Afterglow is being built by one person. This page is written plainly on purpose, because a policy nobody can read is not consent.
Afterglow is run by Biobrainbuddies Ltd, a company registered in England and Wales, company number 15351689, whose registered office is 81 Oxford Road, Gloucester, Gloucestershire, GL1 3EE, United Kingdom. That company is the data controller for the information described below, and is registered with the Information Commissioner's Office under registration reference 00017970176. You can reach us at alwaysanafterglow@gmail.com.
If you join a mailing list, we collect your email address and which form you used, so we know whether you asked for the grief guide, Afterglow updates, or both.
If you create an account, we keep your account identifier, email address, display name, optional username and, when you use Google sign-in, the profile picture Google supplies. You may instead upload a profile photograph. We decode it, crop and re-encode it as a WebP image so camera metadata is not retained, then keep it in private file storage. We keep your access level and the security history needed to prevent an account granting itself additional permissions.
If you send a feature request, funding idea or bug report, we save what you wrote privately with its review and publication status. If you send a safety report, we keep the reason, the relevant page or item, any contact address you provide, and how it was handled. Safety reports are kept in a separate, Admin-only area.
Some of what you can see is a demonstration. The sky shown to a visitor who is not signed in, and anything the interface labels Demo, is fictional — invented people, placeholder photographs, example candles and memories, written to show how Afterglow works. It is stored in the site's code, and it neither reads from nor writes to the memorial database. Lighting a demonstration candle or writing a demonstration memory stays in your browser and disappears when you leave.
When you create a real memorial, we keep the person's name, their birth and death dates, the words the keeper writes, the memorial's visibility, its star's position in the sky, keeper access records, and a private cause-of-death note if one is given. The cause is never shown on a star: it shifts the star's colour by a few degrees so that people who have lost someone the same way can find each other, and that is all it does. We also keep candles, which carry no name or count, and text memories held for the keeper to review.
A keeper can hold up to five memorial photographs. Each upload is decoded and re-encoded as a WebP image before it is stored, which removes camera metadata such as the location a photograph was taken. It then stays private until a keeper deliberately publishes it, and each photograph carries its own public, trusted-circle or keeper-only visibility, which can be narrower than the memorial's. Afterglow does not accept video or community posts yet.
What Your Brain Is Doing During Grief is pay what you want, and what you want is allowed to be nothing. If you choose to pay nothing, no payment happens at all and nothing about a card exists — we ask for an email address so we can send you the file, and that is the whole of it.
If you do pay, the card is handled entirely by Stripe. The card number is typed into a form Stripe owns and is never sent to Afterglow; we never see it, and we could not store it if we wanted to. What we keep is the order: your email address, the amount you chose, the currency, Stripe's own reference for the payment, the country Stripe reports for the card, the page you arrived from, and whether the file was delivered. We keep any refund against the same order.
The download link in your email is a signed token rather than a secret address. It contains your email address and an expiry, signed so it cannot be altered, and it stops working after seven days. That is why a link forwarded to somebody else still works until it expires — and why the copy attached to the email, which does not expire, is the one to keep.
UK data protection law applies to identifiable living people, not to a person who has died. We nevertheless treat memorial information as sensitive family material. A story about somebody who died can also identify or reveal private information about somebody living, so please only share what you are entitled to share and do not include another living person's medical or similarly private information.
We do not use advertising cookies, marketing pixels, cross-site tracking, behavioural profiling or session replay.
If you choose “Let the light in”, we save that visual preference in your browser so the page can remember it. It is only used for that appearance choice, and you can turn it off using the same control.
We use Vercel Web Analytics and Vercel Speed Insights to understand, in aggregate, how Afterglow is used and whether it loads well. This helps us improve the website, accessibility and reliability. We do not use them to advertise to you, build a profile about you, identify you, follow you across websites or make decisions about you.
Vercel says its Web Analytics does not use cookies and reports anonymised aggregate statistics. Depending on the tool, measurement may include a page path, referring site, filtered URL information, approximate location, browser, operating system, device type, timestamp and anonymous performance measures such as loading, responsiveness and visual stability. We strip query strings before optional measurement is sent, and never send email addresses, form text, memorial names or other sensitive content as analytics events.
You can object to this anonymous measurement at any time. Turning it off stops these optional tools loading on future visits from this browser.
We also use Google Analytics 4, and what it does depends on the answer you gave the banner.
Until you say yes, it runs without cookies. Nothing is written to or read from your device, no identifier follows you between visits or between sessions, and there is nothing in it that identifies you. It tells us a page was viewed and roughly from where, and Google models the rest in aggregate. Our basis for counting visits that way is our legitimate interest in knowing whether the site works, which is permitted precisely because nothing is stored on your device.
If you say yes, Google sets its _ga cookies on your device and joins your visits up into sessions. That is the thing the banner is asking about, and it is the only thing it is asking about: the law governs storing or reading information on your device, so a cookie needs your permission and an anonymous count does not. Saying no is not a worse experience, and we do not ask again on every page.
You can change your mind at any time with the control under this paragraph. Switching measurement off turns off both Google Analytics and the Vercel measurement described above, and the choice is remembered in your browser.
We have switched off everything advertising-related that Google offers. Advertising storage, advertising personalisation and advertising user data are permanently denied through Google Consent Mode; Google Signals and ad personalisation signals are disabled; and no advertising domain is even permitted to load by our content security policy. We do not use Google Analytics to advertise to you, build a profile about you, or make decisions about you.
The events we send are a fixed, published list of short labels — a waitlist signup happened or failed, a guide was requested, a button was clicked, a link off the site was followed, one of the demonstrations was tried, this notice was opened. They never carry a name, an email address, a memorial, or anything you typed; a failed signup records only why it failed, never the address it was for; and query strings are stripped before a page path is sent. Google Ireland Limited and Google LLC process this on our behalf under Google's data processing terms and EU standard contractual clauses, which involves transfer to the United States. Google holds the event-level data for no longer than 14 months, the longest period GA4 permits, after which it is deleted on their side.
For mailing-list email, we rely on your consent. You can withdraw it at any time using the unsubscribe link in an email. For account access, we use the information needed to provide the sign-in and private testing service you asked for.
For product feedback, safety reports, access records, security logs and minimal site measurement, we rely on our legitimate interests in building, securing and improving Afterglow, responding to reports and protecting the people using it. We limit access, keep submissions private by default, avoid putting narrative content into email or audit logs, and provide the measurement control above. Where information must be used urgently to protect someone's life, vital interests may also apply. Afterglow is not an emergency service.
Email addresses, marketing consent and signup history are stored inSupabase, our database and authentication provider.Resend sends the email and reports back what became of it, so that an unsubscribe or a bounce is reconciled into that record rather than left with the provider. Resend processes this in the United States.
Payments are processed by Stripe, which is the only party to the transaction that sees your card. Stripe is the controller of that card data in its own right and handles it under its own privacy terms; what reaches us is the order described above. We hold no card number, no expiry and no security code, at any point.
Private-test accounts, access records, feedback, settings, memorials, keeper records, star placements, candles, pending text memories, private profile photographs, memorial photographs and safety reports are stored in Supabase, our authentication, database and private file-storage provider. Photograph objects are not in a public bucket; the site creates a short-lived viewing link only after checking the signed-in profile or the memorial and photograph visibility. Sign-in emails are sent using Supabase's Auth service. Administrative notifications are sent through Resend; those notifications say only that an item is waiting and do not include the words you submitted.
The site itself is hosted by Vercel. Vercel keeps short-lived server logs that include IP addresses, which is ordinary for any web host and is used to keep the site up and to stop abuse. Vercel also provides the anonymous site measurement and performance monitoring described above. Its documentation says Web Analytics uses no cookies and resets its request-derived visitor hash after 24 hours.
These providers process information for us under their service and data protection terms. Some of them process it outside the United Kingdom — our email provider does so in the United States — under the transfer safeguards that apply to their services, such as the UK addendum to the standard contractual clauses. We do not sell personal information, and we have never given anybody's address to a third party to sell to.
Mailing-list records remain until you unsubscribe or ask for deletion; Resend may retain a suppression record so we do not accidentally email you again. Private-test accounts and submissions remain while the account or testing programme is active, or until they are no longer needed for the purpose described above. A memorial remains while its keeper wants it to, and is removed when they ask. We may retain a de-identified product idea. An order, and the refund record against it, is kept for six years after the end of the financial year it falls in, because company and tax law requires a business to be able to evidence its sales — that record is a legal obligation rather than a choice, and it is the one thing on this page we cannot delete on request. Safety and security records are kept only as long as their severity, resolution and any legal obligation require. Pseudonymous abuse-limit hashes are normally removed after 48 hours, and sent notification metadata after 30 days. You can ask us to delete information sooner; some security, suppression or legal records may need to remain.
Under UK and EU data protection law you can ask us to show you what we hold, correct it, delete it, hand it to you in a portable form, or stop using it. There is no charge and no form to fill in. Email us and we will do it, normally within a few days and always within one month.
If you think we have handled your data badly, you can complain to the UK's Information Commissioner's Office at ico.org.uk. We would rather you told us first so we can put it right.
This site is not intended for children under 13. Grief has no age limit, but a mailing list should.
For anything on this page, including deletion requests, write to alwaysanafterglow@gmail.com.