Built for Families Worldwide
This one is an honest note for parents. From day one, Tortoise Time was never built for just one country — we set out to make a tool families anywhere can trust. That means we held ourselves to the world’s stricter standards on privacy and child protection from the very start.
We’re building for families everywhere
Different countries have different rules for “how to protect a child’s data,” and those rules are strict. We didn’t take the “build something rough first, patch it later when the rules get tough” route. Instead, we treated these strict standards as our starting point, not an afterthought bolted on later.
Specifically, we designed around these widely recognized child-protection standards:
- The U.S. children’s online privacy standard (COPPA) — rules for how a child under 13’s data should be handled
- The EU’s child data protection standard (GDPR-K) — Europe’s extra protections for minors’ data
- Google Play’s “Designed for Families” — a higher bar set for apps aimed at children
What we’re describing here is a posture, not a clause-by-clause legal promise — the formal, complete terms live on our Privacy Policy page. This note just wants you to know: when it comes to privacy, we’re serious, and we’re serious by a global standard.
What those standards look like in practice
Saying “we’re compliant” is empty on its own. Here’s what it actually becomes inside Tortoise Time:
- Data stays local first — your child’s screen-time data lives, by default, right on your own phone
- We don’t upload “what your child watched” — we don’t send what a child is playing or which videos they’re watching to any server. We can’t, and we don’t want to know
- No profiling of your child, no ads — we don’t make money by “knowing your kid,” and we never went down that road
- No accounts, no required cloud — uninstall the app, and the data is wiped with it
If you’ve read our notes on website visit counts and each permission, you’ll notice it’s the same tune: what we don’t have to collect, we don’t; what can stay on your phone, we don’t send out.
Why we’re willing to set the bar this high
Because the words “an app for children” carry real weight. A child won’t read a privacy policy or judge whether an app is worth trusting. The only ones who can vouch for them are you — and the conscience of the people building the app.
Holding ourselves to the world’s stricter standards makes us slower and more careful. But we think that’s how a children’s product should be made. We’d rather go slow if it means a parent anywhere in the world can hand their child’s phone to Tortoise Time with peace of mind.
One line for parents
To us, compliance isn’t a badge to stick on a store listing — it’s a line we drew at the very first line of design. Behind “built for families worldwide” is a plain promise: we treat what matters to your child the way we’d treat what matters to our own.
Want our overall note on parent privacy → Permissions Explained Want to know how we treat your data on the website → How We Watch Visits