Safe by design, and easy to check

There is no chat. No other players. No messages, no friend requests, no way for anyone to reach your child through BigPetPal.

The pet is the only thing your child can talk to, and nothing your child says is shared with anyone except you. This is not a setting you have to find and switch on. It is how the product is built, and it cannot be turned off.

The microphone is off until your child presses the button. There is no wake word, no "always on" mode, and nothing listening in the background between conversations.

When your child presses to talk, the pet hears them. When they let go, it stops. That is the whole of it.

Open your parent portal and you will find every conversation your child has had. Not a summary of the highlights, not a sample. All of it.

You can read the full transcript of what both of them said, play back the audio of your child's own voice, and read a short plain-English summary of what the chat was about. It is there whenever you want it, for as long as your account is open.

Most parents look often in the first week and then relax. That is rather the point.

After each chat ends, the whole conversation is read by a separate system whose only job is to notice things a parent would want to know about. It looks for distress, for worry, for anything unsafe.

If it finds something serious, we email you. The alert also appears in your parent portal, showing you what was said, why it was flagged, and how serious it looked, so you can read it in context and decide what to do.

We should be straight with you about one thing: this check runs after the conversation, not during it. It usually takes under a minute. We would rather tell you that than let you believe someone is listening live, because BigPetPal is here to support your attention, not to replace it.

And when something is flagged, we tell you. Not an authority, not a third party. You.

To make the pet feel like your child's own friend, we need a first name, an age, and the handful of interests you choose to share. That is most of it.

What we do not do matters more:

• No advertising. There are no ad tools in the app at all.
• No tracking your child across other apps or websites.
• We never sell, rent or licence your child's information. Not now, not later.
• Nothing your child says is used to train AI models, by us or by the companies we work with.
• No purchases inside your child's app. Anything involving money happens in your browser, not theirs.

A few specialist services help turn speech into words and words back into speech. Every one of them is named, with exactly what it receives, in our Privacy Policy.

We follow the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth) and the Australian Privacy Principles. In practice that gives you four things you can act on today:

• We only collect what the pet genuinely needs. Your permission does not let us collect more than that.
• You can see everything we hold about your child, any time, in your portal.
• You can correct anything that is wrong, yourself.
• You can have it all destroyed the moment you want it gone.

How long we keep each thing is set out plainly in our retention schedule. You can also review our published privacy assessment register.

Delete a child's profile from your parent portal and their transcripts, summaries, safety flags and voice recordings go with it.

To close your whole account, use our deletion request form or email privacy@bigpetpal.com. We will confirm it is you, delete everything, and email you when it is done. You do not need to give a reason, and we will not try to talk you out of it.