Privacy Policy

Mile Coder is a free educational website for children aged roughly four to eight, together with resources for their parents and teachers. It is operated as a sole trader from Victoria, Australia.

This policy explains how we handle personal information — that is, information about an identified individual, or one who is reasonably identifiable, as the term is used in the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth).

As a sole trader with an annual turnover of $3 million or less, Mile Coder is a small business operator and is not, at present, legally bound by the Australian Privacy Principles (APPs).

We are also aware that the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner is developing a Children's Online Privacy Code under the Privacy and Other Legislation Amendment Act 2024. We intend to meet that Code when it is registered, whether or not it applies to us by law.

This is the part that matters most, so it is stated plainly. Every activity on this site — the eighteen AI missions, Train Your Robot, Robot Miles, the puzzles, the printables — is ordinary JavaScript running inside the browser on the child's own device.

• There is no sign-up, login, account or profile of any kind.
• A child is never asked for a name, age, email address, school, photograph or voice recording.
• Nothing a child types, taps, draws or answers is transmitted to us or to anyone else.
• We do not use advertising, ad networks, analytics, tracking pixels, fingerprinting or any third-party marketing scripts anywhere on the site.
• We do not build profiles of visitors, and we have no database of users to build them in.
• We never sell, rent or trade personal information. We do not disclose it for any commercial purpose.

Badge progress on the AI missions and Train Your Robot is written to your browser's localStorage and stays on that one device. We cannot read it. Clearing your browser data erases it. See our Cookies & Local Storage page for the detail.

Being complete about it, there are four ways information reaches us at all.

a. Website server logs

Our host records standard web-server logs for every request, as every website does: IP address, date and time, the page requested, and browser type. We use these only to keep the site running and secure. We do not use them to identify individuals and we do not combine them with anything else.

b. If you email us

The contact form on this site does not send anything to us. It opens your own email program with a message pre-filled, which you then choose to send. There is no form-handling service in between: what you type into that form is not submitted to us, or to anyone else, unless and until you send the email yourself. If you do send it, we receive whatever you put in it — typically your name, your email address, and your question. We use it to answer you and we keep it no longer than we need to.

c. Searches on the AI Resources page

The AI Resources page is for adults building software, not for children. When you search there, your search words are sent to our server and passed on to GitHub, the npm registry, Hugging Face and the Model Context Protocol registry so we can show you live results. Please do not type personal information into that search box.

d. Read-aloud

The “Read to me” buttons use the speech engine built into your browser. We deliberately select an offline voice from your device wherever one is available, so the words never leave the machine. On the small number of devices with no offline voice installed, your browser may fall back to its own online voice service, which would send that sentence to your browser maker. Only fixed lesson text and Robot Miles's own replies are ever read aloud — never anything a child has written.

This site is designed for children, so we build on the assumption that a child is using it and cannot give meaningful consent to anything.

• We collect no personal information from children, so there is no parental consent for us to seek and nothing for a parent to have to withdraw.
• There is no chat with other people, no comments, no uploads, no sharing and no way for a child to be contacted by anyone through this site.
• Robot Miles is a small program running on the device with a fixed, hand-written set of answers. It is not a live chatbot, it does not call an AI service, and it does not learn from or remember what a child types.
• We show no advertising and take no sponsorship, so there is no commercial interest in a child’s attention or data.

Because this site holds nothing about a child, a parent, carer or school does not need to ask us to delete anything. If a child has earned badges on a device and you want them gone, clearing that browser's site data removes them immediately.

Australian Privacy Principle 8 concerns sending personal information outside Australia. We do not deliberately send any, but you should know where the site physically runs:

• Hosting. The site is hosted on Vercel, a company based in the United States, which is where the server logs described above are processed and stored.
• Search sources. Searches on the AI Resources page reach GitHub, npm, Hugging Face and the Model Context Protocol registry, all based in the United States.
• Email. Our contact address is a Google-hosted mailbox, so an email you send us is stored on Google's servers.

Fonts are served from our own domain rather than fetched from Google Fonts, so visiting a page does not tell anyone else you were here.

The strongest protection we have is that there is almost nothing to protect: we hold no accounts, no passwords and no user database, so there is no store of children's information that could be breached, subpoenaed or sold with the business.

The site is served over HTTPS. The administrative area used to update our resource catalogue is password-protected and available only to the operator.

If a data breach ever occurred that was likely to cause serious harm, we would notify the people affected and the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner, following the Notifiable Data Breaches scheme, even though we are not currently required to.

You may ask what personal information we hold about you, ask us to correct it, or ask us to delete it. Email contact.milecoder@gmail.com and we will respond within 30 days.

In practice the answer is usually that we hold nothing except any email correspondence you have sent us, which we will delete on request. We do not charge for this.

You may also deal with us anonymously or under a pseudonym. Nothing on this site requires you to identify yourself.

If you believe we have mishandled your personal information, please tell us first at contact.milecoder@gmail.com. We will acknowledge your complaint within 7 days and give you a written response within 30 days.

If you are not satisfied with our response, you can complain to the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC), which is free:

• Online: oaic.gov.au/privacy/privacy-complaints
• Phone: 1300 363 992
• Post: GPO Box 5218, Sydney NSW 2001

If we change how we handle information, we will update this page and change the date at the top. If a change is significant — for example if we ever started collecting something we do not collect today — we will say so prominently on the site rather than quietly editing this text.