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OnceUponYou

Privacy Policy

Effective 18 September 2026 · Last updated 1 November 2026

Website: https://www.onceuponyou.store

This Privacy Policy outlines how OnceUponYou (“we”, “us”, or “our”) collects, uses, discloses, and protects your personal data when you visit our website, create and purchase a personalised children’s book, or otherwise interact with our store. It covers legal requirements across the United States, the European Union (GDPR), the United Kingdom, Canada (PIPEDA), and Australia (Privacy Act 1988).

Please read section 1B and section 3 carefully. Our product is made from a photograph of your child. Those sections explain exactly what we collect, who processes it, and how long we keep it.

1. Information We Collect

We collect personal information to create your book, process and fulfil your order, improve the service, and comply with legal obligations.

A. Information you provide directly

  • Contact information: your name, email address, and - for printed books - your shipping address and a phone number the carrier can use if there is a problem with the delivery.
  • Order and transaction data: the book you configured, its options, and payment confirmation. Card details are entered directly into our payment provider’s hosted checkout and are never received or stored on our servers.
  • Support and marketing: messages, feedback, and newsletter or discount-code sign-ups you submit to us, including your answers to our feedback survey.

B. Photographs and details of your child

To personalise a book, you provide information about the child it is for. Depending on the options you choose, this may include:

  • the child’s first name and age range;
  • a photograph of the child, uploaded by you;
  • appearance details you select or that are derived from the photograph - for example hair colour and style, eye colour, and skin tone;
  • the names, relationships, and optionally photographs of additional characters you add, such as siblings, relatives, friends, or pets;
  • free-text you write about the story, which may include personal details about the child.

A photograph of an identifiable person may be treated as sensitive personal information under some US state laws, and as a special category of personal data under the GDPR where it is used to identify a person. We treat it accordingly.

You must be the child’s parent or legal guardian, or have their permission, to upload a photograph or details of a child. By uploading, you confirm that you have the authority to do so. Do not upload a photograph of a child you are not responsible for.

C. Information collected automatically

  • Device and usage data: IP address, browser type, operating system, referring URLs, pages viewed, time spent, and navigation paths.
  • Cookies and similar technologies: small files and browser storage used to keep your book in progress, keep you signed in where applicable, and - where you allow it - measure usage and advertising. See section 7.

D. Optional questions after your order

After you pay, your order page may ask you a few optional questions about the child (for example their favorite things, words they say, family routines, and the age or look of the people in the book). You can skip them. We keep your answers, the conversation and any photos you add there with your order, and use them only to make this book.

Anthropic also receives your answers and the photos you uploaded, so it can ask follow-up questions (for example about a costume or a toy in a photo) and note details for the story. It never describes anyone’s face, body or health.

Retention. The conversation, your answers and any photos added in it are deleted 30 days after your book is delivered, together with your other photos.

2. How We Use Your Information

We process your personal information for the following purposes and legal bases:

  • Creating your personalised book from the details and photographs you provide (Legal basis: performance of contract).
  • Processing and fulfilling orders, printing and shipping physical books, and sending order updates (Legal basis: performance of contract).
  • Customer support, order amendments, and revisions (Legal basis: performance of contract / legitimate interests).
  • Asking about your book after it is delivered, and using your answers to improve our books and service (Legal basis: legitimate interests). Every request has a link to stop them.
  • Sending promotional emails and offers (Legal basis: consent / opt-in, with an opt-out in every message). At checkout, Stripe’s payment form may show a box asking whether we may send these emails; Stripe decides from your location whether to show it and how it starts, and you can change it before you pay. We do not send reminders about checkouts you leave unfinished.
  • Analytics, site optimisation, and fraud prevention (Legal basis: legitimate interests / consent).
  • Measuring and improving our advertising, including our ads on Facebook and Instagram (Legal basis: consent in the EU and UK; a right to opt out in the United States - see sections 6 and 7).

We do not use your child’s photograph for advertising, and we do not show it to anyone other than you and the providers listed in sections 3 and 4 who need it to produce your book.

3. How Your Child’s Photograph Is Processed

Your book is illustrated by automated systems. To do that, the photograph and details you provide are transmitted to third-party artificial-intelligence providers acting as our processors:

  • Google - receives the photograph and a text description in order to generate the illustrations of the character.
  • Anthropic - receives the photograph, in order to check automatically that it is usable and to describe the character’s appearance; and receives the child’s name, age range and the story details you supply, in order to write the story text.
  • OpenAI - receives the photographs you upload (of your child and of any other person or pet in the book), the character pictures drawn from them, and the instructions for each picture, which include character descriptions (such as age and eye color) and the words of the story that appear in the picture, and so the child’s first name and other first names in the story, in order to generate the illustrations.
  • Replicate - runs an additional image-drawing service and, when we use it, receives the same kinds of information as OpenAI, in order to generate the illustrations.
  • Black Forest Labs - makes the image model that this Replicate service runs, and may receive the same information when we use it, in order to generate the illustrations.

These providers process this data on our instructions in order to produce your book. We do not authorize them to use it for their own purposes. We use Google and Anthropic on paid commercial terms which prohibit them from using the content we send - including the photograph - to train or improve their models. OpenAI states that data sent to its API is not used to train or improve its models, and may keep what we send for up to 30 days to monitor for abuse, or longer where the law requires it or to protect its services. Replicate removes the content of each request automatically after about an hour, by default.

Your book is also assembled into a print-ready file. For physical orders, that file - which contains the generated illustrations - is sent to our print partner. The original photograph is not sent to the printer.

4. Third-Party Sharing & Disclosure

We share your data only with service providers who help us operate the store and produce your book:

  • Hosting and infrastructure: Vercel (website and application hosting), Supabase (database and file storage), Inngest (background processing).
  • Payments: Stripe. Card details are handled entirely by Stripe.
  • Artificial intelligence providers: as listed in section 3.
  • Printing and delivery: Gelato and its production and courier partners, for physical books.
  • Email: Resend, for order confirmations, delivery of digital books, requests for feedback on your book, and - where you have opted in - marketing.
  • Analytics: PostHog, to understand how the site is used.
  • Advertising: Google, to measure the performance of our advertising, where you have allowed advertising cookies. When you place an order, this includes a hashed (one-way encoded) copy of your email address, so Google can tell whether the order followed a click on one of our adverts.
  • Advertising: Meta Platforms, Inc., to measure and improve our ads on Facebook and Instagram, including deciding who sees them, where you have allowed advertising cookies. Meta’s pixel on our website tells Meta which pages you view, when you start checkout (with the cart amount), and when you complete a purchase (the amount, the currency and our order number). Like any tag of its kind, it also receives your IP address, information about your browser and device, the address of the page you are on, and the address of the page that brought you there. When you place an order, we also give Meta a hashed (one-way encoded) copy of your email address, sent with that purchase and with the pages you view afterwards during that visit, so Meta can match the purchase to its ads. We do not give Meta your name or postal address, your child’s details, or the title or story of your book, and we have switched off Meta’s automatic form scanning and automatic advanced matching. Meta’s own privacy policy explains how Meta uses this information.
  • Legal obligations: where required by law, subpoena, or government order.

We do not sell your personal information for money. Using analytics and advertising technologies, including Google’s and Meta’s, may nonetheless count as a “sale” or as “sharing” for targeted advertising under some US state laws. Section 7 explains how to opt out.

5. Data Retention

We keep personal data for as long as we need it for the purpose it was collected, and for as long as the law requires.

  • Order and transaction records are retained for accounting and tax purposes.
  • Your finished book is retained so that you can download it again and so that we can reprint or support your order.
  • Photographs you upload are retained after your book is made. They are stored in a private, access-controlled location and are not published, listed, or made available to other customers. We do not currently delete them automatically once your order is complete.
  • Books that are never ordered. If you begin creating a book and do not complete an order, the photographs and details you entered may be removed during routine clean-up.

You can ask us to delete your child’s photograph at any time, including after your book has been delivered. Contact us using the details in section 12 and we will delete it. If you ask us to delete a photograph before your book has been produced, we may be unable to complete the order.

6. Region-Specific Rights

A. United States residents

If you live in California, Colorado, Connecticut, Virginia, Utah, or another state with a comprehensive privacy law, you have the following rights:

  • Right to know and access: request details of the categories and specific pieces of personal data we hold about you.
  • Right to delete: request deletion of your personal information, including photographs, subject to statutory exemptions.
  • Right to correct: ask us to fix inaccurate personal information.
  • Do not sell or share my personal information: opt out of advertising technologies at any time using the control described in section 7, or by contacting us. We honour the Global Privacy Control browser signal as a valid opt-out.
  • Limit the use of sensitive personal information: a photograph of your child is only ever used to produce your book. We do not use it to infer characteristics about you or your child for any other purpose.
  • Right to non-discrimination: we will not deny you service, charge you a different price, or provide a lower quality of service because you exercised a privacy right.

B. European Union (GDPR) and United Kingdom residents

  • Access, rectification and erasure: access your data, correct inaccuracies, or request complete deletion.
  • Restrict or object to processing: limit how we process your data, or object to processing based on legitimate interests.
  • Data portability: obtain a structured, machine-readable copy of your data.
  • Withdraw consent: withdraw consent for marketing or non-essential cookies at any time, without affecting processing carried out before you withdrew it.
  • International transfers: your data is transferred to and stored in the United States. Transfers are protected using standard contractual clauses or an equivalent recognised legal mechanism.
  • Complaint: you have the right to lodge a complaint with your national supervisory authority.

C. Canadian residents (PIPEDA)

Canadian residents may access their personal information, challenge its accuracy, and withdraw consent for marketing or non-essential cookies at any time.

D. Australian residents (Privacy Act 1988)

Australian users may request access to, or correction of, personal information we hold. If you have concerns about a privacy breach, you may submit a complaint using the contact details in section 12.

7. Cookies, Tracking and Your Privacy Choices

We use cookies and similar technologies to run this site, to understand how it is used, and to measure our advertising. Some are necessary for the site to work at all; the rest are your choice.

Strictly necessary

These are required to provide a service you have explicitly asked for - keeping your book in progress as you build it, showing you the photographs you uploaded, opening your orders on this device, keeping you signed in, and recording the privacy choice you make below. The site cannot work without them, and they are always on.

Analytics

Used only to understand how the site is used, so that we can fix what is confusing. This tells us which pages people visit and where they get stuck. You can turn this off.

Advertising

Used to measure whether our advertising works - for example, whether a visit that began with an advert ended in an order. When you place an order, we also give Google a hashed copy of your email address for this, and we give Meta one too. Meta’s pixel, which measures and improves our ads on Facebook and Instagram, sets two cookies, _fbp and _fbc; _fbc holds the click identifier from the page address when you arrive from a Facebook ad. You can turn this off, and if you do, we delete the advertising cookies already on your device, including _fbp and _fbc, stop Meta’s pixel, and do not give Google or Meta your email address.

Managing your choices

You can change your mind at any time using the “Your Privacy Choices” link in the footer of every page. Your choice is remembered on this device and applies from the moment you make it. You can also control or delete cookies through your browser settings.

If your browser sends a Global Privacy Control signal, we treat it as an opt-out of advertising and apply it automatically, without you having to do anything.

8. Children’s Privacy

Our books are made for children, but our store is intended for adults. Accounts, orders, and payment are for people aged 18 or over, and we do not knowingly allow a child to create an account, place an order, or upload anything to this site.

The personal information we hold about a child - their name, age range, appearance, and photograph - is provided by a parent or guardian, for the single purpose of making that child’s book. We do not market to children, we do not build advertising profiles of children, and we do not use a child’s photograph or details to target advertising to anyone.

If you believe a child has provided us with personal information directly, or that someone has uploaded a photograph of your child without your permission, contact us using the details in section 12 and we will delete it promptly.

9. Data Security

Traffic to and from this site is encrypted in transit. Uploaded photographs are held in private storage that is not publicly listable, and access to an individual photograph requires a short-lived, signed link issued to the person who uploaded it. Access to customer data by our staff is limited to those who need it to operate the service and provide support.

No method of transmission or storage is completely secure. If a breach affects your personal data, we will notify you and the relevant authorities where the law requires it.

10. International Data Transfers

We are based in the United States and our providers are located in the United States and elsewhere. If you use the site from outside the United States, your data will be transferred to and processed in the United States, protected by standard contractual clauses or an equivalent recognised mechanism where required.

11. Changes to This Policy

We may update this Privacy Policy to reflect changes to the service or to the law. We will update the “Last updated” date at the top of this page, and where the change is significant we will tell you directly.

12. Contact Us

Privacy requests and questions: privacy@onceuponyou.store
Postal address: Digity C LLC (trading as OnceUponYou), 251 Little Falls Drive, Wilmington, New Castle County, DE 19808, United States

To exercise any right in section 6 - including deleting your child’s photograph - email us at the address above. We will respond within the period required by the law that applies to you.