How They're Wired Privacy Policy
Effective: October 2, 2026 · Version: 0.1 · Operated by Family Insights LLC, an Illinois limited liability company ("we," "us"). Contact: privacy@howtheyrewired.com or Family Insights LLC, [MAILING ADDRESS — attorney: RA address vs home].
1. The short version
- How They're Wired is for adults. Parents and legal guardians answer questions about a child they care for. Children never use How They're Wired, and we never knowingly collect information from a child.
- We collect what you type and tap, your email, and a month and year (never the day) of your child's birth. We use it to generate your results and improve the questions.
- We do not sell your information, we do not share it with advertisers, and we do not use it to make decisions about you or your child.
- How They're Wired is educational, not medical or psychological. We do not diagnose, screen for, detect or treat any condition.
- You can delete everything yourself from your account page, or by emailing us. Deletion completes within 30 days.
- We keep your raw answers and every version of the policies you accepted so we can show you the evidence behind any sentence in your results and prove what you agreed to.
2. Who we are and who this is for
Family Insights LLC operates How They're Wired from Chicago, Illinois. Our services are offered to adults (18+) in the United States who are the parent or legal guardian of the child they describe, or who have that parent's or guardian's permission to describe the child (for example, a co-parent invited by the account holder). If you are under 18, do not use How They're Wired. If we learn that an account belongs to someone under 18, or that information was submitted by a child, we delete it.
3. What we collect
A. Account information (you). Email address; the fact that you confirmed you are 18+ and a parent or legal guardian; your relationship to the child (e.g., mother, father, caregiver); your locale; a random account ID; login timestamps. We use magic-link sign-in, so we never store a password.
B. Child information (entered by you). A first name or nickname you choose; birth month and year only; sex, only if you choose to provide it; sibling order, if you provide it. We do not collect a child's full date of birth, last name, photo, school, address, or any health, diagnosis or medication information — and we ask you not to type any of those into free-text fields.
C. Your answers. Every response to every question (the option chosen, when, and whether you changed it); short written stories and examples you type; your "fits / partly / doesn't fit" ratings of your results; follow-up answers to our reconnect emails. These are the evidence behind your results, and we store them as you gave them.
D. Voice recordings (if and when offered). If we offer a voice option for telling a story, we transcribe the recording and keep the transcript. We delete the audio file within 30 days of transcription. We do not create voiceprints, identify speakers by voice, or allow our transcription vendor to do so. We will update this policy and ask for a separate consent before ever changing that. (As of this version, stories are text only and no audio is collected.)
E. Purchase information. If you buy a report or membership, our payment processor (Stripe) collects your card details and billing address directly; we receive a payment record (amount, date, last four digits of the card, billing postal code) but never your full card number.
F. Technical and usage information. Which screens you saw, how long each took, device type, browser, and coarse page-analytics data. We use Plausible Analytics, which does not use cookies and does not track you across sites. Our only cookie is the one that keeps you signed in. We record your IP address at the moment you accept these policies, as part of the consent record (Section 8).
G. Research participation (optional). If you volunteer for an interview or a read-aloud session, we collect what you tell us in that session under a separate written release, which controls how it can be used.
4. How we use it
| Purpose | What we use |
|---|---|
| Generate your results and report, and let you rate them | B, C |
| Send you the magic link, your results, receipts, and the two reconnect emails you agreed to | A, C, E |
| Make the questions shorter and better (item analytics), always working from the raw answers | C, F, in de-identified form |
| Research on the product's usefulness, only if you opt in to the separate "research use" scope | C, G, de-identified |
| Process payments, prevent fraud, handle refunds | E |
| Keep the service working and secure | F |
| Comply with law and enforce our terms | A, E, consent records |
We do not use your information to advertise to you, to build advertising profiles, to make automated decisions with legal or similarly significant effects, or to train any model that could reproduce your child's information. If we ever use a large language model to help draft a report, the request contains only the answers needed for that report and the provider is contractually barred from training on it (Section 6).
5. What we never do
- Sell personal information, or share it for cross-context behavioral advertising.
- Share a child's information with anyone other than the account holder and the people the account holder explicitly invites.
- Provide, claim or imply a diagnosis, clinical assessment, risk score or treatment recommendation.
- Collect information directly from a child.
- Keep audio longer than 30 days after transcription.
6. Who we share it with (service providers)
We use a small number of vendors who process data on our behalf under contracts that limit their use to providing the service to us:
| Vendor | What they do | What they see |
|---|---|---|
| Supabase | Database, authentication, file storage | Everything in Sections 3A–3D, encrypted at rest |
| Cloudflare | Hosting and content delivery | Technical data (3F) |
| Stripe | Payments, tax-threshold monitoring | Payment data (3E); your email |
| Resend | Transactional email | Your email and the content of emails we send you |
| Plausible | Privacy-focused analytics | Aggregate page data; no cookies, no cross-site tracking |
| [LLM provider — Anthropic/OpenAI] | Drafting report text from your answers | The answers needed for that report; no training on your data under the provider's API terms |
| [Transcription vendor — none as of v0.1] | Speech-to-text, if voice stories are offered | Audio, deleted within 30 days; contractually barred from voice-feature extraction |
We may also disclose information if required by law, to protect someone's safety, or in a merger or sale of the business (in which case this policy continues to bind the successor for data collected under it, and you will be notified). We will publish an updated vendor list whenever this table changes.
7. How long we keep it (summary — the full schedule is in our Data Retention Policy)
- Anonymous quiz sessions never claimed by an account: deleted after 90 days.
- Account, child and response data: kept while your account is active so you can return to your results; dormant accounts (no sign-in for 24 months) are notified and then deleted.
- Audio: 30 days after transcription.
- Consent records and purchase records: 7 years (tax and legal requirement), even after account deletion, but with the child data removed.
- De-identified item statistics: indefinitely (they contain no personal information).
8. Your choices and rights
Delete. Your account page has a Delete my account and all data button. It removes your account, every child, every answer, story, transcript, rating and generated report, and any files, within 30 days (usually immediately). Or email privacy@howtheyrewired.com from your account email. We keep only the consent and purchase records described in Section 7, stripped of child data.
Export. Email us and we will send a machine-readable copy of your account's data within 30 days.
Correct. Edit a child's nickname or birth month/year from your account page.
Opt out of research use. Research use of your de-identified answers is a separate opt-in, off by default; toggle it on your account page at any time.
Emails. Transactional emails (magic link, receipt, results, the two reconnect emails you agreed to) are part of the service; any newsletter is separate and has an unsubscribe link.
Versioned consent. Each time we materially change this policy or our Terms, we will ask you to accept the new version before you continue, and we keep a record of each version you accepted (version, timestamp, IP, and the exact checkbox text). You may request a copy.
State rights. Depending on where you live, you may have additional rights (to access, correct, delete, port, or opt out of certain processing). We extend the rights above to everyone regardless of state. To appeal a decision we make about a request, reply to our response and it will be reviewed by Family Insights LLC's owner within 30 days.
9. Security
Data is encrypted in transit and at rest. Access is restricted by row-level rules so that an account can only ever read its own data. Every read of a generated profile and every deletion is logged. No system is perfectly secure; if a breach affects your information we will notify you as required by Illinois law (815 ILCS 530) and any other applicable law.
10. Not a medical, psychological or diagnostic service
How They're Wired provides educational information for parents about everyday patterns of temperament and behavior in context. Nothing in your results is a diagnosis, screening, assessment of risk, or treatment recommendation, and our results can be wrong. If you are worried about your child's health, development or safety, please talk to your pediatrician or another qualified professional. How They're Wired is not designed to and does not provide therapy, psychotherapy or any mental-health service, and any AI features are limited to parenting education.
11. Children's privacy (COPPA)
How They're Wired is not directed to children and we do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 13 (or under 18). Information about a child is entered only by that child's parent or legal guardian, about their own child, for their own use. If you believe a child has submitted information to us, email privacy@howtheyrewired.com and we will delete it. [Attorney: confirm COPPA "collected from a child" posture and the state minors'-data provisions noted in ws6 §4.]
12. International users
How They're Wired is operated from the United States and, for now, sells only to US billing addresses. If you use the free quiz from outside the US, your data is processed in the US.
13. Changes
We will post changes here with a new version number and effective date, and for material changes we will ask you to re-accept before you continue using your account.
14. Contact
Family Insights LLC · privacy@howtheyrewired.com · Family Insights LLC, Chicago, Illinois (write to info@howtheyrewired.com for a postal address)