Short version (DRAFT — pending legal review; not yet in force)
- Before your child's art can be published or sold, you become a verified Agent in four steps: verify your ID, do a short liveness check together with your child, confirm you have parental authority, and give consent.
- Our verification provider checks your ID. We receive only a pass or fail result, never copies of your documents, selfie or video.
- Until all four steps are complete, you can set up a profile and keep private drafts, but nothing can be published and no sale can be created. This is enforced by our servers, not just the app.
- You can withdraw consent at any time. Public display stops straight away; deleting the profile removes the art.
- Making false statements about your identity or your authority over a child breaks our Terms and may be reported.
Effective date: EFFECTIVE DATE
This statement forms part of our Terms of Service. It explains the verification and consent steps for Agents (parents and legal guardians) and the statements you make when you complete them. Our Children's Privacy Notice explains how your child's information is handled.
1. Why we verify families
Kidbys publishes and sells art made by children. To protect children, we need reasonable confidence that:
- you are a real adult and who you say you are;
- a real child exists and is taking part with you;
- you have the legal authority to act for that child; and
- you agree, on the child's behalf, to what Kidbys does with the child's information and art.
Each of these is a separate question, so each has its own step. This is how we meet legal requirements for verifiable parental consent (such as COPPA in the US and Article 8 GDPR in the EU) and prevent fake or AI-generated family profiles.
2. The four verification steps
| Step | What happens | What Kidbys receives |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Identity verification | You verify a government-issued photo ID and take a selfie with our identity-verification provider (Stripe Identity), inside its own hosted flow | Status (verified, processing, needs input, cancelled), a session reference, a failure category if it failed, and timestamps. Not your name, date of birth, address, ID number, or any images |
| 2. Joint liveness check | You and your child take part together in a short live check run by a liveness provider, to confirm a real adult and a real child are present together | Pass or fail, a reason category if it failed, the time, and a reference. Never the video, images or a biometric template |
| 3. Authority attestation | You confirm the statements in Section 3 | The version of the attestation you accepted and when |
| 4. Consent | You give consent on the child's behalf to the processing described in our Children's Privacy Notice, and separately to public display of their art | The version you accepted, when, and for which purposes |
Provider details are on our Subprocessor list.
2.1 What you can do before verification is complete
Before all four steps are complete you can create an adult account, set up a child profile where your country allows it, and save private drafts. You cannot submit art for review, publish, or create a sale. Our servers refuse those actions for any Agent without a current verification.
2.2 Retries, manual review and freshness
- If a step fails, the app tells you which requirement is unmet. You can retry within limits. Repeated failures may be sent to a person for review.
- Verification stays valid for IDENTITY VERIFICATION VALIDITY PERIOD — production value open; beta uses 365 days for identity and JOINT LIVENESS VALIDITY PERIOD for the joint liveness check. After that, or if we suspect account takeover or fraud, we may ask you to verify again.
- When we update the Terms or this statement, you may need to accept the new version before you can continue publishing.
3. What you confirm as an Agent
By completing verification, you confirm to Kidbys that, for each child profile you create or manage:
- Identity. You are the person whose identity was verified, and you are at least 18 years old.
- Authority. You are the child's parent or legal guardian, or you otherwise have the legal authority to act for the child, including to give consent to processing of their personal data, to publish their art, to sell their physical artwork, and to license reproductions of it.
- Other parents. Where the law of your country requires the agreement of another person with parental responsibility for any of these things, you have obtained it.
- No restriction. No court order or other legal restriction prevents you from doing these things.
- The child is real and present. The child who took part in the joint liveness check is the child whose profile you are creating.
- Originality. Art you publish under the child's profile was made by that child.
- Accuracy. The information you give about the child (including any age band) is accurate.
- Changes. You will tell us promptly at [email protected] if any of this stops being true, for example after a change in custody.
- Supervision. You will supervise your child's use of their Artist area in a way suitable for their age, and keep their picture code and devices secure.
- Child's interests. You will use Kidbys, including any proceeds from your child's art, consistently with your child's best interests and any law that applies to a child's earnings or property where you live.
We do not routinely ask for birth certificates or custody papers, because collecting them from every family would create unnecessary privacy risk. We may ask for documents if there is a dispute, a red flag, a non-parent arrangement, or another elevated risk. Any documents requested are kept in a restricted store and deleted when no longer needed.
4. What you consent to
On your child's behalf, you consent to Kidbys:
- creating and maintaining the child profile and the restricted Artist area;
- collecting private drafts, a picture-code credential and device credential from your child as described in the Children's Privacy Notice;
- screening and moderating your child's art;
- separately, displaying the art you publish, with your child's display name and age band, in the public gallery and on your child's public web page (the "public gallery display" consent);
- processing the joint liveness check through our provider, solely for verification.
5. Withdrawing consent
You can withdraw consent at any time from Profile > Privacy & Data > Consent records, or by emailing [email protected].
| If you withdraw | What happens |
|---|---|
| Public gallery display | Processing for public display stops and search and cache entries are invalidated. Your child's art is not deleted. |
| All consent for your child (by deleting the profile) | The child profile, art and derivatives are deleted through our erasure process. See How to delete your account |
Withdrawing consent does not affect processing that happened before. Some records must be kept even after withdrawal, such as financial records of completed sales and the opaque custody history; these never contain your child's name or image.
Today, after withdrawing a consent in the app, re-granting it requires contacting [email protected].
6. Disputes about authority
If another adult tells us they have authority over a child profile, or we receive information suggesting a profile was created without authority, we may:
- freeze publishing, sales, payouts and sensitive changes for that profile;
- ask both adults for evidence, such as a court order;
- remove the profile from public view while we review.
We do not decide family-law disputes. We act on court orders and other evidence we reasonably consider reliable, and we keep a record of what we did and why.
7. Custody transfer
You can propose to transfer a child profile to another verified Agent from Manage Artists in the app. The receiving Agent must accept within 14 days. Transfers are recorded in the custody history. The receiving Agent must already be verified, and the transfer does not move your own account data.
8. Consequences of false statements
Giving false information about your identity, about a child, or about your authority is a serious breach of our Terms. We may suspend or close your account, remove content, cancel sales, withhold or reverse payouts where the law allows, and report the matter to the authorities.
9. Records we keep
We keep a record of each verification result, attestation and consent (version, time, purpose and outcome) for as long as the child profile exists and for RETENTION — consent records after deletion afterwards, so we can show that consent was obtained. These records contain no ID images or video.