What happens to the photos

On this page

1. The short answer
2. What happens to a photo, step by step
3. Who can look — including us
4. Does the AI learn from the faces in the photos?
5. How long they stay
6. The button that removes everything
7. If you want the long version

The short answer

Your photos are used to draw one book, for you. They are stored in the EU, in a place that is not reachable from the public internet. A small number of trained people at Fablebook can open them, and only to check that the drawings came out right. To draw the book they go to Google, in the United States, which keeps what we send for up to 55 days to detect abuse. They are deleted automatically — 60 days after your book arrives, or 30 days after the book was last changed if you do not order. They are never sold, never shown to another customer, and never used to train an AI model.

What happens to a photo, step by step

It is worth being concrete about the route, because the route is where the safety actually lives:

• The photo travels encrypted from your phone and lands in a private storage bucket in the EU. We keep two buckets, both private — one for the photos and drawings, one for the finished book files that go to the printer — and the code that writes files does not take the bucket as an instruction: each operation has its bucket built in. "A photo was accidentally written to the printer’s bucket" is not a mistake our software is capable of making.
• On the way in, everything the phone wrote into the file is removed: the GPS position (often exact to the metre), the time, the phone’s make and model, sometimes your name, and the small hidden copy of the original frame that cameras tuck inside. The picture is re-encoded with nothing attached but its colour profile. We never have the place your photo was taken, so there is nothing to leak, send on or look up.
• Nothing about that photo is written to a log file. Not the image, not its address in storage, not the id of the family it belongs to. The one part of the system that touches photographs is the one part forbidden from logging anything at all.
• To draw a page, the photo and our drawing instructions go to our illustration provider, Google’s Gemini API. It comes back as an illustration. The instructions call everyone by name, because the model that draws the pages has to know who is who: the name of each child the book is about (and their age, and whether a boy or a girl, if you told us), the names of the brothers, sisters, parents, grandparents and pets in the book and what the children call them, the age of a brother or sister if you gave it, and what happens on each page. The finished pages go back to the same provider to be checked, with the story’s words on them, and — if you order the colouring book — to be traced into line drawings. If you ask us to change a page, your request goes to it too, in your own words. It never receives your address, your e-mail address, your phone number or the dedication you wrote, unless you type them into such a request yourself.
• You see your own photos through a link that expires in 15 minutes at most. When a person on our side needs to look at a photo — see below — they do not get a permanent address for it either, but a link that expires within the hour, long enough to check a book without a page going dark halfway; the code will not issue one lasting longer than an hour under any circumstances.
• You see a proof. Nothing is printed until you approve it. What goes to the printer is the finished book file and your delivery address — never your original photos. The printer collects the book file from our private storage through a link that stops working after seven days; the file has no public address.

Who can look — including us

Here is the part most companies leave out. Yes, a human being at Fablebook can open your photographs. Not many of us, and only for one reason: an AI draws a nose in the wrong place surprisingly often, and someone has to compare the drawing with the child to catch it before the book is printed. A service that promised nobody would ever look would be a service that posted you a book with your daughter’s face wrong on page nine.

What that access is not: it is not browsing, it is not permanent, and it is not anonymous. Access runs through the expiring links above, the quality-control tools are closed to search engines and cached nowhere, and nobody outside that job has a route to a customer photo at all.

Does the AI learn from the faces in the photos?

No — and this is the question we would ask first, so it gets a direct answer rather than a clause in section eleven.

We do not train any model on your photographs, and we never will: it is not something we have decided against for now, it is not part of what we sell. We use Google’s Gemini API on its paid terms, under which content sent to the API is not used to improve Google’s models. The free tier operates under different terms, and our code refuses to start on a free-tier key — a customer photo cannot reach it, because the software stops before the first image is sent.

We also do not build a face template, a biometric identifier or a searchable record of any child. The photo is used to draw a picture, and then it is deleted.

How long they stay

• Your book arrived: photos and drawn pages are deleted 60 days after delivery. The gap exists so we can reprint a book that turns up damaged. If the printer never confirms delivery, we treat the book as delivered 30 days after we sent it to print.
• You saw the preview but did not order: everything is deleted 30 days after the book was last changed.
• We cancelled and refunded your order (terms, section 8): everything is deleted 30 days after the refund.
• At Google: what we send and what comes back is kept for up to 55 days, only to detect abuse.
• For the pages drawn after payment, the drawing instructions and the images they need go to Google’s batch service as files, which Google deletes by itself 48 hours after they are uploaded. We delete them as soon as we no longer need them: the instructions when the pages of that round are back, the images when the book (or the colouring book) is finished or will not be drawn any further. We delete the pages Google draws there as soon as we have collected them; Google’s own limit for those is six weeks.
• You asked us to keep your characters for a future book: the drawings (never the photos) are kept until you switch it off, and at most 24 months after you last used them (we e-mail you once, 30 days before), and only because you asked — it is off unless you switch it on.

These are not intentions, they are scheduled jobs with the dates written into the code. What outlives the photos is the paperwork the tax authorities require — order and invoice records, and the record of your consent — kept without any photograph attached to them, and deleted automatically once the statutory years are over.

The button that removes everything

You do not have to wait for the timer, and you do not have to write us a letter. {{Delete our data|/mij}} is a control in your account. It removes the photographs, the drawn pages, the book, the family record and your login, and it starts the moment you press it: the book leaves your account and nothing more is drawn. The files themselves go in our next nightly clean-up — the same deletion path our automatic jobs use, so there is no second, weaker version of "deleted" for customer requests. If Google’s batch service still holds files for your book at that moment, the clean-up waits until Google has deleted them, at most 48 hours after they were uploaded, and runs the night after.

You can also withdraw your consent at any point before printing: we then stop, cancel the order and refund everything. And you have the full set of rights the GDPR gives you — access, correction, portability, complaint to a regulator — set out in the privacy policy.

If you want the long version

The privacy policy covers the same ground with the legal bases, the named processors, international transfers and how to complain. If something on this page and something in that one appear to disagree, tell us and we will fix it — they are meant to be the same document written twice, for two different readers.

Questions about this page

If you would rather talk to a person than read a legal text, e-mail us and we will reply in plain language.

Privacy and your data: support@fablebook.co.uk · Orders and complaints: support@fablebook.co.uk

Post: Name: Fablebook. Registered address: Keurenplein 41 Box A8357, 1069CD Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Chamber of Commerce (KvK) number: 96345357. VAT number: NL005203142B97.