Privacy policy

What this covers

This page describes what happens to your data on this shop. It is written by the people who wrote the code, and it describes what the code actually does.

The controller is Azae, Chaussée d'Alsemberg 897, 1180 Uccle, Belgium. For anything on this page, write to hello@tellmestories.ai.

Your photos are permanently deleted

This is the part most people ask about, so it comes first.

When you upload photos to have your family illustrated, they are only used to draw your family. They are held in memory only for the length of the request, sent to the illustrating service, and then permanently deleted: they are never written to a disk on our side, and we never keep them. The best deletion is the one you do not have to perform.

Nothing is sent until you tick a box on the page where you create your family. This is the sentence next to that box, word for word, and this policy holds us to it:

I agree that my photos are used to draw my family. They are then permanently deleted, and we never keep them.

If you add a first name or an age to a photo, it travels with your description to the illustrating service, to help draw that person. We do not keep it on our side either.

What we do keep, on our own server, is the result: the portraits that come back and the composed picture you look at. Those are kept for 7 days and then deleted automatically.

You can delete your gallery at any time. There is a delete endpoint on the service, and it tells you exactly what it removes and what it does not: it erases what we hold, and it does not claim to erase anything held by the illustrating service on its own account.

The print file

As soon as a product's page shows your family, the file that would go to the printer is prepared and kept for 396 days, which is 13 months, whether you order or not. That is not laziness: the printer can need to read it again days after the order, and a reprint of a damaged parcel needs the original file. Deleting it early would break a paid order.

Your order

Your name, address, email and order history are held by Shopify, which runs the checkout and the store. We see them in the Shopify admin in order to fulfil and support your order. We never see your card details.

Your delivery address is passed to Gelato, which prints and ships the item, and to its carrier. There is no way to deliver a parcel without that.

Who processes what

  • Shopify runs the store, the checkout, the payment and the order records. Ireland, EU.
  • Gelato and its print partners print the item and ship it. Europe.
  • Hostinger International Limited, 61 Lordou Vironos str., 6023 Larnaca, Cyprus runs the family gallery service. Europe.
  • PostHog measures how the shop is used — pages opened, buttons clicked. European Union. No session recording, no photos, no name, no email address.

Cookies

The storefront uses the cookies Shopify needs to run a shop: keeping your cart, keeping you signed in, and preventing fraud. Those are strictly necessary and do not ask for consent.

There is no advertising pixel on this shop. No Meta pixel, no TikTok pixel, nothing that builds an advertising profile of you or follows you to other websites.

We do measure how our own shop is used, and only that. Two things do it, and they are different:

Our own counter. Your browser stores one random identifier so that we can tell one visit from another and link a visit to the gallery it created. It is read only by us and it never leaves our servers. It stays in your browser until you clear your browsing data. On our side, the link between that identifier and your gallery is stored with the gallery and deleted with it — 31 days at most, or straight away if you ask us to delete your gallery.

PostHog, a product-analytics service, records which pages are opened and which buttons are clicked, so that we can see where people get stuck. It is hosted in the European Union and the data stays there. We have turned session recording off: no one records your screen, and the photos you upload are never seen by it. We do not send it your name, your email address or your photos.

What your choice changes. If you accept analytics cookies in this store's cookie banner, we store the identifier and PostHog measures with a cookie. If you have not answered, PostHog runs in memory only — nothing is stored on your device and the measurement ends when you close the page. If you decline, we store no identifier and PostHog is not loaded at all; if you decline during a visit, it stops immediately.

How long we keep things

  • uploaded photos: permanently deleted, never kept
  • portraits and the composed preview: 7 days
  • print file: 396 days
  • the link between your browser's identifier and your gallery: with the gallery, 31 days at most
  • usage events (pages opened, buttons clicked): held by PostHog in the EU, and only for as long as they help us improve the shop
  • order records: as long as accounting and tax law require, through Shopify

Your rights

You can ask for access to your data, correction, deletion, a copy, or to object. Write to hello@tellmestories.ai and a person answers. If you are not satisfied, you can complain to your national data protection authority.