Privacy Policy

About this policy

This policy explains what personal information Pick a Pod (the Alexa skill) does and does not handle, and how the skill works at a technical level. It is written so that any parent — not just a lawyer — can understand it.

Pick a Pod is operated by an individual, not a company. The skill is provided free of charge, with no commercial relationship between the operator and the listener.

What Pick a Pod collects

Nothing. Specifically:

• No names, ages, dates of birth, addresses, or other identifying information
• No email addresses, phone numbers, or contact details
• No accounts, passwords, or login credentials — there are none to create
• No analytics, tracking pixels, behavioural data, or usage statistics
• No voice recordings — those are handled by Amazon at the platform level, not by this skill
• No location data
• No advertising identifiers

The skill has no database, no logging, and no remote storage of any kind.

What Pick a Pod does

When a child says “Alexa, open Pick a Pod”, the following happens:

• Amazon's Alexa service processes the voice request on its own infrastructure
• Alexa sends the recognised intent (such as “play three”) to the skill
• The skill looks up which podcast that number refers to, from a hard-coded list inside the skill's code
• The skill fetches the most recent episode from that podcast's public RSS feed
• The skill tells Alexa the URL of the audio file to stream
• Alexa streams the audio directly from the podcast publisher's servers to the Echo device

At no point does the skill receive, retain, or transmit any information about who is listening or what they listen to. The skill does not know whether the same child uses it twice, or whether the same Echo device is used by different listeners.

What Amazon does

Amazon operates the Alexa platform that this skill runs on. Voice recordings, request history, and other interaction data are handled by Amazon under its own privacy practices, not by Pick a Pod. This includes any data processed when a parent uses Amazon Kids profiles or the Alexa parental dashboard.

To review or change what Amazon retains, parents can:

• Visit the Alexa app on a phone, then go to Settings → Alexa Privacy
• Visit the parental dashboard at parents.amazon.co.uk for kids' profiles
• Read Amazon's UK privacy notice for details on what Amazon collects

What podcast publishers do

Each episode plays directly from the original podcast publisher's servers (BBC, Vermont Public, National Geographic, and so on). When an episode plays, the publisher's hosting service may receive a standard request from the Echo device, similar to how any podcast app works. Pick a Pod has no control over this and no relationship with these publishers — the skill simply uses their public RSS feeds, the same way thousands of podcast apps do.

Children's privacy and COPPA

Pick a Pod is intended for children, including those under 13. The skill complies with the United States Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) by collecting no personal information from any user, of any age. This is the strongest possible form of COPPA compliance — the absence of any data collection means there is nothing to consent to, store, or potentially expose.

No parental consent is sought because none is required: the skill processes no personal data on behalf of any child or adult.

UK GDPR and the Children's Code

For users in the United Kingdom and European Economic Area, the same principle applies under UK GDPR, the EU GDPR, and the UK Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) Children's Code (Age Appropriate Design Code). Because Pick a Pod processes no personal data, no lawful basis for processing needs to be established, no Data Protection Impact Assessment is triggered, and the requirements of the Children's Code that relate to data collection, profiling, and behavioural advertising are satisfied trivially: none of those things take place.

No advertising or paid content

Pick a Pod contains no advertising of any kind. There are no in-skill purchases, no subscriptions, no upsells, and no sponsored content within the skill itself. Individual podcast episodes may contain advertising or sponsorship as part of the publisher's own podcast — that is outside the operator's control and is the same advertising any listener would hear in a regular podcast app.

Third parties

Pick a Pod does not share any information with any third party, because Pick a Pod has no information to share. The skill does not integrate with any analytics service, advertising network, social platform, or marketing tool.

Security

Because no personal data is collected or stored, there is no personal data that could be compromised in a security incident affecting Pick a Pod. The skill itself runs on Amazon's managed Lambda infrastructure under Amazon's security controls.

Changes to this policy

If this policy changes — for example, if the skill's functionality is updated in a way that affects what data is processed — a new version will be published on this page with a clear effective date, before any change to the skill takes effect. The most recent effective date is shown at the top of this page.

Material changes that would affect what data the skill collects (none, currently) will be flagged prominently at the top of this page for at least 30 days.

Contact

For questions, concerns, or any kind of privacy-related request, please email hello@pickapod.uk. Replies might take a few days, as this is a side project run by one person.

Parents who want to raise a concern with a regulator may contact:

• The UK Information Commissioner's Office at ico.org.uk
• The US Federal Trade Commission at ftc.gov