Privacy

Last updated 27 July 2026

The short version: we do not want your data. There are no accounts, no cookies, and no trackers. We count how often stories are served, and our hosting provider keeps ordinary server logs for a short while. That is everything.

What this site is

Cowboyapuss is a free reading site for children aged roughly three to six, and for the grown-ups reading along with them. You can read every published story without signing in, without telling us anything, and without paying.

No accounts, no cookies, no tracking, no ads

There is nothing to sign into on this site: no profile, no email, no password. We set no cookies of any kind, so there is no cookie banner to dismiss. We use no analytics service, no advertising network, no social widgets, and no third-party fonts or scripts. A page you open here loads only from this site and from our own storage, and from nowhere else.

The counting we do

We keep three plain tallies, attached at most to a story and a date, and to nothing else:

• How often our server builds a story page. Pages are cached, so most readers are served a copy without our server being involved at all. This number is therefore a count of server renders, not of people. It is smaller than the number of readers and we never describe it as an audience figure.
• How often a story reaches its last page. When a story is read to the end, the page sends us one short message: the word “finished”, and which story it was. Nothing is attached to it: no name, no identifier, no cookie, nothing finer than the day.
• Whether the storybook app could not reach us. If the app opens while our library is unreachable, it sends one word, “offline”, with the day. No story, no identifier, nothing else. It exists so we notice an outage before you have to tell us.

There is no way for us to tell one reader from another, or to know whether someone came back. That is a deliberate limit, not an oversight: the only way to answer those questions is to give every visitor an identifier, and we are not going to do that to children.

The logs we do not write, but should tell you about

This site runs on Google’s hosting infrastructure. Like every web server in the world, it records standard request logs: the IP address a request came from, the browser and device type, the page asked for, and the time. We do not use these to build a profile of anyone, and no advertising system ever sees them. They exist so a service can be kept running and secure, which is the basis children’s privacy law calls support for internal operations.

We turn that down as far as the platform allows: we configure the platform to exclude request logs for the pages children read from the general log store, keeping only error records so we can fix what breaks, and we verify that configuration against a real log sample before this site is announced. What remains is held briefly (the exact retention period will be stated here at launch). We do not export these logs, sell them, or combine them with anything.

One related note: to stop a machine hammering the site, our server briefly looks at the IP address of an incoming request while it decides whether to answer it. That check happens in memory only and is discarded within a minute. We never store it.

Our own backend

Story pictures, when a story has them, are served from our own storage, which is hosted on Google Cloud under our account, the same place the stories themselves live.

The reading app fetches stories from our own database, which is hosted on Google Cloud under our account. That connection is to our own servers, not to an advertising, analytics, or data-broker service, and it carries story text and pictures, nothing about you.

Children, and their names

We never ask a child for anything. No name, no age, no photograph, no voice recording, no email address. There are no accounts on this site today, so there is nothing for a child to fill in.

If personalisation arrives later, it works like this and will not change: a parent types the family’s first names, those names are stored on that device, and the story is filled in on the screen as it is drawn. The names never leave the device. They are never sent to us, never included in anything we generate, never written to a log, and never passed to another company. You can delete them at any time by deleting them.

How the stories are made, and who checks them

Cowboyapuss stories are written with AI assistance, and we would rather say so plainly than have you work it out. Here is the actual process.

A person decides what a story is: an old fable worth retelling, or something invented for Rodeo Reef, and what it should leave a child with. AI tools help draft the words and draw the pictures. The draft is then checked automatically for the things software is good at catching: reading level, story length, unsuitable content, whether the lesson is actually there. Everything that survives that arrives in a review queue.

A human being then reads every word and looks at every picture, and nothing becomes visible to a child until that person approves it. This is not a policy we intend to follow; it is how the software is built. There is no route through our system that publishes to a child without a person having said yes first, and adding one would mean rewriting the part of the code that exists specifically to prevent it.

Every published story carries a line saying it was written with AI assistance and reviewed by a person. If we ever change how any of this works, this page changes with it and the change is listed at the bottom.

Changes to this policy

When this policy changes we will update the date at the top and add a line to the amendment log below, so you can see what changed and when. We will not quietly rewrite history.

Getting in touch

A contact address lands here before the site is announced. If you have a question about anything on this page, it is the right thing to ask.

Amendment log

• 27 July 2026: first version, written for a free reading site with no accounts, no payments and no personalisation. Describes the daily story counters, the hosting provider’s request logs and their retention, and how stories are made and reviewed.