Cookies & Your Data

Effective Date: 2026-09-13

The short version

We do not sell, rent, lease, trade, or share your personal information with anyone. We run no advertising, no analytics, and no tracking of any kind — there is not a single third-party script, pixel, or tracker on this site. We ask for your name and your email address because a gift exchange cannot work without them, and we use them for nothing else. We do not send marketing email. We do not build a profile of you.

This page explains that in more detail, in plain English. It sits alongside our full Privacy Policy and Terms of Service; where this page and the Privacy Policy describe the same thing, they are meant to agree, and the Privacy Policy is the formal version.

Why there is no cookie banner

Cookie banners exist because most websites set cookies that are not needed to run the site — advertising, analytics, and tracking cookies — and the law requires your consent before doing that. We do not set any of those, so there is nothing to ask you to consent to.

Here is every cookie secretsanta.app sets, with no exceptions:

_secret_santa_key — the session cookie. It holds your logged-in session and the token that protects forms against cross-site request forgery. It is removed when you close your browser. Without it you could not log in at all.
_secret_santa_web_user_remember_me — set only if you tick the "keep me logged in" box when you sign up or log in. It keeps you signed in on that device for 14 days, and is deleted the moment you log out. If you do not tick the box, this cookie is never created.

Both are first-party cookies (they are readable only by secretsanta.app), both are cryptographically signed, and both are set with SameSite=Lax. Under the EU ePrivacy Directive and the UK PECR, cookies that are strictly necessary to deliver a service you explicitly asked for — and cookies you yourself have opted into, like "keep me logged in" — do not require a consent banner. That is the whole of our cookie use.

We also do not use localStorage, sessionStorage, web beacons, browser fingerprinting, session recording, or any other technique for identifying or following you.

No third-party trackers, at all

Every part of this site is served from our own server. There are no analytics services, no advertising networks, no social media buttons or embeds, no content delivery networks, and no externally hosted fonts — the typefaces you are looking at are files on our server, not requests to a font company. Loading a page of secretsanta.app contacts secretsanta.app and nothing else.

Two companies do handle data on our behalf, purely so the service can function. They are contractually bound to process it only on our instructions, and neither is permitted to use it for their own purposes:

Resend — delivers our email (login links, invitations, and notifications). To send you an email, they necessarily receive your email address and the contents of that message.
DigitalOcean — hosts the server the application and its database run on.

That is the complete list. We do not share your information with anyone else, and we will never sell it. If we ever need to add another provider, we will update this page before we do.

What we collect, and why

Your name — so the other people in your gift exchange know who you are.
Your email address — it is how you log in (we send a one-time link instead of using passwords) and how we send you invitations and notifications about your events.
Events you create — the name, budget, description, and rules you type in.
Your gift hint and interests — optional, and only useful because you want your Santa to see them.
Restrictions and assignments — who should not draw whom, and the result of the draw.
A record that you accepted our terms — when you tick the box at sign-up, we note the date and time, your email address, which version of the Terms of Service and Privacy Policy you saw, and the IP address and browser you accepted them from. That record is the only reason we keep an IP address at all.
Email addresses of people you invite — supplied by you, the organiser, and used only to send that person an invitation to your event. If they never accept, the address is used for nothing else.

We do not collect your date of birth, your phone number, your address, or your payment details. We do not track you with your IP address or your browser's user agent, and we do not keep them in our logs — the one place they are stored is the record of your agreement to our terms, described above.

Who can see your information

Other participants in an event you have joined can see your name and, if you wrote one, your hint and interests. Nobody — not even the person who organised the event — is shown who you were assigned to give a gift to; that is visible only to you. Nothing is public, and nothing is visible outside the events you are part of.

How long we keep it

We keep your account, your event history, and the record of your agreement to our terms for as long as your account exists, so that you can look back at previous years. If you ask us to delete your account, we will delete it and your personal information within 30 days. An invitation that is never accepted stops working after 7 days and is not used for anything after that; if you would like the address removed sooner, ask us and we will remove it.

Your rights

If you are in the EEA or the UK, the GDPR and UK GDPR give you the rights below. We extend them to everyone who uses the service, no matter where you live.

Access — ask us for a copy of the information we hold about you.
Rectification — correct anything that is wrong (you can change your name and email yourself in Settings).
Erasure — ask us to delete your account and your personal information.
Restriction and objection — ask us to stop or limit how we use your information.
Portability — get your information in a machine-readable form.
Withdraw consent — where we relied on your consent, take it back at any time.
Complain — raise a complaint with your local data protection authority. In the UK, that is the Information Commissioner's Office.

To exercise any of these, email us at the address below. It is free, and we will respond within 30 days. We will not treat you differently for asking.

The legal basis for what we do is the performance of our contract with you — running the gift exchange you signed up for. We do not use your information for marketing, profiling, or automated decision-making.

California

We do not sell your personal information, and we do not share it for cross-context behavioural advertising, as those terms are defined by the California Consumer Privacy Act. We never have. That is why you will not find a "Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information" link on this site — there is nothing for it to do. California residents have the right to know what we collect, to have it deleted, to have it corrected, and not to be discriminated against for exercising those rights; email us and we will take care of it.

Age

SecretSanta.app is intended for adults. You must be at least 18 years old to create an account. We do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 18, and if we learn that we have, we will delete it.

Who we are, and how to reach us

SecretSanta.app is operated by ByteJoy LLC, which is the data controller for the information described on this page. For any question about your privacy, your data, or this page — including a request to delete your account — write to us:

Email: support[at]bytejoy[dot]com

See also our full Privacy Policy and Terms of Service.