Privacy policy

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Last updated: November 12, 2026

Who we are

This store is run by giftdate.co. We sell a personalized natal-chart candle to customers in the United States through our store at giftdate.co. For anything in this policy, email hello@giftdate.co.

This policy explains what information we collect when you order, browse or open a reading page, why we collect it, who we share it with and what you can ask us to do with it.

What we collect

When you place an order. Your name, email address, shipping address, phone number if you give one, and what you ordered. Shopify processes your payment; we never see your full card number.

The personalization details. For each candle you tell us the recipient’s first name, birth date, birth time (or that you don’t know it), birthplace, the scent, a note and who the note is from. These details are usually about someone other than you. By entering them you confirm you’re comfortable sharing them with us for this purpose. If the recipient is a child, you confirm you’re their parent or guardian or have that person’s permission.

When you open a reading page. Standard web server logs: the page address, the time, your IP address, browser type and the referring page. The reading host does not set tracking cookies. No analytics or advertising tools run on reading pages.

When you browse the store. Shopify sets cookies needed to run the store (cart, checkout, security) and, with your consent where required, analytics cookies. If you’ve consented to marketing cookies, our advertising pixel may also run. See “Advertising cookies” below.

When you contact us. Whatever you send, usually your name, email, order number and the content of your message.

Why we use it

• To compute the recipient’s chart, write the reading, render the label and make the candle.
• To host the reading page the label’s QR code points to.
• To take payment, ship the order and send order and shipping emails.
• To answer your questions and fix problems.
• To keep records we’re required to keep for tax and accounting.
• To measure and improve the store and, if you’ve consented, to show ads for giftdate.co to people who have visited it.
• To prevent fraud, which Shopify handles as part of checkout.

We don’t sell personal information. We don’t use the recipient’s birth details for anything other than making their candle and reading page.

The reading page

Each candle’s reading page lives at a short address on r.giftdate.co, encoded in the label’s QR code. The page shows the recipient’s first name, birth date, birth time if you gave one, birthplace, the chart and reading, your note and your sender name.

Anyone who has the address can open the page. That’s deliberate, because the recipient needs to open it without an account and may want to share it. The page is not listed in search engines (we ask them not to index it) and the address isn’t guessable in practice, but it isn’t password-protected. Don’t put anything in the note you wouldn’t want someone else holding the candle to read.

If you or the recipient want the page taken down, email hello@giftdate.co with the page’s address (open the QR code and copy it) or the order number. We’ll remove it within 7 days, after which the QR code shows a short “this page has been removed” notice.

Who we share it with

We share information only with the services needed to run the store and fulfil orders.

Shopify (Shopify Inc., Canada) runs the store, checkout and payments, and stores order and customer records. Shopify’s privacy policy is at shopify.com/legal/privacy.

Our production partner (based in the USA) and its candle maker in New Hampshire make and ship the candle. We send them the recipient’s first name as part of the label artwork, the finished label image, the scent and the shipping name, address and phone number. We don’t send them the birth date, time, place, note or your email, except as they appear on the label image itself (the label shows the first name, birth date, birth time if known and birth city).

Render (Render Services, Inc., USA) hosts the order engine and the reading pages. The recipient’s personalization details and the generated chart and reading are stored there.

GeoNames data. Our birthplace search uses place names and coordinates from GeoNames (geonames.org), licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0. Searches run on our own servers; nothing is sent to GeoNames.

Email. Order and shipping emails are sent through Shopify. Mail sent to hello@giftdate.co is handled in Google Workspace, and our replies are sent through Amazon Web Services.

We may also disclose information if the law requires it, to protect our rights or the safety of others, or as part of a sale or transfer of the business, in which case this policy would continue to apply to the information transferred.

We don’t share information with data brokers and we don’t sell it.

Advertising cookies

If we run ads, we use the Meta Pixel, which some US state laws treat as “sharing” personal information for targeted advertising. You can opt out by declining marketing cookies in the cookie banner, by using a browser that sends the Global Privacy Control signal (we honour it), or by adjusting your ad settings in your Meta account. Opting out doesn’t affect your order.

How long we keep it

Order records (name, address, email, what you bought) are kept for as long as we’re required to keep accounting and tax records, typically 7 years.

Reading pages and the personalization details behind them are kept for as long as the page is live, which by default is indefinitely, because the QR code on the candle needs somewhere to go. You can ask us to remove a page at any time.

Label artwork is kept by us for 90 days after delivery so we can reprint if something arrives damaged, and by our production partner under its own retention policy.

Support emails are kept for 2 years.

Server logs on the reading host are kept for 30 days.

Your choices and rights

Whoever you are and wherever you live, you can email hello@giftdate.co to:

• ask what personal information we hold about you or a recipient;
• correct it;
• have a reading page removed;
• have personal information deleted, subject to records we must keep by law;
• get a copy of the information you gave us in a portable form;
• opt out of targeted advertising.

Residents of California, Colorado, Connecticut, Virginia, Utah, Texas, Oregon, Montana and other states with consumer privacy laws have specific rights along these lines, including the right not to be discriminated against for exercising them, and in some states the right to appeal a decision we make about a request. We’re a small business and may fall below the thresholds at which those laws apply, but we’ll honour these requests from anyone. We’ll verify a request by matching it to the email address on the order, and we aim to respond within 45 days. If we refuse a request, we’ll say why, and you can reply to appeal; if you’re still unhappy you can contact your state’s attorney general.

Recipients who didn’t place the order can also ask us to remove their reading page or correct their details. We’ll ask for the page’s address (from the QR code) or enough detail to find the order.

Residents outside the US: we only ship to the US, but if you’ve opened a reading page or contacted us, the same choices apply to you.

Children

Our store is for adults; you must be 18 or over to place an order. We don’t knowingly collect information directly from anyone under 13. A candle may be a gift for a child, in which case the buyer gives us the child’s first name, birth date and birthplace and confirms they’re allowed to. We use those details only to make the candle and reading page, and a parent or guardian can ask us to remove the page at any time.

Security

The store runs on Shopify, which is PCI DSS compliant and handles all payment data. Our order engine and reading pages are served over HTTPS. Access to order data is limited to the people who run the store. No system is perfectly secure, and we’ll tell you and the relevant authorities if a breach affects you, as the law requires.

Attribution

Place names and coordinates for birthplace search come from GeoNames (https://www.geonames.org), licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Planetary positions are computed from NASA JPL’s DE440 planetary ephemeris.

Changes to this policy

If we change this policy, we’ll update the date at the top and, for material changes, note it on the store. The current version always lives at giftdate.co/policies/privacy-policy.

Contact

hello@giftdate.co