Privacy Policy

1. Who is responsible

mybirth.day is the controller of the personal information described here.

Write to [email protected] about anything in this policy.

If you are in the EEA or the UK and our answer does not satisfy you, you may complain to your national data protection authority. We would rather you came to us first.

2. What this covers

The website at mybirth.day, the mobile app, and the email and notifications we send you.

It does not cover other sites we link to, or content another site serves inside a memory. Those have their own policies.

3. What we collect

From you, when you make an account and use it:

• your username, display name and email address;
• your birth date — required, because it is when your birthday wall opens and how we check the minimum age;
• your timezone, so a wall opens at midnight where you actually are;
• the language you read the interface in;
• your profile photograph and bio, if you add them;
• the memories you write, and the photographs, video and audio you upload;
• who you follow, who is in your circle, and who you have blocked;
• whatever you tell us when you contact support.

From the provider you sign in with: an identifier for your Google or Apple account, your email address, and your name where they release it. We never receive your password.

From Stripe, if you subscribe: a customer identifier and the state of your subscription. Card details go straight to Stripe and never reach us.

From your device and network, automatically: IP address, browser and device type, what was requested and when, and diagnostics when something fails. Our delivery network also tells us an approximate country, which is used to pick a currency and a starting language — nothing finer than a country, and no GPS location.

From other people: what they write on your wall, and the fact that they follow, mention or block you.

4. Cookies and similar storage

There are four, and none of them is for advertising or follows you to other sites:

• a session cookie, which is what keeps you signed in — strictly necessary;
• a language cookie, which remembers the language you picked;
• a short-lived encrypted cookie during signup, which carries the username and birth date you typed across the hop out to Google or Apple, and expires within fifteen minutes;
• a preference kept in your browser for light or dark appearance.

No advertising cookies, no third-party trackers, no cross-site analytics pixels. Because every cookie we set is either strictly necessary or a preference you chose yourself, there is no consent banner to click past.

5. Why we use it, and our legal basis for doing so

Under the GDPR every purpose needs a legal basis. Ours are:

• to give you the service you asked for — making your account, opening your walls, showing memories, sending the notifications you turned on: performing our contract with you;
• to take payment and run a subscription: performing our contract, and a legal obligation for tax and accounting records;
• to keep mybirth.day safe — preventing abuse and spam, rate limiting, looking into breaches of the terms: our legitimate interest in a service that is not harmful to use, weighed against your interests;
• to fix and improve the product from error diagnostics and aggregate usage: our legitimate interest in something that works;
• to send you product email you asked for: your consent, which you can withdraw at any time;
• to answer a legal request, or to bring or defend a legal claim: a legal obligation, or our legitimate interest.

We do not use your content to train machine learning models, and we do not pass it to anybody who does.

6. What is public

Your profile and your walls are public by default. Anybody with the link can see them, with or without an account, and search engines can index them.

Public means: your username, your display name, your profile photograph, your bio, the day and month of your birthday, the walls you have, and the memories on them together with the name and photograph of whoever wrote each one.

Not public: your email address, your birth year, and your exact date of birth. Those are never shown on your profile.

You can change who may add to a wall and who a wall is for. That changes what the site shows from then on; it cannot reach back for what somebody has already seen or saved. Treat anything you post as something that may turn out to be permanent and public.

7. Who else sees it

We do not sell personal information, and we do not share it for cross-context behavioural advertising. It reaches somebody else in four situations:

• Other people using mybirth.day, as section 6 describes — that is the point of the product, not a side effect of it.
• Providers who process it on our instructions and for nothing else: Stripe for payments, Amazon Web Services for file storage, Cloudflare for delivery and protection, Hetzner for video encoding, our email provider for account and notification mail, and our hosting provider. Each one is bound by a written contract.
• Law and safety: where the law requires it, where we have to answer a valid legal request, or where it is necessary to protect somebody's life or safety, prevent fraud, or enforce our terms. We tell you when we are allowed to tell you.
• A business transfer: if mybirth.day is merged, bought or sold, personal information may move with it. You will be told, and this policy keeps applying until you are given a new one.

8. Where it goes

Some of the providers in section 7 are in the United States, so personal information may be processed outside the EEA and the UK.

When it is, we rely on the European Commission's Standard Contractual Clauses and the UK international data transfer addendum, alongside the measures in section 10. Ask at [email protected] and we will tell you what safeguards cover a particular transfer.

9. How long we keep it

We keep something for as long as it takes to do the thing we collected it for, and then it goes. In practice:

• your account and profile: while the account exists;
• a memory you delete: recoverable for 30 days, after which the record and its files are removed for good;
• a username you release: held for 90 days before anybody else may claim it, so nobody can step straight into a page that represented you;
• your account once you delete it: removed, with its memories and media, on the same schedule as above;
• payment and invoice records: as long as tax and accounting law requires, which outlasts the account;
• security and error logs: a short rolling window, then discarded;
• anything under a legal hold: until that matter ends.

Backups roll over on their own cycle, so something deleted can sit in a backup for a while after it has gone from the live service. It is not put back, and it is not used for anything.

10. How we look after it

Traffic is encrypted in transit. Files live on managed object storage that only the service can reach. Access to production data is limited to the people who need it, and it is logged.

Signing in happens at Google or Apple, which means there is no password of yours here to lose.

No system is perfectly secure. If a breach affects your personal information and is likely to put you at risk, we will tell you and the relevant authority inside the time the law allows.

11. Your rights

Wherever you live, you can ask us to:

• give you a copy of the personal information we hold about you;
• correct anything wrong — most of it you can change yourself in settings;
• delete your account and what it holds;
• hand you your content in a portable form;
• stop or restrict a use that rests on our legitimate interests; or
• withdraw a consent you gave, which does not undo what was done while it stood.

Write to [email protected]. We answer within one month, and we will say so if something complicated needs longer. It costs nothing, and asking will never change how you are treated here.

We may need to confirm who you are before acting, and we do that without collecting more than the check needs.

12. If you are in California

This section is your notice at collection under the CCPA, as amended by the CPRA.

Over the last twelve months we have collected the categories set out in section 3: identifiers, customer records, commercial information about a subscription, internet activity, coarse location inferred from an IP address, and the content you chose to upload. Section 5 says why we collected each, and section 9 says how long we keep it.

We disclose those categories for business purposes to the providers named in section 7. We have not sold personal information, and we have not shared it for cross-context behavioural advertising, in the last twelve months. We do not knowingly sell or share the personal information of anybody under 16.

You have the right to know, to delete, to correct, and to opt out of sale or sharing — there is nothing to opt out of, because we do neither. You also have the right not to be treated differently for exercising any of them, and we run no financial incentive programmes for personal information.

You may use an authorised agent, who has to show written permission from you. Write to [email protected].

13. If you are elsewhere in the United States

Virginia, Colorado, Connecticut, Utah and the other states with a comprehensive privacy law give you rights close to those in section 11 — access, correction, deletion, portability, and opting out of targeted advertising, sale, and profiling that has legal effects. We do none of those three things, so there is nothing to opt out of.

Write to [email protected] to exercise any of them. If we turn a request down you may appeal by answering our reply, and we will respond inside the time your state allows.

14. Children

mybirth.day is not for children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from them. Registration refuses a birth date that puts you under that age.

If we learn an account belongs to somebody under 13, we close it and delete what it holds.

If you are a parent or guardian and you think a child has given us information, write to [email protected] and we will remove it.

15. Automated decisions

We make no decision about you by automated means that has a legal effect or something similarly significant. Ordering a feed and working out when a wall opens are both automated, but neither decides anything about your rights.

16. Changes to this policy

When this policy changes materially we update the date at the top and tell you in the app or by email before it takes effect. Smaller corrections happen as they are needed.

Ask at [email protected] for an earlier version and we will send it.

17. Contact

mybirth.day

[email protected]