Data Retention

Your account

We keep your account, your email address and your sign-in, for as long as your account is open, so you can come back to your books whenever you like.

When you delete your account from your account page, we permanently remove your account, your books, your characters, and their pictures. [DRAFT, owner to ratify] Deletion is immediate, with no grace period; once it is done it cannot be undone.

Your books and characters

We keep the books and saved characters you create for as long as your account is active, so your work and your reusable cast are always there when you return. You can edit or delete any book or character yourself at any time, and a deletion you make removes its pictures from our storage too.

No photographs

You build characters from descriptions and choices you make, not from photos. Our Little Book does not ask for, accept, or store photographs of the people a book is about, so there is never an uploaded picture of a real person, or of a child, sitting in our systems to keep or to purge. The art in your book is an illustration generated from your words, not a copy of a photograph.

Unfinished drafts

If a book is started but never finished and then sits untouched, we eventually clear it so abandoned work and anything attached to it does not pile up. [DRAFT, owner to ratify] A draft with no activity for 180 days is treated as abandoned and removed, along with any work-in-progress art attached to it. An active project is never affected; the clock only starts once a draft has been left alone.

Leftover files

Occasionally a picture file can be left in our storage with no book or character still pointing at it, for example after a deletion that did not fully finish. [DRAFT, owner to ratify] We sweep for these orphaned files and remove any that have been unreferenced for 30 days, so nothing sensitive lingers by accident.

Orders and payments

When you buy a digital book, a membership, or a printed book, we and our payment and print partners keep a record of that order. [DRAFT, owner to ratify] Because tax and finance law requires it, we keep order and payment records for the legally required minimum, generally about 7 years, even after an account is closed. We never store full card numbers ourselves; payment details are handled by our payment processor.

Backups

We may hold short-term backups so we can recover from a failure. [DRAFT, owner to ratify] Backups roll over on their own within 30 days, so data you delete is purged from backups within that window as old backups age out.

Technical logs

We keep basic technical logs, the kind that record errors and keep the service healthy, for a short time and then discard them. [DRAFT, owner to ratify] Operational logs are kept for about 90 days.

How removal happens

Some removal is immediate and in your hands: deleting a book, a character, or your whole account takes effect right away. Other removal is automatic and on a schedule: a routine job identifies what has aged past the windows above and clears it. We review what that job would remove before anything is removed, so the safe, conservative outcome is always the default.

Questions

You can download or delete your information yourself from your account page at any time. If you have a question about how long we keep something, write to us at hello@ourlittlebook.com and we’ll be glad to explain.