The short version: your child's writing, scores and profile live on your device, not on our servers. There are no accounts, no advertising and no personal tracking. Your child's writing, scores and name never leave the device. What does leave it is described below: the referral codes, the weekly leaderboard, and anonymous usage counts. All three can be switched off. None of them carries your child's surname, age, photo, location or contact details, and none is ever used to advertise to you or follow you around other apps.
Your child’s profile is stored only on the device it was created on: names, ages, chosen interests, every score, the portfolio of their work, and all settings. We never receive any of that. Deleting the app, or using Settings → Delete all data, removes it completely.
There is no account and no password, so there is nothing for us to look up. We never ask for an email address or a date of birth.
If writing samples are left on, the app sends us examples of the writing itself: the shape and order of the strokes, and nothing else. We use them to understand how handwriting improves over time and to make the scoring better.
Each sample carries a random code generated on the device, so we can tell that two samples came from the same child without ever knowing who that child is. A sample carries that code, what the child was asked to write, the date, the score, an age band such as “5–6”, and the school style in use. It never carries a name, a surname, an exact age, a photo, a location or an email address, and it is never joined to the leaderboard.
Switch it off in Settings and nothing further is sent. When you use Settings → Delete all data, the app asks us to delete the samples we hold for your child before it clears the device. The random code that identifies them lives on the device, so it has to be used before it is erased.
If you share or redeem an invite code, we record the redemption in our ledger so both families receive their free sessions. That record contains the invite code and a random installation identifier. It contains no names, no email addresses, and nothing about your child.
The leaderboard is on when you set up a profile. While it is on, exactly four things are shown publicly to other Penwick users:
Never a surname, city, age, photo or anything else.
One more thing travels with the row, and we would rather spell it out: a random installation identifier, the same one used for referral codes. It is what lets us update your child's row each week instead of adding a new one every time. It is generated on the device, it is not linked to a name, an email address or an account, and it is not used for advertising or for following anyone across other apps. Because a first name sits alongside it, our App Store privacy label correctly reports this as data linked to you. To switch it off, go to Settings, Weekly leaderboard and leave the board. That stops new scores immediately. To have past entries removed as well, email us and we will delete them.
So we can tell which parts of the app are worth improving, Penwick counts how it is used and sends those counts once a session. It is counts only, for example “three practice sessions, one of them the story pages”.
Nothing that identifies anyone is attached, and there is deliberately no identifier at all, not even a random one. That means we can see that 4 in 10 families finish the setup, and we can never see which families those are. Ages are sent as a band (5, 6-7, 8-9), never an age; how long you have had the app is sent as a range, never a date.
Never sent: your child's writing, their scores, their name or nickname, their interests, photos, your location, your device identifier or your advertising ID.
Switch it off in Settings → Share anonymous usage. Turning it off also discards anything waiting to be sent.
If you use Scan written work, the photographs you take of finished handwriting pages are sent to our marking service, which passes them to a vision model to be marked and returns the feedback. That is the only time a photograph ever leaves the device, and it happens only when you tap Send. The service keeps nothing: no photo, no feedback and no identifier is stored on our side. Along with the photo it receives an age band such as “7–8” and the handwriting style in use, never a name.
The marking itself is done by a third-party vision model reached through OpenRouter, which handles the image in order to mark it and, under its terms, does not use it to train models. Please crop out names, faces and school logos before sending; the page you want marked is the writing. A small copy of each page stays on your device in the portfolio, and you can remove any scan from the portfolio at any time.
Payments are handled entirely by Apple's App Store or Google Play. We never see your payment details. The record of your family's subscription is stored on your device and with the store you subscribed through.
Penwick is designed for children aged 5 to 9, which is why the app is built to work without collecting their data. The one thing visible to others is the weekly leaderboard: a first name or nickname, a buddy character, a country flag, a star count and the random installation identifier described above. There is no surname, no age, no photo, no location and no way for another family to contact your child. An adult can switch it off in Settings at any time. Settings is deliberately open rather than locked behind a puzzle, because a parent should be able to change something quickly, so please make this choice yourself when you set the app up.
MyAutobot Ltd is the data controller for the things described above. We rely on your consent for the leaderboard and the usage counts, which is why both are switches you control, and on our legitimate interest in running the referral scheme you chose to take part in.
Because Penwick is for children, consent is the parent's or guardian's to give. Please set the app up with your child rather than handing it over at the profile screen, and decide the leaderboard question yourself.
You have the right to ask what we hold, to have it corrected or deleted, to withdraw consent at any time, and to complain to a supervisory authority. In the UK that is the Information Commissioner's Office at ico.org.uk. Write to the address below and we will answer within one month.
The leaderboard, referral ledger and usage counts are stored on Microsoft Azure and Cloudflare servers in the United Kingdom and the European Union. We do not sell data, and we do not share it with advertisers or data brokers.
MyAutobot Ltd (United Kingdom)
[email protected], put
"Penwick" in the subject line.