Privacy Policy

The short version. outglow stores the lantern you bought: a name, a link, a category, the lantern you picked, the logo you uploaded and the running total that has been paid for it. All of that is public, because a public board is the entire product. We don’t store your email, we don’t profile you, and we don’t run ads.

1. Who we are

Tugboat Coding Limited (registered in England and Wales, company number 11118743), of 86-90 Paul Street, London EC2A 4NE, is the data controller for this website. Contact us at hello@outglow.lol.

2. What the site stores

When a pack is bought we store one row. This is all of it, and all of it is shown publicly on the board:

• the sector you chose, which decides which board your lantern appears on besides the main one (the page calls it a category; the column kept its older name)
• the name on the sign, exactly as you gave it, which is what is painted on your lantern
• the link the sign points to, exactly as you gave it
• whether that link is an X profile or an ordinary site, which decides what the lantern says under your name
• a tidied copy of that link — lowercased, with the scheme and any trailing slash removed — which is how we recognise a second payment as belonging to the same listing rather than making a duplicate
• the running total paid for that listing, in cents, which decides how bright your lantern is and where it hangs
• the lantern shape you picked — round, long, an andon box or a bronze one
• the lantern colour you picked — red, white, banded or striped
• the Katakana name we generated from your company name, when you choose to replace the logo on your public lantern
• a reference to the logo file you uploaded, which is how we find that file in our storage when your pack is built
• the date the listing first appeared
• the date it last changed, which is the date of the most recent payment against it
• a cosmetic referral credit, when a new buyer reached checkout from your lantern link; it records the two public lantern identifiers and can display up to three fireflies beside your lantern

The logo file itself is stored too, in Cloudflare R2 in the European Union. It is the image you chose for your brand pack. It is served from this site as your lantern unless a Katakana name replaces it.

There is no account, no password and no email address. If you never buy a listing, browsing this site leaves nothing about you in our database at all.

We also keep a record of each payment, so that a listing’s total can be traced back to the payments that built it and so that a repeated delivery from our payment provider cannot be counted twice. Per payment we store:

• a reference for the delivery our payment provider sent us, which is what lets us recognise a repeat of the same one
• the payment provider’s own order reference, so a payment here can be matched to their records
• the payment provider’s own payment reference, which is the same idea for the newer payments
• which listing it paid for, as the tidied link described above
• the amount that was paid, in cents, taken from the order itself
• the tax inside that payment, in cents, which we subtract before it counts towards your total so that a buyer in a high-tax country is not ranked below an identical buyer in a low-tax one
• the currency the payment settled in
• which uploaded logo that payment delivered
• the date the payment was recorded

None of that names you. Who paid is held by Dodo Payments, not by us — see the next section.

3. What we never see

Payment is handled by Dodo Payments, who act as merchant of record. You give them your card details; they never pass them to us. What reaches us is confirmation that an order was paid, and how much for. Their own privacy notice governs what they hold about you as their customer.

4. A listing is public, and how long each part of it lasts

The board is the product, so every field in section 2 is published. Payments are permanent and there are no refunds — that is a term of sale, set out in the Terms, not a data-protection position.

If you want a listing taken down, email us and we will remove it. Removing it does not return the money. Your lantern can also come down without you asking, in the cases section 6 of the Terms lists — a rights-holder complaint, a link that stops working, a reversed payment, or a legal requirement.

When a listing comes down, for whatever reason:

• The lantern stops being displayed and its row stops appearing on the board.
• Your uploaded logo is deleted from our storage within 30 days.
• The payment record stays, because UK tax law requires us to keep records of what we sold and for how much. It holds no name, no email and no card detail — see section 3.

If we stop running outglow altogether, the board goes with it, every uploaded logo is deleted, and only the payment records survive, for the same tax reason. The image files you downloaded are on your own machine and are not ours to delete.

An upload that never gets paid for is deleted within 7 days on its own. Choosing a file and not completing checkout leaves nothing behind.

5. Cookies and analytics

No cookies. This site sets none of its own.

Your browser may store your lights and season choices on this device. Those choices never leave your browser.

When you first open a lantern page, the browser keeps that public lantern identifier in sessionStorage for this browser session. Checkout can pass that identifier to Dodo and then to us. We use it only after Dodo confirms a new payment, to add a cosmetic firefly credit. It does not change rank, brightness, price, pack contents, money, or eligibility for anything.

Analytics, without cookies and without tracking you across the web. We use DataFast to count visits, which is what the “N online” and “N visitors” figures in the header come from. It is cookieless: it records that a visit happened, with the page, the country, the device and the referring site, and does not follow you to anybody else’s site. We read those figures back in aggregate and never look up an individual. DataFast is the data processor; their own notice covers what they hold.

Cloudflare serves the site and keeps its own short-lived request logs as a network operator; we do not query them to build a picture of any individual.

6. Your rights

Under UK GDPR you can ask us what we hold about you, ask us to correct or erase it, and object to our processing. Email hello@outglow.lol and we will answer within one month. If you are not satisfied you can complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office.

7. Changes

If this notice changes materially, the date at the top of this page changes with it.