signed in: in Account, “Erase everything on this phone” does just that.

Other phones that were signed in to the account keep what’s on them until you sign out or erase them there, in Account.

Our server’s trail records aren’t linked to you, so they can’t be picked out and deleted. They go after 7 days and 12 months, as above.

Deleting the app erases what’s on the phone, but not your family account. Delete the account in the app first, or write to us.

What we don’t do

• no adverts
• no analytics or tracking tools
• no selling or sharing of your information
• no chat or contact between families
• no building a profile of you or your children

Children

SparkTrails is for families. Children of about 4 to 13 play its trails with a grown-up, and teenagers and grown-ups can play the 14+ trails. A grown-up sets it up and adds the explorers.

A nickname is fine for an explorer: it’s only used to talk to them in the app. Home hunt photos are of places, so leave people out of them where you can. And a grown-up should be with children on every outdoor trail.

We’re careful with children’s information, as the UK’s Children’s Code asks: the most private choices are where SparkTrails starts, it asks only for what it needs, and nothing nudges you to share more.

Your rights and how to reach us

You can ask what we hold about you or your children, ask us to correct it, or ask us to delete it, and we will answer. If you aren’t happy with our answer, you can complain to the data protection authority where you live (in the UK, the Information Commissioner’s Office).

SparkTrails is run by Studio Darling. Write to privacy@sparksforkids.app.

Changes

If the app starts handling information differently, this notice will change before it does, and the date below will show it.