Effective October 28, 2026
Insectopia Explorer is a free educational game for kids made by Accelerator Media, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. It is built so kids can play without giving us any personal information.
This policy covers the Insectopia Explorer web game, the Android and iPhone apps, and the phone photo page the game opens. “We” means Accelerator Media.
Quick summary for parents
- No accounts. Kids never create an account or give a name, email, age, birthday or phone number.
- Bug photos are checked and deleted. Photos with a person’s face are rejected. Bug photos are stripped of hidden data, used once to identify the bug, then deleted.
- No exact location. The desktop game never asks for location. On phones, location is optional and is turned into a broad region (like “Pacific Northwest”) on the device. Only the region name is sent.
- No ads and no tracking for advertising. We don’t sell or share data, and the game shows no ads.
- Anonymous play stats only. We count things like how many people reach each part of the game, without knowing who they are.
What we collect
We collect only what the game needs to work, and none of it identifies a child.
| Data | Why | How long |
|---|---|---|
| Bug photos the player chooses to send | Identify the bug | Deleted right after identification |
| Broad region (optional, phones only) | Seasonal bug tips | Saved on the device; sent with each request, not stored |
| Current month | Seasonal bug tips | Not stored |
| Typed questions to Lumen | Answer the question | Kept briefly in memory for the conversation, then discarded |
| Random device ID | Keep Ask Lumen conversations and the daily question limit working | Stored on the server only as a scrambled (hashed) value |
| Anonymous play events | Improve the game | Kept in a private dataset |
We never collect: names, email addresses, phone numbers, ages or birthdays, exact GPS location, contact lists, photos of people, voice recordings, or advertising IDs.
Bug photos
Every photo goes through these steps on our server, in this order:
- Face check. If a person’s face is detected, the photo is rejected and goes no further.
- Hidden data removed. We strip the photo’s metadata (EXIF), which can include location and date.
- Shrunk. The photo is reduced to a small size (512 pixels).
- Identified. Our server identifies the bug with BioCLIP 2, and Anthropic’s Claude double-checks the result.
- Deleted. The photo is discarded once identification is done. We don’t save it.
Phone photo page. When a player uses “Use my phone,” the game shows a short code. The code expires after 30 minutes or once a bug is found. A small preview of the photo may be held in memory until then, and is never written to storage.
Location
Location is optional and never leaves the device as exact coordinates.
- Desktop and web game: never asks for location. Players can pick a broad region in Settings if they want.
- Phones (app and phone photo page): the phone asks permission first. If allowed, the device turns the approximate location into one of 23 broad regions (for example, “Pacific Northwest”). Only that region name is sent. We request approximate location only, never precise location.
- If location is declined, the player can pick a region from a list or skip it. Lumen then uses only the current month for seasonal tips.
Ask Lumen
Lumen is an AI guide. Players can type up to 10 questions a day, and Lumen answers in text and a generated voice.
- Personal information is blocked. If a question includes something personal, like a name, address, phone number or school, Lumen gives a friendly reminder not to share that, and the question goes no further.
- Questions are kept briefly. Recent questions are held in server memory so Lumen can follow the conversation, then discarded. They are not saved to a database or used to train AI.
- Answers are filtered to keep them kid-friendly.
- Lumen can be wrong. She is an AI and can sometimes get a bug wrong.
Anonymous play data
We count how the game is played so we can improve it, without knowing who is playing.
- What we record: game steps reached (like “met Lumen” or “finished the battle”), loading time, and which badge was earned, tied to a random session number.
- What we don’t record: names, IP addresses, locations or anything that identifies a player.
- Device ID: the game keeps a random ID on the device so Ask Lumen and the daily question limit work. Our server only ever holds a scrambled (hashed) version of it.
- No outside trackers: the game includes no advertising or third-party analytics tools, and Unity’s own analytics are turned off.
Service providers
A few trusted companies help run the game. They receive only what’s listed here, and only to provide their service to us.
| Provider | What it does | What it receives |
|---|---|---|
| Hugging Face | Hosts the game and our server | Standard web requests needed to load the game |
| Anthropic (Claude) | Checks bug identifications and writes Lumen’s answers | Face-free, metadata-free bug photos (512 px); typed questions with personal info blocked |
| ElevenLabs | Creates Lumen’s spoken voice | The text of Lumen’s answer only |
| BioCLIP 2 (Imageomics Institute) | Identifies bugs | Runs on our own server; no data is sent to the Imageomics Institute |
Anthropic and ElevenLabs process this data under their business (API) terms and don’t use it to train their AI models. We don’t sell data or share it for advertising.
Children’s privacy (COPPA)
Insectopia Explorer is made for kids, and we designed it to follow the U.S. Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA).
- We don’t knowingly collect personal information from children, and the game doesn’t ask for any.
- Because no personal information is collected, the game doesn’t require parental consent to play.
- If we ever learn that personal information from a child reached us by mistake (for example, typed into a question), we delete it.
- If we ever add a feature that needs personal information, we will update this policy and get verifiable parental consent first.
How long we keep data, and security
- Photos: deleted right after identification.
- Questions to Lumen: the last 3 questions are held in server memory for up to 30 minutes so Lumen can follow the conversation, then discarded.
- Daily question counts: reset every day.
- Anonymous play stats: kept in a private dataset only our team can access, for as long as they help us improve the game.
- Security: all connections use HTTPS encryption, and access to our server and data is limited to our team.
Parents’ choices
- Location: turn it off anytime in the phone’s settings, or pick “Skip” in the game.
- Camera and photos: the game only uses the camera or photo library when your child chooses to. You can turn off access in the phone’s settings.
- Start fresh: uninstalling the app, or clearing the browser’s site data for the web game, removes the region choice and the random device ID from the device.
- Questions: you can contact us anytime to ask what we hold or to request deletion. Because we don’t know who players are, we may ask for details like the date and time of play to help us look.
Changes and contact
If we change this policy, we’ll update the date at the top. If a change affects what we collect from kids, we’ll explain it in the game before it takes effect.
Contact us
Accelerator Media, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit
Email: info@acceleratormedia.org
Mailing address: 32023 SE Pipeline Rd, Gresham, OR 97080
Phone: 503-386-1737