Who we are
The Birthday Chronicle is a trading name of Richard Wilde. Our address is 74 Whitwell Green Lane, Elland, HX5 9EG, United Kingdom. We are registered with the Information Commissioner's Office, registration number ZC241707. If you have any questions about this policy or your data, contact us at hello@dayiwasborn.co.uk.
What we collect and why
To show you your free birthday page: the date of birth you enter, which we use to look up historical events and prices.
To create your paid personalised newspaper: the same date, an optional recipient name, and an optional photo you upload. The photo is converted to black-and-white in your own browser before it's used to generate the newspaper image — we do not keep a copy of it (see “How long we keep things” below).
To take payment: when you buy a newspaper, you're taken to Stripe's own secure checkout page. We never see or store your card details. Stripe passes us back your email address and the order details (date, region, name if given) so we can confirm your order and, if needed, email you a link back to it.
Cookies and similar technology: see the “Cookies” section below.
Legal basis for using your data
- Free birthday lookup: legitimate interests — providing the service you came to the site and asked for.
- Paid newspaper, payment, and confirmation email: performance of a contract — we need this data to fulfil the order you've paid for.
- Analytics: legitimate interests — Vercel Analytics is cookieless and doesn't identify individual visitors, so no consent is needed.
- Mediavine advertising, including Grow: consent — handled by Mediavine's own consent banner, and you can withdraw it at any time via “Update Privacy Settings” in the footer.
Who we share data with
We use a number of other companies to run this site. Each only receives what it needs to do its job:
- Stripe — processes your payment. Receives your card/billing details directly (never via us), your email address, and the order details above.
- MailerSend — sends the one confirmation email after a successful order, containing your email address, the order date, your name if given, and a link back to your order.
- Anthropic (Claude) and Google (Gemini) — generate the wording and any illustration on your newspaper. Receive the birth year, region, and (if given) the recipient's name and the city you entered — no email address, no photo, no payment details.
- Supabase — hosts the database behind our “share this page” links. Stores the shared page's URL (just a date and region, never a name or photo).
- Vercel Analytics — cookieless analytics that tells us how many people visit and which pages are popular. See “Cookies” below.
- Mediavine — our advertising partner. Runs the ads on this site and shows its own consent banner to UK/EU visitors; also loads Grow, a feature that lets readers save content they like. Mediavine and its own advertising partners (listed within the consent tool) may set their own cookies or use other browser storage that we don't control. See “Cookies” below.
- Open-Meteo, Wikimedia and Wikidata — free public data sources we query for historical weather, events, and birthdays for the date you give us. We only ever send them a date, never anything that identifies you.
- Vercel — hosts the website itself.
Cookies
We use Vercel Analytics to see how many people visit the site, which is cookieless — it sets no cookies and doesn't identify individual visitors, so it needs no consent. Mediavine, our advertising partner, shows its own consent banner to UK/EU visitors on your first visit and may set its own cookies, along with its advertising partners and Grow. You can change your choice at any time using the “Update Privacy Settings” link Mediavine adds to our footer. We also store (on a couple of pages) which country you last selected, in your browser's local storage — never on our servers. For full details, see our Cookie policy.
How long we keep things
- Photos and generated newspapers: not stored anywhere by us, at any point. Once your newspaper is generated and downloaded, our servers hold nothing — you'd need to re-upload if you want another copy later.
- Orders: we don't keep our own database of orders.
- Server logs: our hosting provider's server logs may briefly contain technical records related to your order, retained by them for a short period measured in days.
- Confirmation emails: our email provider keeps its own activity log of emails it has sent, including the recipient's address, under its own retention policy.
- Payment records: Stripe keeps the payment record under its own retention rules.
- Shared page links: kept for 24 months, then automatically deleted.
Data sent outside the UK
Some of the companies we use are based outside the UK and process data there, including Stripe, Anthropic, Google, Vercel, and Mediavine. Where this happens, the transfer relies on UK International Data Transfer Agreements, the EU Standard Contractual Clauses, or an applicable adequacy decision, as set out in each provider's own standard terms of service. We have not negotiated bespoke transfer terms with any of them — we rely on the safeguards they already have in place as standard.
Your rights
Under UK data protection law, you can ask us to: tell you what data we hold about you, correct it, delete it, restrict how we use it, give you a copy of it, or object to how we use it. You can also withdraw advertising consent at any time via “Update Privacy Settings” in the footer. To ask about any of this, email hello@dayiwasborn.co.uk.
You can also complain directly to the Information Commissioner's Office at any time, without contacting us first: ico.org.uk, or by phone on 0303 123 1113.