Who is responsible
Everglow is a personal project, not a company. For anything on this page — a question, a correction, a deletion or a copy of your data — write to everglow@koumen.net. That inbox is our only contact point: as a personal project we have no business premises or postal address to publish. Our name is on file with our payment processor and our hosting provider; ask us and we will give it to you, and a lawful request can reach it there.
We are the data controller for the information described below. If you are in the EEA, the UK or California, the rights in “Your rights” apply to you; we extend the same rights to everyone else as a matter of course.
The short version
We store what you put on a pet memorial, a photograph if you add one, an email address only if you ask for expiry reminders, and two small identifiers in your browser that let you edit your own page and count how many you have raised. We do not sell data, run ads, build advertising profiles, or train AI models on your photographs. A pet memorial page is public by design — anything you write on it can be read by anyone with the link.
What we store
What you write and upload
- The memorial. A companion’s name, species, years, epitaph and story, plus the stone style, colour, scene and plot you chose.
- Photographs. One cover image on a free page, and up to ten or thirty more on a paid stone. Images are stored on our own server and served from it.
- Messages. The whispers visitors leave, and letters you seal for a future date. Sealed letters are held on the server and their text is not sent to any browser until the date you chose.
- Reminder address. An email address is stored only if you enter one on your memorial so we can warn you before a candle or a year runs out. It is never used for marketing. Every message says how to stop them, and you can remove the address from My memorials in one click.
Identifiers in your browser
- A keeper cookie (
everglow_keeper), a random string kept for one year. It answers one question: how many memorials has this browser raised? It cannot edit anything. See the cookie policy. - An owner key in your browser’s local storage, one per memorial. It is sent only when you make an explicit edit, in an
x-owner-tokenheader, and never on an ordinary page view. It is what lets you change your own memorial and stops anyone else from doing so.
Technical and purchase records
- IP address. Used briefly to rate-limit purchases of candles and flowers by visitors (20 per hour). This is held in memory for at most an hour and is not written to a permanent log tied to you.
- Visit counts. How many times each page was opened, and how many separate readers opened it that day. This is counted on our own server: no cookie is set, no third party is involved, and the reader is represented by a short hash of address, browser name and the day, with a secret salt. Addresses themselves are not written to the table, and because the day is part of the hash, yesterday’s reader and today’s cannot be linked. See the cookie policy.
- A purchase ledger. A record of each stone, candle, bouquet or pair bought: what, for how long, how much, when, whether it was bought by the keeper or a visitor, and the checkout reference. It holds no card details.
- Preferences. Your chosen scene, hour, season and render style are kept in local storage so the garden looks the same next time.
Why we use it
To display the memorial you asked us to display (performing our side of the service), to keep the garden working and prevent abuse (our legitimate interest in running a small, safe site), and — only if you give us an address — to send the two expiry reminders you asked for (your consent, which you can withdraw at any time). Counting visits rests on the same legitimate interest: what comes out is a number of page views and readers, never a profile of a person. We do not use any of it for automated decisions or profiling.
What we never do
- No advertising, sponsored content or ad-network cookies.
- No sale, rental or sharing of your data for marketing.
- No analytics or tracking pixels that follow you across sites.
- No training of image or language models on your photographs. A photograph is used only to show it on the memorial and to derive the colours of the little carved figure.
Memorial pages are public
A memorial is meant to be shared. Its name, years, story, cover photograph, photo wall, whispers and any example badge are visible to anyone who has the link, and the memorial index is reachable by search engines. Please do not put personal details about living people, contact information or anything private on a page. If you would rather not show a photograph at all, you can raise a memorial without one and we will make a quiet colour portrait instead.
Photographs and outside services
As the site runs today, every photograph stays on our own server. The small carved figure is derived here, from the photograph’s colours, and no image is sent to any outside provider. If a photo-to-3D service is ever connected, this page will say so before it is used and the site will say so at the point of upload.
Reminder emails, if you asked for them, are delivered through our mail provider or held in a local outbox until one is configured. We share only the address, subject and message text needed to send the note.
Payments
Payment is handled by Creem (creem.io), which sells on our behalf as the merchant of record. Your card number never reaches our server: it is entered on Creem’s checkout and stays with Creem and its payment partners. Creem also handles the invoice, any sales tax or VAT, and refunds, and its privacy policy applies to what it collects for those purposes.
What we receive back from Creem is small: that a payment succeeded, what it was for, the amount and currency, the checkout reference, and — if you gave one at checkout — an email address. We store that as a purchase record and, where you gave an address, use it once to send the confirmation that says when your stone or light runs to. We do not receive your address, your card, or any bank details. See the refund policy.
How long we keep things
A memorial is kept until you ask us to remove it. We do not delete pages for being quiet. If a yearly plan ends, nothing is erased: the stone stops standing in the garden and the memorial falls back to a free page, with its words, photographs and messages intact. The keeper cookie expires after a year; local-storage keys stay until you clear them.
Visit counts are kept only as daily totals, not tied to a memorial or a person, and are pruned once they are old enough to be uninteresting. Purchase records are kept for as long as tax and accounting rules require, because they are the only proof a sale happened. Reminder addresses disappear when you remove them from your memorial, or when the memorial is deleted.
Your rights
You can ask us to: show you what we hold about a memorial; correct it; delete a memorial, a photograph, a message or a reminder address; export the words and photographs so you can take them elsewhere; or stop reminder emails. Write to everglow@koumen.net from any address — because there are no accounts, we will ask you for the memorial’s private link to confirm it is yours. We aim to answer within 3 working days. You also have the right to complain to your local data-protection authority.
Clearing your browser’s cookies and local storage removes the identifiers on your device, but please keep the private link we gave you when the memorial was raised: without it, the browser can no longer prove it may edit that page.
Children
Everglow is intended for adults (18 and over). We do not knowingly collect information from children. If a child has raised a page, write to us and we will remove it promptly.
Security and changes
The site is served over HTTPS, stored on a server we control, and keeps editing behind per-memorial keys. No system is perfectly safe, and we will tell you if something goes wrong. If this policy changes, we will update the date at the top and, for a material change, say so on the site.
Questions, removals and data requests: the contact page or everglow@koumen.net.