Privacy

A memorial you publish is stored in a Postgres database run by Supabase, and the photographs go into private storage alongside it. The database is hosted on Amazon Web Services in the region the project was created in. Nothing is stored only in your browser any more, which means a memorial opens on any device you sign in on and survives clearing your browsing data.

A memorial set to private is kept private by the database itself rather than by the page hiding it. The rules live next to the data, so a request for a private memorial from somebody who was not invited returns nothing at all, the same answer it gives for a memorial that does not exist. Photographs are not on guessable public addresses; each one is fetched through a short lived signed link.

If the site is ever run without those keys set it falls back to keeping everything in your own browser, which is how it worked before the database existed. The dashboard says which of the two is happening rather than leaving you to guess.

An account holds your email address, the name you gave, and the memorials you have made. Signing in is a link sent to that address, so there is no password here to be stolen. A memorial holds what you put in it: names, dates, the story you write, the photographs, the places, and what visitors leave.

Ordinary technical information is collected as well, such as which pages were served and rough error logs, because that is how a website is kept working. We do not build advertising profiles.

The map on a memorial draws its imagery from CARTO, an outside service, which means your device asks them for map tiles and they can see the address it came from. They are not told whose memorial you are looking at. If the map does not load, the places stay marked and the page says so.

Styx is built to look through a photo library and find the moments worth keeping. When that feature exists, photos will be analysed to recognise recurring faces, read the dates and locations already attached to the file, and group pictures into events.

Photographs are used to build the memorial they were given for and nothing else. They are not sold. They are not used for advertising. They are not used to train models for anyone outside Styx. Nothing appears on a memorial without the family approving it.

We will not sell your information or anyone else’s. We will not place advertising on a memorial. We will not pass a bereaved family’s details to funeral homes, insurers, or anybody else who would like to sell to them at the worst moment of their lives.

If that ever changes, it will change for new memorials only, it will be announced first, and you will be able to take everything with you.

You can delete a memorial from your dashboard. It is removed from the database, and everything that hung off it goes with it: the timeline, the places, the photographs, the memories and the flowers. It cannot be undone today, so the confirmation says so plainly. Exporting a memorial in one step, and deleting an account and everything in it, are not built yet.

A memorial that is deleted is meant to be gone. We will not keep a quiet copy.

Styx is being built in Canada and intends to handle personal information in line with PIPEDA, including your right to see what we hold about you and to ask for it to be corrected or removed.

This page is written to be truthful rather than to be thorough legal drafting, and it describes how Styx works today rather than how we hope it will work. It will be reviewed by a lawyer before Styx takes payments, and it will be republished then.

Questions about any of this can go to hello@styx.ca. A person reads it.