Privacy policy
Holiday Registry holds information about families and the gifts they buy each other. We collect as little of it as the product can function on, and some of it we deliberately keep away even from the people it is about.
What we collect
- Your name and email address. The email is how invitations reach you and how you sign in.
- Your birthday — day and month only. It is optional, and we never ask for the year. Not for you, and not for your children.
- Your wish list. The items you add, the links you paste, and any notes about size or colour.
- What you have claimed. Which gifts you said you would buy, so nobody else buys the same thing.
- Which families you belong to, and whether you are a head or a member of each.
What we never collect
- Birth years, for anybody.
- Payment details. We never handle money — we only coordinate who is buying what.
- Any information collected from a child.
- Your contacts, unless you explicitly pick them when inviting people.
Children
Children do not have accounts here. A child appears as a managed profile: a name, optionally a birthday, and a wish list — all of it entered by an adult in the family. No information is collected from a child, only about them, and only by their parent or guardian.
Children never see a shopping surface and are never shown a commercial link. Deleting a managed profile deletes that child’s data.
A family head may promote a managed profile to a full account for someone aged 13 or over. They confirm the age at that moment, and we record that confirmation.
What other people can see
Everyone in a family you belong to can see your name, your wish list, and your preferences card. Ordinary members do not see other members’ email addresses; the family head does, because they manage invitations.
What nobody can show you is what has been claimed on your own list. That is not a preference or a display setting — claim information is excluded from your view where the data is read, so there is no screen, export, email, or support request that can reveal it. The person who created the family is under exactly the same rule on their own list.
We send two kinds of email. Transactional messages — invitations, sign-in links, security notices — you cannot turn off, because the product does not work without them. Everything else — family digests, claim reminders, price alerts, anything promotional — you can control individually, and every marketing email carries an unsubscribe link.
No email we send to you contains information about claims on your own list.
Links and clicks
When you click through to a shop, we record that a click happened, which item it was for, and which shop it went to, so the retailer can attribute the sale. We do not build a browsing profile of you and we do not sell this data. See our affiliate disclosure for how the commercial side works.
Cookies, and the shops we link to
Holiday Registry itself sets only what it needs to work: a session cookie that keeps you signed in, and a preference cookie that remembers which family you were looking at. We use no advertising or cross-site tracking cookies of our own.
When you follow a shopping link, you leave Holiday Registry for the shop — sometimes by way of an affiliate network — and those services may set their own cookies so the sale can be credited. For Amazon links that is the Amazon Associates Program; for many other shops it is Skimlinks (see the Skimlinks privacy policy, including its notice for California residents). We pass them no information about you or your family — not your name, not your email, not who the gift is for.
Automated fetching of product pages
When you paste a link, a separate, isolated service of ours fetches that page once to read its title, picture, and price. It does not fetch Amazon pages, whose terms do not allow it.
How we protect it
Everything is encrypted in transit. Sessions live in secure, HTTP-only cookies rather than anywhere a script could reach them. Sign-in links expire, can only be used once, and are revoked if you are removed from a family. We keep audit records of sign-ins, membership changes, and administrative actions.
Deleting your account
You can delete your account yourself, and it is a real deletion. Gifts you claimed for other people become anonymous rather than being revealed — removing yourself must never spoil somebody else’s Christmas. Deleting a family removes the data belonging to the managed profiles it created.
Contact
Questions about any of this: privacy@holidayregistry.net.