DoodleMate Privacy Policy

Last Updated: 09/11/2026

Tangential Operations LLC, a Delaware limited liability company ("Company", "we", "us", or "our"), has prepared this Privacy Policy to explain (1) what personal information we collect in connection with our DoodleMate service, (2) how we use and share that information, and (3) your choices concerning our privacy and information practices. This Privacy Policy applies to the personal information that we collect from users who have registered an account with us or otherwise interact with our website at https://doodlemate.com or any other products or services that link to this Privacy Policy (collectively, the "Services").

Applicability of this Privacy Policy

DoodleMate has three tiers of use, and what we collect depends on which one you are in:

1. The free core, open to everyone. Drawing, animating, and downloading your creation require no account, and we designed them to collect no personal information. Visitors of any age can use this tier, including children under 16.

2. Personal-information features, for ages 16 and up. Creating an account, uploading a photo, saving your work, and publishing a creation to a public link (which can include your recorded voice) all have the potential to contain personal information, so they sit behind a neutral date-of-birth screen. Visitors under 16 are routed back to the free core. Saving your work also requires an account; uploading a photo and publishing do not. If a parent or guardian wants these features for a child under 16, the parent or guardian must create and maintain the account and use the Services on the child's behalf, and they are the account holder from whom we collect information.

3. Education Mode, for classrooms. Teachers may create classroom logins for their students, including students under 16 and under 13. Here the relationship with us belongs to the teacher: the teacher creates every student login, and we collect the limited student information described in the "Education Mode: Students and Classrooms" section below under the teacher's authorization, consistent with COPPA best practices.

Outside Education Mode, we do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 16. If we learn that a child under 16 has passed the age screen and created an account, we will promptly delete that information. If you believe this has occurred, please contact us at the address in the "How to Contact Us" section below.

Personal Information We Collect

Information you provide to us:

• Account information: your email address, and, if you sign in with Google or Apple, the name and email those services share with us.
• User content, such as images, drawings, and doodles you upload to our Services ("User Content"). We process your User Content to generate animated videos. If you upload drawings or artwork created by or depicting a minor, you represent and warrant that you have the right and authority to upload such content and, where required by applicable law, that you have obtained appropriate parental or guardian consent. If you choose to publish a creation, we additionally store and host the rendered video, a preview image, and the "recipe" (the caption, motion, background, and character selections) needed to display it. We make a published creation publicly accessible at a shareable link.
• Saved work, if you choose to save a creation to your account. We store what the creation is made of: its recipe, a preview image, a rendered video, and any voice recording it uses, along with any characters and backdrops you save to your libraries. We keep these until you delete them or delete your account. A voice recording stays on your device unless you save or publish the creation that uses it.
• Feedback or correspondence, such as information you provide when you contact us with questions, feedback, product reviews, or otherwise correspond with us online.
• Marketing information, such as your preferences for receiving communications about our activities, events, and publications, and details about how you engage with our communications.
• Other information that we may collect which is not specifically listed here, but which we will use in accordance with this Privacy Policy or as otherwise disclosed at the time of collection.

Information we obtain from third parties:

• Social media information. We may maintain pages on social media platforms, such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and other third-party platforms. When you visit or interact with our pages on those platforms, the platform provider's privacy policy will apply to your interactions and their collection, use, and processing of your personal information. You or the platforms may provide us with information through the platform, and we will treat such information in accordance with this Privacy Policy.
• Other sources. We may obtain your personal information from other third parties, such as publicly-available sources.

Automatic data collection

When you use DoodleMate, some information is recorded automatically:

• Device and connection data, such as your browser type, operating system, screen size, language settings, IP address, and the general area (country or city) that an IP address points to.
• Usage data, such as which pages you viewed, when, and for how long, and which features you used (for example, that a character was animated or a video was downloaded).

How we collect it

• Web analytics (Plausible). We use Plausible Analytics, a privacy-focused service, to understand how DoodleMate is used overall. Plausible sets no cookies, stores no personal information, does not store IP addresses, and does not follow you to other websites. It gives us counts and usage patterns: how many people visited, which pages they viewed, which features were used, and which countries they came from. See Plausible's data policy.
• Our own servers. Like almost every website, our servers keep standard access logs (IP address, browser type, and the request made) so we can keep the site secure and fix problems. We keep them for a limited time and use them for nothing else. Our servers also record the usage events described above (for example, that a drawing was uploaded or a video was downloaded). Those records carry a random per-visit id that is discarded when you close the tab, never your IP address.
• Local storage in your browser. We store a few settings in your browser so the site works: your answer to the age screen, your sign-in session, and work in progress. These stay on your device and are not used to track you. You can clear them at any time through your browser's site-data settings.
• No cookies, no tracking pixels. DoodleMate sets no cookies, uses no advertising or tracking cookies, and places no tracking pixels in pages or emails. That is why there is no cookie banner: there is nothing to consent to. (Signing in with Google or Apple briefly takes you to their sign-in pages, which follow their own privacy policies.)

Advertising

We show no ads on DoodleMate, use no advertising cookies or identifiers, and share nothing with advertising networks. No advertising or tracking code from Google or any ad network runs on DoodleMate. We never use your uploaded images or doodles for advertising.

How We Use Your Personal Information

To operate our Services:

• Provide, operate, maintain, secure, and improve our Services.
• Provide information about our Services.
• Communicate with you about our Services, including by sending you announcements, updates, security alerts, and support and administrative messages.
• Understand your needs and interests, and personalize your experience with our Services and our communications.
• Respond to your requests, questions, and feedback.

For marketing. We may send you occasional marketing emails as permitted by law, for example about new features or events. Every such email has an unsubscribe link, and we do not use your personal information for advertising.

To comply with law. As we believe necessary or appropriate to comply with applicable laws, lawful requests, and legal process, such as to respond to subpoenas or requests from government authorities.

For compliance, fraud prevention, and safety. To: (a) protect our, your or others' rights, privacy, safety or property (including by making and defending legal claims); (b) enforce the terms and conditions that govern our Services; and (c) protect, investigate, and deter against fraudulent, harmful, unauthorized, unethical, or illegal activity.

For research and development. We may create and use de-identified information for our business purposes, including to analyze the effectiveness of our Services, to improve and add features to our Services, and to analyze the general behavior and characteristics of users of our Services. We may use this anonymous, aggregated, or de-identified data and share it with third parties for our lawful business purposes.

Content moderation. To keep DoodleMate safe, we scan images you upload for prohibited content, and we screen captions against a blocklist. The image scan is performed with the help of a third-party content-moderation provider, to which the uploaded image is sent for analysis. We retain a record of these moderation checks for a limited period for safety and abuse-prevention purposes.

No Generative AI Training

We will not use User Content (i.e., uploaded images and doodles) to train, fine-tune, or otherwise improve any generative AI models.

Education Mode: Students and Classrooms

What a student login is. A teacher creates each student's login and hands it over as a printed card with a code. Students have no email address and no password of their own; the printed code is the whole credential, and the login exists only inside their classroom.

What we collect from the teacher. A teacher holds an ordinary DoodleMate account, so everything above about account information applies to them. For each classroom they create, we also store the class name and grade level, the country and state or region the class is in, and the school name and district if the teacher chooses to enter them. We use the location to understand where DoodleMate is being used in schools and to ensure we are complying with local laws. We do not use any of it for advertising.

What we collect from students. The name or nickname their teacher entered, the creations they make and save (drawings, characters, backdrops, and scenes), and basic operational records such as the dates the login is used. By default we store no voice recordings and no student photo uploads: a student can always draw, and a student can still record their voice and download a video of their character speaking it, but the recording itself never reaches our servers and photo upload is off. Storing recordings and accepting photo uploads each require the teacher to explicitly opt in, confirming they have the necessary permissions. Like any website, our servers and security tools record technical information about each request, such as IP address and browser type. We use it only to operate and protect the service, never to profile a student or for advertising, and it is deleted automatically within 90 days.

What we deliberately don't do. Students see no advertising. We use no advertising or tracking cookies anywhere on DoodleMate, so none reach student sessions, and we share no student data with anyone for advertising. Our analytics on student sessions collect no personally identifiable information, are cookieless, and function in aggregate. We never sell student personal information, we don't use student data to train AI models, and the No Generative AI Training section above applies to student work in full.

Who can see student work. The student and their classroom's teacher, who can view, download, and delete it. Students can download their work directly, but they cannot publish it or share it with others through the site.

The teacher's role and parents. We rely on the teacher to provide consent on behalf of parents, consistent with COPPA best practices for services used for an educational purpose. We provide teachers a letter for parents describing all of this in plain terms. Parents can review or request deletion of their child's information through the teacher, who can act on it directly and immediately, or by contacting us.

Retention and deletion. Student work is kept while the classroom is in use. A teacher can delete an individual creation, a student, or the whole classroom at any time. Deleting a creation removes it and its files right away. Deleting a student or a classroom takes effect immediately, and the underlying files are erased by a nightly cleanup, normally within a day. Turning off photo upload or voice recording for a class deletes what was already collected under that permission, and turning it back on does not bring any of it back. If a classroom goes unused for about six months, we email the teacher a warning, then a final reminder, and about two weeks after the first warning we permanently delete the classroom and its students' work.

Questions. Write to privacy@doodlemate.com.

Cross-Border Processing of Your Personal Information

Tangential Operations LLC is headquartered in the United States. To provide and operate our Services, it is necessary for us to process your personal information in the United States. If we transfer personal information across borders such that we are required to apply appropriate safeguards to personal information under applicable data protection laws, we will do so. Please contact us for further information about any such transfers or the specific safeguards applied.

How We Share Your Personal Information

Service providers. We may share your personal information with third-party companies that provide services on our behalf or help us operate our Services (such as hosting, analytics, email delivery, content hosting and delivery, and content moderation). We do not share your personal information with advertising partners.

Professional advisors. We may disclose your personal information to professional advisors, such as lawyers, bankers, auditors, and insurers, where necessary in the course of the professional services that they render to us.

For compliance, fraud prevention, and safety. We may share your personal information for the compliance, fraud prevention, and safety purposes described above.

Business transfers. We may sell, transfer, or otherwise share some or all of our business or assets, including your personal information, in connection with a business transaction (or potential business transaction) such as a corporate divestiture, merger, consolidation, acquisition, reorganization or sale of assets, or in the event of bankruptcy or dissolution. In such a case, we will make reasonable efforts to require the recipient to honor this Privacy Policy.

Other users. Content you choose to publish may be visible to other people. Where your personal information can be seen, collected, and used by others, including being cached, copied, screen captured, or stored elsewhere by others (e.g., search engines), we are not responsible for any such use of personal information. In particular, a creation you choose to publish is public: it is viewable by anyone who has its link (not only signed-in users) and can be shared onward. Creations you do not publish are not shared.

Your Choices

In this section, we describe the rights and choices available to all users.

Personal information requests: In certain circumstances (including based on where you are located), you may have the following rights in relation to your personal information:

• The right to learn more about what personal information of yours is being processed, how and why such information is processed, and the third parties who have access to such personal information. We have made this information available to you without having to request it by including it in this Privacy Policy.
• The right to access your personal information.
• The right to rectify/correct your personal information.
• The right to restrict the use of your personal information where permitted under applicable law.
• The right to request that your personal information is erased/deleted where permitted under applicable law.
• The right to data portability (i.e. receive your personal information or have it transferred to another controller in a structured, commonly-used, machine readable format) where permitted under applicable law.
• The right to object to processing of your personal information or to direct us not to share your personal information with a non-affiliated third party where permitted under applicable law.

To make a request, please email us as provided in the "How to Contact Us" section below. We may ask for specific information from you to help us confirm your identity. We will require authorized agents to confirm their identity and authority, in accordance with applicable laws. You are entitled to exercise the rights described above free from discrimination.

In addition, where you have provided your consent to processing for the purposes indicated above, you may withdraw your consent at any time (or otherwise exercise your aforementioned rights in relation to your personal information) by contacting us below.

Please note that in some circumstances, we may not be able to fully comply with your request, for example if we are required to retain certain information about you to comply with applicable laws and regulations or if the information is necessary in order for us to provide the services you requested. We will not deny you access to our services, or provide you a lower quality of services if you exercise your rights.

Opt out of marketing communications. You can unsubscribe using the link in any marketing email we send, or change the setting on your account page.

Cookies and tracking. We use no cookies and no tracking technologies, so there is nothing to opt out of here. The settings we keep in your browser's local storage can be cleared at any time through your browser's site-data settings; the site will simply show you the age screen again.

Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information. We do not sell your personal information, and we do not share it with anyone for targeted advertising. Because we never do this, there is nothing you need to opt out of.

Analytics. Our only analytics service is Plausible, described under "Automatic data collection" above. It sets no cookies and identifies no one. If you would still rather not be counted, privacy browser extensions and ad blockers commonly block Plausible, and DoodleMate works exactly the same without it.

Do Not Track and Global Privacy Control. Some browsers send "Do Not Track" or "Global Privacy Control" signals asking websites not to track you or sell your data. We do not track you across websites and do not sell or share your data for advertising in the first place, so we already meet what these signals ask for, whether or not your browser sends them.

Other Sites, Mobile Applications, and Services

Our Services may contain links to other websites, mobile applications, and other online services operated by third parties. These links are not an endorsement of, or representation that we are affiliated with, any third party. In addition, our content may be included on web pages or in mobile applications or online services that are not associated with us. We do not control third-party websites, mobile applications or online services, and we are not responsible for their actions. Other websites and services follow different rules regarding the collection, use, and sharing of your personal information. We encourage you to read the privacy policies of the other websites and mobile applications and online services you use.

Retention

We retain your personal information for as long as appropriate to fulfill the purposes for which we collected it, including for the purposes of satisfying any legal, accounting, or reporting requirements, to establish or defend legal claims, or for fraud prevention purposes. To determine the appropriate retention period for your personal information, we consider the amount, nature, and sensitivity of the personal information, the potential risk of harm from unauthorized use or disclosure of personal information, the purposes for which we process personal information and whether we can achieve those purposes through other means, and the applicable legal requirements.

For specific content: images you upload are deleted automatically after approximately three weeks, unless you save the character, in which case we keep it until you delete it; a creation you save, along with its preview image, rendered video, and any voice recording it uses, is kept until you delete it or delete your account; a creation you publish (its video and preview image) is hosted for approximately three weeks and then deleted automatically, unless you are signed in and extend it; if we remove a published creation for a policy violation we may retain a copy for a limited period for legal and safety purposes; and moderation-scan records are retained for a limited period.

Security Practices

We use organizational, technical, and administrative measures designed to protect against unauthorized access, misuse, loss, disclosure, alteration, and destruction of personal information we maintain. Unfortunately, data transmission over the Internet cannot be guaranteed as completely secure. Therefore, while we strive to protect your personal information, we cannot guarantee the security of personal information.

Changes to this Privacy Policy

We reserve the right to modify this Privacy Policy at any time. If we make material changes to this Privacy Policy, we will notify you by updating the date of this Privacy Policy.

How to Contact Us

Please direct any questions or comments about this Privacy Policy or privacy practices to privacy@doodlemate.com.