Privacy policy

1. Who we are

Pet Pawtrait (petpawtrait.shop) is run by Geraldine Silverton and Chris Silverton (a partnership), trading as Pet Pawtrait. You can email us at hello@petpawtrait.shop or use our contact form.

We are the "controller" of your personal information under UK data protection law (the UK GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018).

2. What we collect

• Your email address, if you give it to us (it's optional for your first few portraits) or when you order, so we can send you your portrait, your order confirmations and one-time sign-in links.
• The photos you upload and the portraits we create from them, along with the style and options you chose and any pet name you add.
• Order details: what you bought, the amount paid, and your name, delivery address and phone number for orders that are posted. Card payments are handled by Stripe; we never see or store your full card details.
• Messages you send us through our contact form or by email.
• Technical information: your IP address, browser type and the pages you request, recorded by our servers and used to keep the site secure and to apply the free portrait limits.
• Visit statistics: the pages you view, the website or advert that brought you here, your type of device (phone, tablet or computer), and whether you went on to create a portrait or order. These are counted without cookies, under an anonymous ID that changes every day, and we don't store your IP address with them.
• Essential cookies that keep the site working (see our cookie policy).

Photos may contain information about you or your home in the background. Please only upload photos of your pet that you're happy for us to process. We don't knowingly collect information from children under 13.

3. How we use it, and our legal basis

What we do	Legal basis
Create your portraits, show your previews and email you when they're ready	Contract: to provide the service you asked for
Take payment, make and deliver your order, and send order and delivery emails	Contract
Reply to your messages and help with problems	Contract, or legitimate interests in looking after our customers
Limit free portraits, prevent fraud and abuse, and keep the site secure	Legitimate interests in running a safe, affordable service
Count visits and see which adverts and websites bring people to the site, so we can improve it and spend sensibly on advertising	Legitimate interests in understanding how our site and adverts are used
Keep records of orders and payments	Legal obligation (tax and accounting law)
Record when files you've bought are downloaded, so we can show they were delivered if a payment is disputed	Legitimate interests in protecting ourselves against unfounded payment disputes

We only send service emails about your portraits and orders. We don't send marketing emails, and we don't sell your information. AI is used to create portraits, but not to make decisions about you.

4. Who we share it with

We use carefully chosen service providers, who may only use your information to provide their service to us:

Provider	What they do	What they receive
Hostinger	Hosts our website, database and email inbox	Everything stored by the site
Replicate, Inc. (USA)	Runs the AI models that create portraits	Your photo and the portrait instructions
Google LLC and OpenAI (USA), through Replicate	Provide the AI image models	Your photo and the portrait instructions
Stripe Payments Europe Ltd and Stripe, Inc.	Process payments and help prevent fraud	Your email, payment and billing details, delivery address
Postmark (ActiveCampaign, LLC, USA)	Sends our emails	Your email address and the content of our emails to you
Cloudflare, Inc. (USA)	Checks that form submissions come from people, not bots	Technical information such as your IP address and browser
Print and delivery partners	Make and deliver printed orders	Your portrait file, name, delivery address and phone number

We may also share information if the law requires it, to protect our rights or our customers, or with a buyer if our business is sold (who would have to protect it in the same way).

5. Transfers outside the UK

Some providers above are based in the United States, so your information may be processed there. When it is, we rely on the UK–US "data bridge" for organisations certified under it, or on the UK International Data Transfer Agreement or Addendum to the EU Standard Contractual Clauses, which require your information to be protected to UK standards. You can contact us for more detail.

6. How long we keep it

• Portraits you don't buy, and the photos they were created from: 30 days, then deleted automatically.
• Portraits you buy, and the photos they were created from: kept so you can download them again and we can deal with any problems with your order, until you ask us to delete them.
• Order and payment records: 6 years after the end of the tax year of the order, as required by law.
• Your email address: while you have portraits or orders with us.
• Messages to us: up to 2 years.
• Security and free-limit records (including IP addresses): up to 90 days. Server logs: up to 30 days.
• Visit statistics (anonymous, without IP addresses): about 13 months.
• Records of when you downloaded files you bought (the time, file, IP address and browser, kept as evidence of delivery in case of a payment dispute): 2 years.

Our service providers keep information under their own retention rules. For example, Replicate deletes the inputs and outputs of AI requests made through its API after a short period.

7. Keeping it safe

Photos and portraits are stored privately and are only available to you through links that can't be guessed or that expire. The site is served over HTTPS, sign-in uses single-use links, and access to customer information is restricted. No system is completely secure, but we take care to protect your information.

8. Your rights

You have the right to:

• ask for a copy of the personal information we hold about you;
• ask us to correct information that's wrong;
• ask us to delete your information, including your photos and portraits (we'll keep only what the law requires, such as order records);
• object to, or ask us to restrict, how we use it;
• ask for information you gave us in a portable format.

To use any of these rights, contact us or email hello@petpawtrait.shop. We'll reply within one month. It's free, unless a request is clearly unfounded or excessive.

9. Complaints

If you're unhappy with how we've handled your information, please tell us first so we can put it right. You also have the right to complain to the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) at ico.org.uk or on 0303 123 1113.

10. Changes to this policy

We'll update this policy if how we use your information changes, and change the date at the top. If a change is significant, we'll tell you by email.