Privacy

People tell us the name of someone who died. That is not ordinary customer data, and we do not treat it like it is.

This policy covers judahproject.com and every message we send. The business responsible for the information described here is The Judah Project, reachable at the address at the bottom of this page.

What we collect

Your name, your email address, and — only if you ask for texts — your mobile number. If you choose to tell us, the first name of the person you are grieving and your relationship to them, so the messages can speak plainly instead of generically. We also keep your timezone and preferred delivery hour, and a record of which messages were sent to you.

When you pay, Stripe handles the card. We never see or store card numbers.

Our hosting provider keeps ordinary server logs — IP address, browser, and the page requested — for a short period, which is how any website on the internet stays up and resists abuse. When you opt in to text messages we deliberately record your IP address and browser alongside that opt-in, because federal telemarketing rules require us to be able to prove consent came from you.

What we never do

We do not sell, rent, or trade your personal information, and nothing about a subscriber is ever handed to an advertiser. Mobile numbers, text-messaging consent, and the name of the person you lost are never shared with third parties or affiliates for marketing purposes under any circumstance. No advertising networks, no data brokers, no list swaps, ever.

We do not put tracking pixels in the daily messages. We do not track whether you opened one, and we will never contact you because you stopped opening them.

We have never sold personal information, and we do not use it for automated decision-making that produces legal or similarly significant effects. We do share one narrow thing for advertising measurement — described under Advertising below — and it never concerns a subscriber. If your state gives you the right to opt out of that, write to us and we will honour it.

Why we are allowed to have it

We use what you gave us for exactly one thing: delivering the year you or someone else paid for, and answering you when you write. We do not repurpose it. If we ever wanted to use it for something genuinely new, we would ask you first.

Who we share it with

Only the services required to actually deliver the thing you asked for: Stripe for payment, Twilio for text messages, our email provider for email, Neon for the database, and Vercel for hosting. Each one only receives what it needs to do its job. The single exception is Meta, which receives what is described under Advertising below.

We would also hand over information if a court or law validly required it, or to protect someone from imminent harm. If this business were ever sold or wound down, your information would move only to a party bound by this same policy — and we would tell you before it did.

Cookies

Meta’s advertising cookie is set on the public pages — the home page, the gift page, the pages for churches and funeral homes. It is not set on the pages that belong to you. Your daily pages, the page where you open a gift, the redemption page, the page where you set up a year for yourself, and the page after payment all load without it. There are no analytics cookies at all. The only other cookie we set keeps the operator logged in to the private admin area, and it is never set on your browser. Your own pages work by the link in your address bar, not by a cookie, which is why they still open on a new phone.

Advertising

We run ads, and we measure whether they work. Two things happen because of that, and neither one involves a grieving person.

When someone buys a gift, we tell Meta that a purchase happened and what it was worth, along with the buyer’s email address and name scrambled into a one-way code. Meta can check that code against an account it already has; it cannot turn the code back into an email address. The same happens when a church or funeral home signs up. No phone number is ever included, and neither is anything about the person the gift is for or the person who died.

If you set up a year for yourself, none of this happens — not the purchase, not the signup, not even the page view. Losing someone is not an advertising signal, and we are not going to turn it into one.

Where state law limits what an advertising platform may do with information about you, we send the flag that enforces that limit.

If someone gave this to you

The person who bought it told us your first name and email so we could invite you. They are never told whether you opened it, whether you signed up, what you chose, or whether you stopped. That is yours.

Text messages

Texts are only ever sent to a number whose owner personally checked the consent box on our own site. A gift buyer cannot sign anyone else up for texts. Reply STOP to any message to end them immediately, or HELP for help. Message and data rates may apply.

Your private pages

Your daily pages live at a private link containing a long random token. There is no password because we do not think a grieving person should have to remember one. Those pages are blocked from search engines. Anyone with your link can read your pages, so treat it the way you would treat your email.

If you lose the link, you can have it emailed to you again. If you think someone else has it, write to us and we will issue you a new one, which silently retires the old.

How we protect it

Everything travels over HTTPS and is stored encrypted at rest by our database provider. Private links carry 128 bits of randomness, which makes guessing one hopeless. Access to the administrative side is limited to the one person who runs this. No system is perfect, and we will not pretend otherwise — but nothing here is stored more loosely than it needs to be.

How long we keep it

Your account and your year stay as long as you want them, because people come back to day 40 in year three. Ask us to delete it and it goes. Order and payment records are kept for seven years, which is what tax and accounting rules require of any business. Text-message consent and opt-out records are kept for at least five years, for the same telemarketing rules described below. Server logs age out within weeks.

Deleting everything

Email us and we will delete your account and content outright — not deactivate it. The only thing we keep is the minimum record of your text-message consent and opt-out, which federal telemarketing rules require us to retain. Nothing in that record is ever used to contact you again.

Your rights

Wherever you live, you can ask us to show you what we hold about you, correct it, delete it, or send you a copy in a portable file. Residents of California, Colorado, Connecticut, Virginia, and other states with privacy statutes have those rights by law, along with the right not to be treated worse for using them — and we would not treat you worse for it in any state.

To use any of them, write to hello@judahproject.com. We answer within 45 days, usually the same week. We may need to confirm you are you before handing over a copy of a grief record, and if we ever have to refuse a request we will tell you plainly why. You may use an authorized agent, and you may appeal a refusal by replying to it.

California residents: we do not sell or share personal information as those terms are defined in the CCPA, we do not process it for cross-context behavioral advertising, and we do not knowingly collect it from anyone under 16. The categories we collect, why we collect them, and who receives them are listed above rather than in a table.

Where this operates

This is run from the United States and the information is stored there. If you sign up from another country, you are asking us to send it to you there, and it will be handled under this policy and US law.

Children

This is written for adults and is not directed at children under 13. We do not knowingly collect their information. If you believe a child has given us something, write to us and we will delete it.

If this policy changes

We will change the date at the top. If a change actually affects what happens to your information — not a wording fix — we will email the people it affects before it takes effect, rather than expecting anyone to re-read this page.

Reaching us

Reply to any message from us, or write to hello@judahproject.com. A person reads it.

The Judah Project
2140 Stephens Rd
Warren, MI 48091