Compliance commitment
Langa Library intends to operate its services for children and young readers in a manner consistent with applicable child privacy, data protection, consumer protection, online safety, and content-access laws in the jurisdictions where the service is made available.
Where applicable, this may include requirements relating to children under 13, parental or guardian consent, age-appropriate disclosure, data minimization, protection of minors, content classification, and restrictions on public participation by minors.
If a local law, platform rule, browser-store rule, school requirement, or child-protection requirement is stricter than this policy, Langa Library should apply the stricter safeguard where reasonably practicable.
General-audience service, not child-directed by default
Langa Library is intended as a general digital library for readers, researchers, students, and the public. It is not designed by default as a service primarily directed to children under 13.
If Langa Library later creates a child-directed collection, school edition, classroom workflow, family account, or youth reading program, that feature should have additional age-appropriate privacy notices, parental or guardian consent flows where required, and content restrictions before launch.
Until such dedicated systems exist, Langa Library should treat known or suspected under-age use cautiously and should limit features that create public exposure, persistent profiles, public contributions, or unnecessary personal data processing.
Children under 13
Where Langa Library has actual knowledge that a user is under 13, or below the applicable minimum age in the relevant jurisdiction, Langa Library should restrict account features that are not appropriate for that user.
Langa Library should not knowingly collect, publish, or retain unnecessary personal information from a child under 13 without the parental or guardian consent required by applicable law.
Features that may require additional restriction for children under 13 include public contributor profiles, public comments, public translation publication, public cover attribution, certificates, saved social identity, open messaging, or other community-facing functions.
Young readers under 18
Readers under 18 may have different levels of maturity, legal capacity, and parental or guardian oversight. Langa Library should therefore distinguish between general reading access, mature-content access, contribution privileges, public profile features, saved translation features, and community recognition features.
Known or reasonably suspected users under 18 should not be given unrestricted public participation tools by default. Public display names, contributor credits, public submissions, certificates, and public community recognition may require additional safeguards.
If a feature may expose a young reader publicly or collect additional personal information, Langa Library should apply a more cautious default until age, consent, and safety requirements are reviewed.
Age signals and third-party sign-in
Langa Library may allow sign-in through third-party identity providers such as Google, Facebook, or other account systems. These systems may provide account, authentication, or age-related signals depending on their own policies, the user's region, and available account data.
Third-party sign-in is not a complete age-verification system. A user may misstate age, use another person's account, have incomplete account data, or access content without reliable age information.
For that reason, Langa Library should not rely solely on Google, Facebook, or any other external sign-in provider to determine whether a reader is a child, a teenager, or an adult. Langa Library should maintain its own content, privacy, and feature-access safeguards.
Age assurance and account controls
- Langa Library may use age-related signals from account providers where available, but should treat them as one signal rather than a complete guarantee.
- Where age is unknown, Langa Library may apply conservative defaults for mature or uncertain content.
- Where a user is known or reasonably believed to be under the required age for a feature, Langa Library may restrict or disable that feature.
- If a user appears to have misrepresented age, Langa Library may review the account, restrict access, request additional confirmation, or disable features that are inappropriate for the user's actual or suspected age.
- If parental or guardian consent is legally required, Langa Library should not enable the relevant child-account or data-processing feature until the consent process is available and completed.
Content classification and filtering
Langa Library should classify and review books, metadata, covers, descriptions, tags, OCR text, and translation surfaces with attention to age suitability where practical.
The library may include literary, historical, political, religious, philosophical, archival, or scholarly works that contain mature themes, difficult language, violence, discrimination, sexuality, trauma, or other sensitive material. Such material may be valuable for adult readers or research but unsuitable for younger readers.
Langa Library should therefore support maturity flags, review status, restricted access, cautious defaults, and reporting procedures for content that may be inappropriate for children or young readers.
Mature or uncertain content
- Works identified as mature should not be promoted to young readers by default.
- Works with uncertain maturity classification may be restricted, hidden from youth-facing discovery, or routed for review before being surfaced in youth contexts.
- Search, recommendations, featured sections, author pages, and cover displays should avoid presenting mature or uncertain content to young readers where age-aware controls are available.
- Historical or archival value does not remove the need for age-aware presentation.
- If a book, cover, metadata record, OCR result, or translation preview is reported as unsuitable for minors, Langa Library should review it and may restrict or correct it.
Limitations of review
Langa Library will seek to classify and review books carefully, but no large digital library can guarantee that every book, record, cover, OCR text, metadata field, imported file, or machine translation preview has been perfectly reviewed at all times.
A work may be misclassified, metadata may be incomplete, a cover may be unsuitable, OCR may contain errors, a translation may introduce unexpected wording, or a user may misrepresent age.
Because these risks cannot be eliminated entirely, Langa Library maintains reporting, correction, takedown, privacy, and safety contact channels.
Privacy of minors
Information about minors requires special care. Langa Library should minimize collection of personal information from children and young readers and avoid unnecessary public display of identifying information.
Langa Library should not publish a minor's personal identity, contact information, private reading activity, public contribution profile, certificate, or contributor credit without appropriate safeguards and, where required, parental or guardian consent.
If Langa Library learns that it has collected personal information from a child in a way that requires parental consent or additional legal safeguards, it should review the account, restrict relevant features where appropriate, and respond to parent or guardian requests.
Contributions by minors
Langa Library may later accept contributions such as metadata corrections, OCR reports, original covers, reading notes, or translation suggestions. Contributions by minors require additional caution.
A minor should not be encouraged to publish personal information, public profiles, contact details, identifying biography, school information, or other unnecessary personal data as part of a contribution.
Where the contributor is known or reasonably believed to be under 18, Langa Library may limit public attribution, require guardian consent, or display credit in a safer non-identifying form.
Parental, guardian, and school contact
Parents, guardians, educators, and schools may contact Langa Library to report age-inappropriate content, incorrect classification, privacy concerns involving a minor, account access concerns, or public display of a minor's information.
Langa Library may review the relevant account, record, book, cover, translation, or contribution and may restrict, correct, remove, or reclassify material where appropriate.
- General support: langalibrary.team@gmail.com.
- Privacy concerns involving minors: langalibrary.team@gmail.com.
- Copyright or takedown concerns: langalibrary.team@gmail.com.
- Security concerns involving accounts or access: langalibrary.team@gmail.com.