A Toddles book is brought to life using AI — but your child's photo is handled with care every step of the way. This article explains exactly what happens to it.
What happens with the photo you upload?
When you upload a photo of a child, the AI uses it as a reference to create a unique illustrated character for their storybook — the actual photograph never appears in the book.
Your photo is:
Stored securely on our encrypted servers
Used only to generate illustrations for your specific book
Never published, never shared on social media, and never visible to other Toddles users or the general public
This is nothing like posting a photo on Facebook or Instagram. Toddles is not a social media platform — no one else can see what you upload.
Which AI providers does Toddles use?
We work with various trusted, enterprise-grade AI providers to generate illustrations, write the personalised story text, and perform quality checks. All are established commercial services used by thousands of businesses worldwide, with strong data protection commitments in place.
What precautions do these providers take?
Each provider operates under strict commercial data handling commitments. As standard practice across all of them:
Your data is not used to train their AI models. When you access these services through a commercial API (as Toddles does), your content remains yours and is never fed back into model training.
Data is encrypted both in transit and at rest, so it is protected while being sent to the provider and while stored on their infrastructure.
Data is automatically deleted after processing or within a short, defined retention window — it is not held indefinitely.
They operate under formal data processing agreements and compliance frameworks (such as SOC 2, GDPR, and equivalent standards) that legally bind them to these commitments.
In short, your child's photo passes through these systems solely to generate their illustrated character — and then it's gone from their infrastructure.
How does Toddles share data with these providers?
We never send your original photo file directly to an AI provider. Instead, we share a temporary, secure link to the photo that:
Expires automatically after 7 days
Can only be accessed by our systems and the specific AI service processing your book
Is generated fresh each time and cannot be guessed or reused
Can I have my data deleted?
Yes. You have two options:
Remove personal data from a specific book — We'll permanently remove all uploaded photos, character names, story content, and generated illustrations for that book. Non-sensitive order information is retained. Any shared links to the book will stop working immediately.
Delete your entire account — We'll remove your account and all associated data, including all books, order history, and uploaded content.
See our article on Managing Your Personal Data for details on how to make either request.
Is Toddles compliant with South African data protection law?
Yes. Toddles operates in accordance with South Africa's Protection of Personal Information Act (POPIA). You can read our full Privacy Policy for details on how we collect, use, and protect your information.
If you have any further questions about how we handle your data, please reach out to us at [email protected] — we're always happy to help.