Privacy Policy — Color My Heart Out
The Deal
I don't want your data. I don't want your child's data. I don't want your email, your name, your device, your location, your habits, or a list of which pictures your kid likes best.
This is a coloring app for children. It collects nothing. It sends nothing. It shows no ads. It asks for no money, ever, for anything. Most of this policy is a list of things I don't do.
If you came here looking for the part where I explain how I share anonymized insights with trusted partners to improve the experience — wrong document. That part doesn't exist.
Who I Am
My name is Michael Sherman. I built Color My Heart Out because I got tired of handing my kids a tablet and watching a coloring app interrupt them with an ad for a casino game, or gate the good pictures behind a purchase button sized perfectly for a four-year-old's thumb.
The app is formally operated by Quixotic Universe Inc, a California corporation, of which I am the sole owner. You can reach me at michael@michaelsherman.com.
There's no development team. No marketing team. No growth team. No data science department mining your child's behavior to surface engagement opportunities. It's me. And as I said: I don't want the data. I don't have time for it.
What I Collect
Nothing.
There's no account. No signup. No registration. No email field. No "create a profile to save your progress." No birthday prompt. No "tell me about yourself for a better experience."
I don't ask, because I don't want to know.
The App Doesn't Go Online. At All.
This is the short version of the whole policy: Color My Heart Out has no networking code in it. It cannot phone home, because there is no home to phone. It works identically on an airplane, in a car, in a basement, or with the device in Airplane Mode forever.
There is no server of mine. There is nowhere for your data to go, even if I wanted it, which I don't.
The only internet activity connected to this app is the App Store (or Google Play) checking whether there's an update, the same way it does for every app on the device. That's the store doing its usual thing, not me watching you.
What Your Device Stores, On Your Device
- Your pictures in progress — which squares you've painted, so you can come back to them.
- Your settings — sound, piano notes, critters, left-handed layout, the Grown-Up Lock.
- Any photos you import, plus small thumbnails of them.
All of it lives in the app's own storage on your device. I can't see any of it. I don't want to see any of it. Delete the app and it's gone, and I can't recover it for you, because I never had it in the first place.
Your Own Photos Stay Yours
You can turn a photo into a picture to paint. Here's exactly what happens:
- You tap My Photos. The system's own photo picker opens — Apple's, not mine.
- You pick one photo. The app receives that single photo and nothing else.
- The app copies it into its own storage so it can be painted.
The app never browses your photo library. It can't. The picker hands over the one picture you chose and nothing more. That copy stays on your device, and it is never uploaded anywhere, because — see above — there is nowhere for it to go.
On Mac, you can save a finished picture wherever you like. That's your computer, your file.
Children
This one matters, so it's not boilerplate.
Color My Heart Out is made for children, and it is built so that a child using it alone cannot give away anything about themselves, because there's nothing to give away and no one to give it to. Specifically:
- No personal information is collected from anyone, of any age, ever. That satisfies COPPA by the simplest possible route: there's nothing to protect, because nothing is gathered.
- No ads. Not banner ads, not video ads, not "rewarded" ads, not cross-promotion for my own things. None.
- No in-app purchases, no subscriptions, no currency, no unlockables. Every picture and every feature is in the app from the moment you install it.
- No third-party analytics, advertising, or tracking SDKs. There are no third-party SDKs at all.
- No social features. No chat, no sharing to social networks, no user-generated content shown to anyone else, no way for a stranger to contact your child.
- No links out of the app. A child cannot tap their way into a browser, a store page, or my inbox.
Parental Controls
Settings, photo import, and saving a picture sit behind the Grown-Up Lock: press and hold for three seconds, then answer a multiplication question. It's on by default. A grown-up can turn it off in Settings if they'd rather not bother with it.
It's not a bank vault. It's a speed bump for small hands, which is exactly what it's meant to be.
Cookies
None. There's no website involved in using the app, and the app sets no cookies of any kind.
Analytics
None.
I have no idea how many people use this app, which pictures are most popular, how long anyone paints for, or whether anyone finishes. No dashboards, no funnels, no retention charts. I'm flying completely blind and I prefer it that way.
If I ever want to know something, I'll ask — in public, in a way you can ignore — rather than sneak a tracker into a children's app.
Third-Party Platforms
I don't share data with third parties, because I don't have data to share. But a couple of companies are unavoidably between you and the app:
Apple distributes it through the App Store, and Google distributes the Android version through Google Play. When you install from a store, you're dealing with a trillion-dollar company's storefront, not with me. They have their own accounts, terms, and privacy policies, and they collect their own download and device information on their end. That's between you and them.
The stores hand developers some coarse aggregate numbers whether the developer wants them or not — roughly how many downloads, roughly which countries. Nothing in that is tied to you or your child, I don't go looking at it, and it wouldn't tell me anything useful if I did.
If you've opted in to sending crash reports to developers, Apple or Google may pass me an anonymous crash log when something breaks. It says what code crashed. It doesn't say who you are, and I only see it because you chose to share it.
Your Legal Rights
Depending on where you live, you have rights under laws like the GDPR, the UK GDPR, and the CCPA/CPRA — to access, correct, delete, or receive a copy of personal data a company holds about you, and to object to certain uses of it.
In this case the answer is short and boring. I hold no personal data about you or your child. If you email and ask "what do you have on me?", the reply will be an anticlimactic "nothing." But I'll still reply, because that's how I do things.
California residents: I don't "sell" or "share" personal information as the CCPA/CPRA defines those terms. I don't sell or share it under any ordinary definition either.
Security
The strongest security measure available is not having the data in the first place, and that's the one I use. Your pictures and settings sit on your device, protected by your device. Nothing travels to me, so there's nothing of yours for anyone to intercept or steal from me.
Changes
If I update this policy, I'll change the date at the top. If I ever start collecting anything — which is not the plan, now or ever — I'll say so loudly, before it takes effect, and you'll have every chance to walk away.
Contact
A real human reads it. It's me. There's only me.