01 · Who we are
Donae is run by Cooke-Yarborough Ltd, registered in England and Wales under company number 17272745. We are the controller of your personal data, registered with the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) under number ZC171876, and we follow the UK General Data Protection Regulation and the Data Protection Act 2018. Questions? Email privacy@donae.co. Earlier versions of this policy are available on request.
02 · What we collect
About you
- Your email address, first name, password (stored only as a secure hash) and the country you live in
- Your writing style: tone, formality, sign-off, phrases you like or avoid, and any writing sample
- Your default budget, time zone and, if you save one, your own delivery address
- Your plan and payment status, payment references from Stripe (never your card details), and the date you cancel, with a reason if you give one
- Your agreement to our Terms and this policy, with the date and version
About the people you add
- Their name and date of birth, which are required. We use the date of birth for birthday reminders and to suggest gifts that suit their age
- How they are related to you, and their occasions, with dates and your budget
- Their interests, likes and dislikes, and anything a gift should avoid
- Notes you write about them, gifts they have already had, and sizes where relevant
- Their delivery address, if you save one for checkout
Everything except their name and date of birth is optional.
When you use Donae
- The gift ideas we suggest (item, price, shop and link), the card message we draft, which idea you view or choose, and when you mark a gift as sorted
- How many refreshes you use, and any messages you send us
- Whether our emails reach you, bounce or are unsubscribed from. We do not track whether you open them
- Security records (sign-ins, password resets and a one-way hash of your IP address), kept for up to 30 days to prevent abuse, and technical error records, kept for up to 90 days
Voice
Voice is optional, needs your consent on screen first, and you can stop using it at any time. We turn your recording into text and do not keep the audio.
Email updates and feedback
If you sign up for updates, we hold your email address and the wording you agreed to, with the date. If you give feedback or take part in research, we hold your answers. We never read your email or import your calendar.
03 · How we use it
- To provide Donae: suggesting gifts, drafting card messages, sending your gift emails and running your account. We need this to provide the service you signed up for.
- To keep Donae secure: to protect accounts and prevent abuse, in our legitimate interests.
- To keep a record of what you agreed to, in our legitimate interests and to meet our legal obligations.
- To send you updates and use your feedback, with your consent, which you can withdraw at any time.
- To improve Donae, using anonymised patterns that identify no one.
We never use your data for advertising, never sell it, and make no decisions about you based solely on automated processing that have a legal or similarly significant effect on you.
04 · The people you add
Everything we hold about the people you add comes from you. We never buy data, look anyone up or link anyone to social media. We use these details in our legitimate interest in helping you choose gifts for the people who matter to you, and we never:
- Contact them, or send them suggestions or marketing
- Sell their details or share them with data brokers
- Share their details with another customer, or combine them across accounts
- Tell them what you spent or how their gift was chosen
Our Terms require a genuine personal relationship with everyone you add. Please let them know you use Donae, and share this policy with them if they ask. You can remove anyone at any time from your account page.
If someone has added you
You can ask what we hold about you, have it corrected, or object and have it deleted, with no account needed. Email privacy@donae.co with your name and, if you can, who you think added you. We reply within one calendar month, free of charge, and if you would rather the person who added you was not told, we will talk to you first.
05 · Sensitive information
Some information has extra protection in law, such as health, ethnic origin, religious or political beliefs, sex life or sexual orientation. Donae does not need it, so please leave it out and give us the practical effect instead, such as “no nuts”. If you include something like this about someone else, you confirm you are satisfied they would be comfortable with us holding it to help choose their gift.
Before notes are saved, we automatically trim them to the details that help choose a gift.
06 · Who we share it with
We share data only with providers who help us run Donae, and only for that purpose:
- AI provider - Anthropic prepares gift ideas and card messages, and picks out the details that help choose a gift from what you tell us.
- Search provider - to find gifts, Anthropic runs a short web search for us, and may use a search partner of its own. Searches describe the gift, such as the occasion, budget and interests, and sometimes how the person is related to you, such as “a gift for a brother”. They are built to leave out names, your notes and sensitive details. We keep the gifts we suggest to you and a short record of the other results.
- Speech-to-text - our speech-to-text provider turns voice recordings into text.
- Email - Postmark sends our emails.
- Payments - Stripe processes membership payments.
- Hosting and storage - Netlify hosts our website, Supabase stores our database and Sentry alerts us to technical errors.
- Feedback - Google hosts our optional feedback form.
Some providers process data outside the UK, including in the United States, under contractual safeguards. Email privacy@donae.co for details.
07 · How long we keep it
- Your account and the people you add - until you remove someone or close your account, when we delete the details straight away. Copies in our security backups and with our providers expire on their own schedules, usually within about a month, and we keep a dated record of the deletion.
- Email updates - until you unsubscribe. After that we keep your address only on a do-not-email list, so we never write to you again.
- Email delivery records - whether an email we sent you was delivered or bounced, linked to your address only in coded form, for 13 months, then deleted.
- Feedback and research - only while the feedback programme you took part in runs, then only themes that identify no one.
- Voice - we do not keep recordings. Our speech-to-text provider may keep technical logs of requests for up to 90 days for security and troubleshooting.
08 · Your rights
You can access, correct, delete, restrict or object to the use of your data, take a copy of it, and withdraw consent at any time. Do this on your account page. If you do not have an account, email privacy@donae.co (see section 04). If you are not satisfied, you can complain to the ICO at ico.org.uk.
09 · Cookies
We use one strictly necessary cookie to keep you signed in, and no other cookies, tracking pixels or analytics.
10 · Changes to this policy
We update this policy from time to time. If a change matters to how we use your data, we will email you before it takes effect. The date at the top shows when it last changed.