Privacy Policy

1. Who we are

List of Wishes operates the website at https://listofwishes.com, the List of Wishes browser extension, and the free tools on the site such as the Secret Santa generator. We are based in Australia. If you want to reach a human about anything on this page, email hello@listofwishes.com.

2. What we collect

If you make an account

Your name, username, email address and password. Passwords are hashed with bcrypt and we never see or store the original. If you sign in with Google we receive your name, email address and profile photo from Google instead, and there is no password.

Anything else you choose to add: profile photo, bio, country, birthday, anniversary, an annual gift budget, your reminder and display preferences, and any custom occasions you create, including images you upload for them. Birthdays and anniversaries are optional and exist so we can remind people before the date.

What you put on your lists

Wishlist titles, item names, prices, notes, links and images, which occasion a list is for, and its event date. Also who you are connected to on the site: friends, groups and events, and any RSVPs to those events.

If you set up a cash fund, we store the bank details or PayPal handle you enter so that contributors can be shown where to send money. Card payments through a cash fund are handled entirely by Stripe. Card numbers never touch our servers.

If you use the site without an account

You can claim a gift, chip in to a group gift, ask an anonymous question about an item, RSVP to an event, join a Secret Santa, or leave a blog comment without signing up. In each case we store what you type, which usually includes your name and sometimes your email address so the other person can be told. Blog comments also record your IP address and browser, which is a standard spam measure.

Technical information

Standard web server information. We record your country, taken from your connection, so we can show prices in a sensible currency.

On blog articles we also record how people read: a session identifier, a per-browser identifier, your browser and version, the page you arrived from, how far down you scrolled, how long you stayed, and which outbound links you clicked. Alongside that we store a one-way hash of your IP address, salted and shortened, which lets us tell two readers apart without keeping the address itself. We use this to work out which articles are worth writing more of.

3. Information about other people

You give us other people's details when you:

• Run a draw with the Secret Santa generator. You enter up to 60 names, and their email addresses if you want us to send each person their match.
• Share a wishlist by email, or send someone a reminder about it.
• Invite a friend to the site who does not yet have an account.
• Send a letter to Santa on a child's behalf to someone else's address.
• Nominate someone to help organise a cash fund.
• Send a thank you note to whoever claimed your gift.
• Create a profile for your child (see section 8).

If you do this, you are telling us you have their permission. We use those details only to do the thing you asked for. We do not add them to any mailing list, we do not build a profile of them, and we do not sell or share them.

If you received something from us and did not expect it, email hello@listofwishes.com and we will delete your details and stop. You do not need an account to ask.

Secret Santa generator, specifically

The generator at /secret-santa works without an account. We store the exchange name, everyone's name, their email addresses if the organiser chose to email the matches, who was matched with whom, and the organiser's IP address so we can stop the tool being used to send spam.

Each participant is sent one kind of email and nothing else: their match. The organiser can ask us to send it again if someone lost it, but that is the same message. Nobody is signed up to anything, and they are excluded from every reminder and newsletter we send.

The organiser gets a private link with a delete button on it, which removes the exchange and everyone in it from our database. Two honest caveats: emails already sent cannot be recalled, and the delivery log described in section 9 keeps a record that we sent to that address.

4. How we use it

• To run the service: show your lists, stop two people buying the same gift, draw Secret Santa names, take RSVPs.
• To send you email you asked for: your match, a shared wishlist, a claim confirmation, a password reset.
• To send account holders reminders about upcoming birthdays, events and gift deadlines. Be aware these are on by default, and you can switch them off in your settings.
• To send our newsletter, if you subscribed. Every newsletter has an unsubscribe link.
• To answer you when you contact us.
• To understand which pages people read, in aggregate, so we know what to write next.
• To keep the site working and stop abuse.

We do not sell personal information, and we do not use it for advertising targeting.

5. How we make money

Many outbound product links on this site are affiliate links. If you buy something after clicking one, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. That is our main income, and it is why we do not need to sell your data. When you click one of those links, the retailer or affiliate network can see that you came from us, and they will apply their own privacy policy and cookies from that point on. Our affiliate disclosure explains this in more detail.

One of these is not click-only, and you should know about it. We run a Partnerize tracking tag on every page of the site, not just when you click a product link. It exists so purchases get credited to us correctly. It reports the page address you are on, and it loads its code from a rotating address, which means we cannot fully audit what it does. We have stopped it loading on any page whose address contains a private link, such as a Secret Santa match, and we strip the secret part out of what it reports. If you would rather it did not run, a browser or extension that blocks trackers will stop it.

6. Who else sees it

We use other companies to run the service. They only receive what they need for their part of it, and they are not allowed to use it for anything else.

• MongoDB Atlas stores the database.
• Vercel hosts the site and provides basic, cookie-free traffic counts.
• Resend sends our email, so it receives the recipient address and the contents of the message.
• Google Analytics measures page visits, and sets cookies to do so. Pages with a private link in the address, such as a Secret Santa match, are reported to Google with the secret part removed.
• Google also handles Sign in with Google, if you use it.
• OpenAI powers the gift finder chat and the gift suggestions. Your message and the recent conversation are sent to them, and if you are signed in and asking about your lists, the titles of those lists so the suggestions are relevant. Do not type anything into the chat you would not want sent to a third party.
• Stripe processes cash fund payments and handles all card details.
• Cloudflare sits in front of the site, so it sees every request.
• Affiliate networks, including Awin, Rakuten, Amazon, Partnerize, Commission Factory, Impact, Viator and Expedia, so purchases can be credited to us. See section 5 about Partnerize specifically.
• Microlink reads product pages you paste in, so we can fill in the title, price and image for you.
• Sentry may receive technical error reports if something breaks.

Several of these are outside Australia, mainly in the United States and the European Union, so your information may be stored or processed overseas.

We will also disclose information if the law requires it.

7. Cookies and similar technology

We set exactly three cookies ourselves: one to remember your country so prices show in the right currency, one so guests can react to an item without reacting twice, and one to remember whether a sidebar was open.

We keep more in your browser's own storage, which stays on your device: your sign-in token, your language, currency and display preferences, an identifier we use to recognise your browser for blog reading statistics, the tokens for any anonymous question or pledge you have going, and, if you have commented on the blog, the name and email address you used, so the form fills itself in next time. Clearing your browser data removes all of it.

Google Analytics sets its own cookies to count visitors and tell repeat visits apart, and the Partnerize tag described in section 5 may set its own storage. We currently load both for everyone, so there is no cookie banner. If you would rather not be counted, use a browser or extension that blocks trackers. We do not currently act on Do Not Track or Global Privacy Control signals, and we would rather say so than imply otherwise.

Affiliate networks may also set cookies when you click through to a retailer.

8. Children

You must be at least 13 to create an account, and we ask you to confirm that when you sign up. We do not ask for your date of birth, so this is your word rather than something we can check. If you tell us an account belongs to someone under 13, we will close it.

Parents and guardians can create a profile for their own child inside their own account. That profile can hold the child's first name, age, date of birth, a chosen avatar and their wishlists. Children cannot sign in, cannot be contacted through the site, and have no account of their own. Only the parent can create, edit or delete the profile.

If you create a child profile you are confirming you are that child's parent or guardian and you consent to us holding those details.

A child's wishlist can be shared by link. Anyone with the link can see the child's first name, age and lists, so treat it the way you would treat any link with your child's name in it.

Anyone holding that link can ask to follow the list and be emailed when you add items. Before that starts, we email the address to check the owner actually wants it, so nobody can sign someone else up. Once they confirm, we email you to say who it is. You can see and remove followers from your dashboard at any time.

You can delete a child profile at any time from your dashboard, which removes their lists, items, gift claims and followers with it.

If you believe we hold information about a child under 13 without a parent's involvement, email us and we will remove it.

9. How long we keep it

We are being straight with you here rather than quoting a tidy number we do not enforce.

• Things you delete yourself, such as a wishlist, an item, an event, a group or a child profile, are deleted from the database along with the claims, shares and thank you notes attached to them. Some records of contributions and messages tied to a deleted item can remain.
• A Secret Santa exchange made with the free generator can be deleted in full from the organiser's private link.
• Everything else is kept for as long as your account exists.
• We keep a log of emails we have sent, which includes the recipient address, so we can investigate delivery problems. It expires after 12 months, and the subject line is removed when you delete your account.
• If you unsubscribe from the newsletter we keep your address on the list, marked as unsubscribed, so we do not accidentally email you again.

Deleting your account

There is a delete button in your settings. Before you confirm it, we show you a count of exactly what will go and what will stay, taken from your real data.

Some things are kept with your name stripped off rather than deleted, and it is worth explaining why. If you reserved a gift on a friend's list, that reservation stays in place so nobody buys a duplicate; it just stops saying it was you. Same for a reply to someone's event, which keeps counting toward their numbers, and for a Secret Santa you were part of, where deleting your entry would break the match for whoever was buying for you. Your public blog comments become anonymous rather than disappearing, because deleting them would take other people's replies with them.

We will not let you delete while money is in the air. If someone has sent you a contribution you have not confirmed yet, sort that out first, otherwise they are left with no way to resolve it.

If you would rather we did it, or you want something removed that the button does not cover, email hello@listofwishes.com and we will do it by hand within 30 days.

10. Your rights

Under the Australian Privacy Act and its Privacy Principles you can ask us to:

• tell you what personal information we hold about you,
• give you a copy of it,
• correct it if it is wrong,
• delete it,
• stop sending you email.

Email hello@listofwishes.com and we will respond within 30 days. You do not need an account to make a request. If somebody put your details into the site without asking you, tell us and we will remove them.

If you are unhappy with how we handle it, you can complain to the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner at oaic.gov.au. If you are in the UK or the European Economic Area, you also have rights under the GDPR, including the right to object to processing and to complain to your local supervisory authority.

11. Security

The site is served over HTTPS only. Passwords are hashed with bcrypt. Sign-in uses signed tokens that expire after seven days. Access to the database is restricted and most API endpoints are rate limited. Card payments are handled by Stripe and card numbers never reach us.

No system is perfectly secure, and we are a small operation rather than a large company with a security team. Three things worth knowing so you can make your own decisions.

• Private links, such as a Secret Santa match or a gift claim, work for anyone holding them. There is no password on top. Do not forward them.
• Bank details you enter for a cash fund are stored in our database rather than encrypted separately, and they are shown to anyone who can see that wishlist, because that is how a contributor gets them. If the list is public, treat those details as public. Setting the list to private stops us serving them.
• Our rate limiting is per server, and we run on several, so it is a speed bump against abuse rather than a hard ceiling.

12. The browser extension

The List of Wishes extension reads the page you are on when you click it, to pull out the product name, price and image. It only does this when you click the extension. It does not track your browsing, and it sends nothing about the page anywhere until you choose to save an item to a wishlist. Opening the extension does fetch your own wishlists, so it can show you where to save things.

Chrome will warn you that the extension can read all websites. That is because a small helper script loads on every page, but it sits idle and does nothing until you click.

13. Changes to this policy

If we change how we handle personal information we will update this page and change the date at the top. If the change is significant, we will tell account holders by email.

14. Contact

Email hello@listofwishes.com or use the contact form. A real person reads it.