Privacy
What we collect, who sees it, where it lives, and how to get rid of it.
Effective 11 October 2026. 0981308 BC Ltd, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
The short version
To make a book we need the words you type about the people in it, and to post one we need an address. We do not accept photographs. We do not sell anything to anyone. A book you start and never order is removed from the service automatically after 60 days; a sealed copy is kept in our archive for audit, and we delete that too if you ask.
What we collect
What you type
The names, ages, appearances and relationships you describe, what you would like the story to be about, and any dedication. This is the book — it is written into the story and drawn into the illustrations.
Much of it is about a child, and often not your own. Please describe only what you would be comfortable seeing printed in a book that will sit on a shelf. There is no need to give a surname, a birthday, a school, an address, or anything that identifies where a child can be found — and our checks reject contact details and web addresses in printed fields.
What we do not collect
No photographs. There is no way to upload one; the feature is switched off in the software, not merely absent from the screen. Nothing you provide is used to train an image model on a real person's face.
You do not need an account to make or buy a book. If you choose to sign in, we keep your email address and an account identifier so we can recover your old books and orders. Sign-in uses a one-time code sent by email; we do not collect or store a password. No IP addresses are kept in our own records — the limits that stop the site being abused are counted against the book, not against you.
If you ask for the welcome offer
The welcome code is one per email address, so asking for it signs you in with that address (the same optional account as above). We record that we gave your address a code — kept as a one-way fingerprint of the address, not the address itself — so the same address is not given a second one, and the code is switched off once that address has paid for a book. Stripe holds the code itself. If you tick the box for news and offers, we keep your address, the time and the words you agreed to, until you unsubscribe; if you do not tick it, we do not email you anything but the code you asked for. Every offer email has an unsubscribe link.
If you order
Your email address and delivery address, collected by Stripe on their own payment page and passed to us so we can post the book and send you confirmations. We never see your card number.
On your device
One cookie (cb_session) that lets you return to a book you started; it is HttpOnly, Secure and expires after 60 days. A short list of your books in your browser's local storage. If you sign in, the browser also keeps the account session tokens issued by Amazon Cognito. Signing out removes those account tokens but does not discard the book you currently have open. None of this is used for advertising. The only third-party cookies are Google Analytics', described below, and only where they are allowed.
Analytics
We use Google Analytics 4 to see how people find the site, which pages they read, and which countries they visit from. It records the pages you view, the site that sent you, your device and browser type, and an approximate location (country and city) that Google works out from your connection. Google Analytics 4 does not store your IP address. It never receives what you type into a book, your email address, delivery address, or the private links that open a book. We have turned off Google's advertising features, and the data is not used for advertising.
Where cookies are allowed, Google Analytics sets cookies named _ga and _ga_… that recognize a returning browser, for up to 13 months. In the United Kingdom, the European Economic Area, Switzerland and Quebec these cookies are off unless you agree. Until then, Google receives only cookieless, anonymous signals used to estimate totals. Anyone, anywhere, can turn them off here:
Our CDN also keeps its own request log — the date, the page, whether it loaded, and the country the request came from, with no IP address and no cookie.
Who else processes it
Making a book means sending what you wrote to services that turn it into words and pictures. Each one receives only what it needs.
- Anthropic — the conversation and the story text.
- OpenAI — the illustrations, generated from written descriptions.
- Stripe — payment, and the email and delivery address you give them.
- Amazon Web Services — hosting, storage, and optional email-code sign-in through Cognito.
- Google — website analytics (Google Analytics 4), as described above.
- Gelato — printing and delivery, once an order is placed. They receive the finished print files and the delivery address.
Where it is stored
In the United States (Amazon Web Services, Oregon), and the services above are also United States companies. We are a Canadian company, so information about Canadian, British and American customers alike is processed in the United States and is subject to the laws there, including lawful access by United States authorities. If that is not acceptable to you, please do not use the site.
How long we keep it
- A book you never order: 60 days, then removed from the service automatically. This is enforced by the database, not by someone remembering.
- The archive: kept indefinitely. Before any record is removed, a copy is written to encrypted, access-restricted archive storage (Amazon Web Services, Oregon), where it cannot be altered. It is kept so we can answer a dispute, a chargeback or an audit, and is not used for anything else. Ask us to delete your data and we remove it from the archive as well, except sale records we must keep for tax.
- An order: about seven years — records of a sale have to be kept for tax, and Canadian rules require six.
- An optional account: until you ask us to delete it. Deleting an account does not erase sales records we are legally required to retain.
- News and offers: until you unsubscribe. After that we keep only a note that the address said no, so it is never emailed news or offers again.
- The finished book files are kept while an order is in progress and for a reasonable period afterwards so a replacement can be printed.
Your rights
You may ask what we hold about you, ask us to correct it, and ask us to delete it. Under Canadian law (PIPEDA) and, if you are in the United Kingdom, under UK GDPR, we will respond within 30 days. Ask at privacy@penwynn.com.
A book that has been printed and posted cannot be un-printed, and we must keep the sale record for tax — but everything else about it can be removed.
Children
This site is sold to adults. A book is usually about a child, but the customer is the adult who describes them and decides what appears. We do not knowingly let anyone under 18 buy a book, and we do not ask a child for anything.
Changes and contact
If this policy changes materially we will change the effective date above and, where we hold your email because you ordered, tell you. Questions: privacy@penwynn.com.