Paw & Story — Privacy Policy

Version 1.4 — Effective: 2026-07-20

Your photos and memories are yours. This policy explains, plainly, what we collect, how we keep it safe, and how you stay in control.

1. Who is responsible

The data controller is Egységmester Kft. ("we"), registered seat 2330 Dunaharaszti, Gyóni Géza köz 8., Hungary; company reg. no. 13-09-162959, registry court: Budapest Környéki Törvényszék Cégbírósága; EU VAT no. HU24291608; represented by Antal Mátyás. Contact: hello@pawandstory.com. Our hosting provider, acting as a processor, is Hostinger International Ltd., 61 Lordou Vironos Street, 6023 Larnaca, Cyprus, serving from an EU data centre. Our supervisory authority is the NAIH (naih.hu).

The Service is for adults. You must be 18 or over to create an account, upload photos, or buy a tribute. We do not knowingly collect personal data from children; if you believe a minor has used the Service, write to us and we will erase the data.

2. What we collect

• Photos and videos you upload of your pet (your own content, with your consent, and with the consent of any people who appear in them).
• The answers you provide in the questionnaire.
• Basic account and purchase records (email, order details). Payment is processed through Stripe Managed Payments; the seller and merchant of record is Sold through Link, LLC (a Stripe company), while Stripe Payments Europe, Ltd. acts as the payment processor. We never receive or store your card data.
• Technical error data. To find and fix faults, your browser sends us the address of the page you were on and technical details of any error (browser type, and where in our code the error happened) for errors and for roughly one page view in ten. Before it leaves your browser we strip out tokens, cookies, request contents and the values of program variables, and we never record your screen. See Section 6.

3. Why and on what legal basis

• To create and deliver your memorial book, tribute film, and memorial page — performance of a contract (GDPR Art. 6(1)(b)).
• To keep purchase records where the law requires it — legal obligation (Art. 6(1)(c)).
• To answer your messages and keep the Service secure — legitimate interest (Art. 6(1)(f)), balanced with care given the sensitive moment these orders often come at.
• To keep the site working by diagnosing technical errors — legitimate interest (Art. 6(1)(f)). We minimise this to what a fault report needs (see Section 2) and you can object at any time.

Other people who appear in your photos. A family photo may show people other than you, and we then process their images without having collected anything from them directly (GDPR Art. 14). We do this to perform our contract with the person who ordered the tribute (Art. 6(1)(b)) and on our legitimate interest in producing the keepsake they asked for (Art. 6(1)(f)); the safeguard is that the customer warrants to us, in our Terms, that they have the consent of everyone pictured. Their images come from the customer's own upload, are used only to make that one tribute, are shown to nobody else unless the customer makes a memorial page public, are never sent outside the EU, and are never used to train any model. They are deleted on the schedule in Section 5. Anyone who appears in a photo has the rights in Section 7 — including the right to object and to ask for erasure — and can exercise them by writing to hello@pawandstory.com. Because we hold no contact details for them, we cannot notify them individually; this policy serves as that notice.

We do not use your uploads or answers for advertising, and we never sell your data.

4. How we store it

• S3-compatible object storage that we run ourselves, on our own server in the EU (Frankfurt, Germany) — not a third-party cloud bucket.
• The storage is not exposed directly to the internet, and its contents cannot be listed publicly.
• Every file travels over an encrypted HTTPS connection.
• Served only through short-lived, signed links issued for a single request — never from a public or guessable URL.
• We never use your uploads to train any model.
• Every image in your tribute is a real photo you uploaded. There is no image generation anywhere in the Service — we do not generate, recreate, or synthesise pictures of your pet.

How the words and the music are made. The story text in your book and film is composed by an AI language model provided by OpenAI (see Section 6) from the answers you typed, and is then checked automatically so that no sentence states a fact you did not give us. Your photos are never sent to OpenAI or to any other AI provider — only your written answers are. The background music is AI-generated instrumental music we prepared in advance and serve from our own servers; making it involves no data about you or your pet.

5. Retention

• Files: 90 days. An automated sweep permanently deletes the photos and videos you uploaded and the generated book PDF and tribute film 90 days after delivery. Please download your book and film and keep your own copies — they are yours for life, but our servers only hold them for those 90 days.
• The one exception: a public memorial page. Your memorial page is private by default. If you choose to make it public, the files behind that project are kept for as long as the page stays public. A private page does not postpone the 90-day deletion.
• What the sweep does not cover. The 90-day sweep deletes files. Your questionnaire answers, the story text, your pet's details, and your account record (your email address) are not part of it — we keep them until you erase them yourself, so that your account and order history still make sense to you.
• Erasing everything. Use /account/delete: we email a confirmation link to verify it is you, and when you click it we permanently delete your uploads, your generated book and film, your memorial pages, your questionnaire answers, the story text and your pet's details. You can also email hello@pawandstory.com and we will do it for you.
• The purchase record survives erasure — honestly described. Hungarian accounting law requires us to keep the record of your purchase for 8 years. So after erasure we retain the amount, the date and the payment reference held by Stripe, and we keep the underlying account row that the record attaches to. We replace your email address with a non-deliverable placeholder (erased-…@deleted.invalid) and delete your Stripe customer identifier. We want to be exact about what that does and does not achieve: this is pseudonymisation, not anonymisation. The payment reference can still be traced back to you inside Stripe's own systems, so the record is not fully anonymous. GDPR Article 17(3)(b) permits this where retention is necessary to comply with a legal obligation.

6. Who receives data

• Stripe Managed Payments — Sold through Link, LLC (a Stripe company), the seller and merchant of record, concludes the sale, charges you, issues your invoice or receipt, and determines and remits any applicable VAT/sales tax; Stripe Payments Europe, Ltd. acts as the payment processor (checkout, invoicing, tax, refunds).
• EU hosting and storage — Hostinger International Ltd., 61 Lordou Vironos Street, 6023 Larnaca, Cyprus, acting as a processor under a GDPR Art. 28 agreement, serving from an EU data centre.
• AI text provider — OpenAI Ireland Ltd (Ireland). The answers you write in the questionnaire are sent to OpenAI to compose the story text for your book and film. OpenAI receives your written answers only — not your photos, not your email address, and not your payment details. Our contract is with OpenAI Ireland Ltd, an Irish company, which acts as our processor under a data-processing agreement concluded under Article 28 GDPR. OpenAI does not use data sent through its interface to train or improve its models, and deletes it within 30 days.
• Onward transfer to the United States. To provide that service, OpenAI Ireland Ltd passes this text to its affiliate OpenAI OpCo, LLC in the United States. That transfer takes place under the European Commission's standard contractual clauses of 4 June 2021 (Decision 2021/914), a lawful transfer mechanism under Article 46(2)(c) GDPR. OpenAI is not certified under the EU–US Data Privacy Framework, so we do not rely on it. Write to hello@pawandstory.com and we will send you a copy of the standard contractual clauses and of our data-processing agreement.
• Error monitoring — our own GlitchTip. The technical error data in Section 2 goes to a GlitchTip instance at errors-c7f31a.practicalapps.studio that we run and control ourselves, on our own infrastructure. It is not a third-party analytics or advertising service, and no error data is shared with anyone else.

Your photos never leave the EU/EEA. They are not sent to OpenAI or to any other provider outside the EU. The only routine transfer outside the EU/EEA is the onward transfer of the questionnaire text described above — made by our Irish processor, not by us — plus whatever Stripe processes to take your payment under its own terms. If any further transfer ever became necessary, it would rest on an adequacy decision or standard contractual clauses, and this policy would be updated first.

7. Your rights

Under the GDPR you have the right of access, correction, deletion, restriction, objection, and portability, and the right to withdraw consent at any time. You can exercise your right to erasure yourself at any time from /account/delete. For anything else, write to hello@pawandstory.com and we will respond within one month. You may also lodge a complaint with your local supervisory authority (in Hungary: NAIH — Nemzeti Adatvédelmi és Információszabadság Hatóság, naih.hu).

8. Cookies and analytics

We set no cookies at all, and we run no analytics product, no advertising pixel and no third-party scripts — not on the site and not on memorial pages. The only thing we store in your browser is one strictly-necessary local-storage entry that lets you reopen your own tribute. That is why you see no cookie banner. Our Cookie Policy sets this out in full, including Stripe's own cookies on its payment page.

9. Changes

If this policy changes in a way that matters, we will post the new version here with a new effective date and, for significant changes, let you know by email.