Privacy Policy

1. What Wingstead is, in privacy terms

Wingstead is unusual among websites: most of the content on it is about people who have passed away, uploaded by the people who loved them. This creates three roles, and we treat each differently:

• Memorial creators — people with an account who create and manage a memorial.
• Contributors — people who leave a memory, photo, or tribute on a memorial.
• Visitors — people who view memorials or browse the site.

2. Information we collect

3. How we use information

• To provide the service: hosting memorials, showing them to the people you choose, sending account emails (confirmation, password reset).
• To keep the service safe: preventing abuse, spam, and unauthorized access.
• To improve Wingstead: aggregate, anonymous usage statistics.

We do not use memorial content to train AI models, we do not sell or rent personal data, and we do not show advertising.

4. Public and private memorials

Every memorial has a visibility setting controlled by its creator:

• Private memorials are visible only to people who have the link. They are excluded from our public collection and we ask search engines not to index them.
• Public memorials are visible to anyone, may appear in Wingstead's public collection, and can be found through search engines.

The creator can change this setting at any time. Making a memorial private after it was public will remove it from our site immediately, but search engines and visitors may retain copies or caches for some time — that part is outside our control.

5. Where your data lives

Wingstead runs on established cloud infrastructure providers:

• Vercel — website hosting and content delivery.
• Supabase — database and file storage. Our database and uploaded files are stored in the London region (eu-west-2), in the United Kingdom.
• Resend — delivery of account emails such as confirmations and password resets.

These providers process data on our behalf under their own security and privacy commitments. If we introduce paid features, payments will be handled by a dedicated third-party payment processor; we will never see or store your card number.

6. Removal requests and disputes

We know that grief and families are complicated, so we want this part to be clear:

• If you created a memorial, you can edit or delete it, and any tribute on it, at any time.
• If you contributed a tribute, you can request its removal by contacting us or the memorial creator.
• If you are a family member of the person remembered and believe a memorial should not exist, contains content you have rights over, or was created against the family's wishes, contact us at hello@wingstead.com. We will review such requests seriously and quickly, and where a close family member objects and the creator cannot demonstrate a better claim, we will err on the side of removal. A memorial should be a comfort, not a source of pain.
• If you appear in a photograph on a memorial and want it removed, contact us and we will assess the request under applicable law.

7. Data retention and deletion

• Memorials are intended to be lasting. We keep memorial content for as long as the memorial exists, including if the creator's account becomes inactive — permanence is the point of the service.
• If you delete your account, we delete your account data. You will be asked whether your memorials should be deleted with it or remain online.
• Deleted content is removed from live systems immediately and from backups within 30 days.

8. Your rights

Depending on where you live (including under the EU GDPR, the UK GDPR, and similar laws), you may have the right to access, correct, export, or delete personal data we hold about you, and to object to certain processing. To exercise any of these rights, email hello@wingstead.com. We will respond within 30 days. If you are in the EU/EEA or the UK, you also have the right to lodge a complaint with your local data protection authority.

9. Children

Wingstead is not directed at children under 16, and we do not knowingly collect data from them. Memorials may of course depict people of any age, subject to the creator's rights and responsibilities.

10. Cookies

We use only the cookies necessary for the service to function (such as keeping you signed in) and, if analytics are enabled, a privacy-respecting analytics tool that does not track you across other sites. We do not use advertising cookies.

11. Changes to this policy

If we make meaningful changes, we will update the date above and, for significant changes, notify account holders by email. Continued use of Wingstead after changes take effect means you accept the updated policy.

12. Contact

Questions, concerns, removal requests: hello@wingstead.com.