OpenWhen

Privacy Policy

Last updated: October 2026

What we store

  • The letter you write, its title, and anything you attach to it — a photo, a voice note, a song choice. We have to keep this: it is what the recipient opens when they follow your link.
  • A cookie in your own browser (ow_buyer_id) so you can find letters you already wrote and so anything you have paid for stays unlocked. It lasts a year from your first visit, or from the day you buy Premium, which is why Premium is valid for 1 year on the browser you buy it on. If you follow the link to your letters in one of our emails, a second one (ow_linked_ids) lets that browser list them too. Both are ours alone and never shared with advertisers.
  • Usage analytics — views, unlocks, which features get used. We may publish aggregate statistics from these, such as counts by occasion or how soon letters are opened, never text from any letter.
  • Truncated, hashed IP addresses, for rate limiting only.
  • If you buy Premium, a record of the purchase. Payment itself is handled by Stripe, Dodo Payments or Google Play; we never see your card or wallet details.
  • If you use “Help me find the words”, your three answers are sent to our AI provider (OpenAI) to write the draft, and are not stored by us.
  • An email address only if you give us one — to send a letter on your behalf, to answer you when you write to support, or, when you ask on the share screen, to tell you when your letter is opened, when they write back, and a year on from the day. Every one of those emails has an unsubscribe link, and it stops all email to that address. You are never asked for one to write or send a letter.

Content is encrypted in transit and at rest by our database provider. We do not add a second layer of encryption on top of that, so please treat a letter as private between you, your recipient and us — not as secret.

What we don't do

  • No accounts, no passwords, no sign-up
  • No advertising cookies and no cross-site tracking
  • We never sell or rent your data, or share it for advertising

How long we keep it

A letter is kept until you remove it. There is no automatic expiry unless you choose one: if you set an expiry date while writing, the letter stops opening at that date. Otherwise it stays available, which is deliberate — people come back to letters years later, and your letters would be empty if we deleted them for you.

Your rights and deleting your data

You can disable a letter at any time with the manage link you were given when you created it. A disabled letter can no longer be opened by anyone. If you want a letter and its contents erased outright, or want to know what we hold about you, ask us on the support page and we will do it by hand.

Contact

Questions about any of this? Write to us on the support page. It reaches a person, and we answer there — we have no inbox behind an @openwhen.cards address.