Privacy Policy
Last updated 24 August 2026
Once Spoken is a small independent project run by one person. This page explains, in plain English, what information it holds, why it holds it, and what you can ask us to do about it.
The short version
- We collect what we need to receive a memorial, check it, publish it and answer your messages. Nothing more.
- We do not sell your personal information, and we do not share it for anyone else’s marketing.
- We do not use advertising trackers or analytics. There are no tracking cookies on this site.
- A memorial is meant to be public — that is the whole point of it. Your own contact details are not.
- You can ask us to correct or remove things, and a person will read your request.
Who operates Once Spoken
Once Spoken is operated from the United Kingdom by the person who runs this site, who is the data controller for the personal information described here.
Administrator to confirm: the legal or trading name of the operator, and a postal address for correspondence. A privacy policy has to identify the controller, and this cannot be established from the site itself. Until it is filled in, please treat the contact route below as the way to reach us.
Administrator to confirm: whether registration with the Information Commissioner’s Office (and payment of the data protection fee) is required for this activity, and if so the registration number.
Information about people who have died
This matters, and it is often misunderstood, so it is worth being precise about it.
UK data protection law — the UK GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018 — protects living individuals. Information about a person who has died is not that person’s “personal data” under those laws, and the rights described further down this page (access, erasure, and so on) do not belong to someone who has died.
That is a statement about the law, not about how we behave. We treat memorials with care because of what they are, and we will always consider a request from a family member about someone they have lost, whether or not the law obliges us to. See corrections and removal.
Two things do remain personal data, and are covered by this policy in the ordinary way:
- Your information as a submitter, correspondent or visitor — you are living, so the law applies to you.
- Information about living people that happens to appear inside a memorial — for example a living person visible in a photograph, or someone identifiable from the words that were quoted.
What we collect
When you submit a memorial
The submission form asks for the person’s name, the year they were born, the year they died, a short piece of something they said, and a photograph. That material is intended to be published, and if we approve it, it will be publicly visible on this site to anyone who comes across it.
The form also asks for:
- Your email address — optional. It is used only if we need to contact you about the memorial you submitted. It is not published, and it is not visible to visitors.
- Your confirmation that the details are accurate and that you have the right or permission to submit the memorial and the photograph. This is required.
- Your optional permission for us to feature the memorial on Once Spoken’s social media or promotional material. This is a separate, genuinely optional choice, and leaving it unticked has no effect on whether the memorial is published. We record whether you gave it, when, and the wording you were shown at the time, so that we can honour it accurately. You can withdraw it at any time by contacting us.
When you contact us
The contact form asks for your name, your email address, what your message is about, and the message itself. If you were looking at a particular memorial when you opened the form, a reference to that memorial is included so we can see what you are writing about.
Moderation records
Every memorial is reviewed by a person before it appears. We keep the record of that review — whether a memorial was approved or rejected, and any note made about it — along with the submission itself.
Technical information
Once Spoken does not run analytics software, advertising tags or third-party tracking of any kind. We have not added anything to this site that follows you around it or anywhere else.
However, like any website, this site cannot be delivered to you without your device contacting the servers that serve it. Our hosting and database providers keep their own technical logs as part of running their services, which will ordinarily include IP addresses, timestamps and details of the request. We do not use those logs to build any profile of you. Administrator to confirm: the log retention periods applied by Netlify and Supabase on the current plans, and whether any of those logs are exported or retained elsewhere.
Why we use it, and our lawful basis
| What | Why | Lawful basis |
|---|---|---|
| Submitter’s email address | To contact you about the memorial you submitted — a query, a problem, or a decision | Legitimate interests: running a moderated memorial site and being able to reach the person who sent something in |
| Submission confirmation | To show that someone confirmed they had the right to submit a memorial and photograph | Legitimate interests, and compliance with our legal obligations where a dispute or complaint arises |
| Optional social media permission | To use a memorial in Once Spoken’s own promotional material, only where that was agreed | Consent — which you can withdraw at any time |
| Contact form messages | To read, answer and act on what you have asked us | Legitimate interests: responding to the person who chose to write to us |
| Living people appearing in memorial content | Publishing an approved memorial | Legitimate interests in operating a memorial service, balanced against that person’s rights — if you are that person, tell us and we will act |
| Provider technical logs | Security, fault diagnosis and keeping the service running | Legitimate interests: keeping the site available and secure |
Administrator to review: the balancing of legitimate interests above, and whether a memorial could ever include special category data (for example, information revealing a living person’s health, religion or beliefs), which would need a further condition under Article 9.
We do not use your information to make automated decisions about you, and we do not profile you.
Who else is involved
We do not sell personal information and we do not share it for anyone else’s marketing. We do rely on a small number of service providers to make the site work at all:
| Provider | What it does for us |
|---|---|
| Netlify | Hosts this website and serves its pages |
| Supabase | Stores memorials, submitted photographs and contact messages, and handles administrator sign-in |
| jsDelivr | A public code network that delivers one software library the site uses; your browser requests that file from them, so they receive your IP address |
| Unsplash | Supplies the placeholder photographs shown only if our database cannot be reached; in that situation your browser requests those images from them |
We may also disclose information where the law requires it, or where it is necessary to establish, exercise or defend a legal claim — for example where someone alleges that a photograph was published without their permission.
Administrator to confirm: whether an email service is used to reply to enquiries, and whether any other tool (backups, error reporting, spreadsheets, a personal email account) holds copies of submitter or enquiry information. Anything that does is a processor and should be named in this table.
Where information is held
Our providers are international companies and may process information outside the United Kingdom, including in the United States.
Administrator to confirm: the region the Supabase project is hosted in, and the transfer safeguards relied on for each provider — normally the UK International Data Transfer Addendum or an adequacy decision, as set out in each provider’s data processing agreement. Until this is confirmed, we do not want to state a specific location or safeguard that we have not verified.
How long we keep it
A published memorial is intended to be permanent. That is what people are asking us for when they submit one, and it is the point of the site: that someone might still come across that face and those words many years from now.
Everything else is kept only as long as it is useful:
- Submitter email addresses are kept alongside the memorial so we can reach the person who sent it in.
- Consent records are kept for as long as we hold the memorial they relate to, because they are the evidence of what was agreed.
- Contact messages are kept while we deal with them, and for a period afterwards so that we have a record of what was asked and what we did — particularly for removal requests and complaints.
- Rejected submissions, including the photograph, are removed once the decision has been made and any query about it has been resolved.
Administrator to set: specific retention periods for contact messages, rejected submissions and submitter email addresses, and to confirm that rejected photographs are actually deleted from storage rather than only hidden. We have deliberately not invented figures here.
Cookies and storage on your device
This site does not set any cookies. There is no advertising, no analytics, and nothing that follows you between websites. That is why you have not been shown a cookie banner: there is nothing here that needs your consent.
One small item is stored in your browser’s local storage:
| Name | What it is |
|---|---|
memoryflame_visitor |
A random identifier created by your own browser, so that lighting a candle for the same person twice is not counted twice. It contains no name, email address or anything else about you, it is never sent to any other website, and it is not used to track you. |
We consider this strictly necessary for the candle feature you are choosing to use. You can clear it at any time through your browser settings; the site will simply create a new random value the next time you visit.
If you sign in to the administration area — which visitors do not — the software library we use stores a sign-in token in local storage so you stay signed in. That is essential to signing in at all.
Administrator to note: if analytics, advertising, embedded video or social media widgets are ever added, they will almost certainly require consent under the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations, and this section and the site will need a consent mechanism before they go live.
Your rights
If you are a living individual whose personal data we hold, you have the right to:
- ask what we hold about you, and get a copy of it;
- have inaccurate information corrected;
- ask us to delete information, in the circumstances where that right applies;
- ask us to restrict how we use it, or object to our use of it where we rely on legitimate interests;
- withdraw consent — for example the optional social media permission — at any time, without that affecting anything done before you withdrew it;
- ask for a copy of information you gave us in a portable form, where that right applies;
- complain to the regulator.
These rights have limits and exceptions in the legislation. If we cannot do what you have asked, we will tell you why.
We do not charge for dealing with a request, and we aim to respond within one month.
Corrections, changes and removal
Separately from the legal rights above, you can simply ask. Please contact us if you would like a memorial corrected, a photograph changed or taken down, or a memorial removed altogether — or if you believe something has been submitted that should not have been, or was submitted by someone with no right to do it.
Tell us the name shown on the memorial and, if you can, your relationship to the person. It helps us act quickly and helps us be fair to everyone involved. Every message is read by a person.
Where a request concerns a memorial submitted by someone else, we may need to weigh up more than one person’s wishes. We will be straightforward with you about what we decide and why.
Children
Once Spoken is not aimed at children and we do not ask anyone to create an account to visit it. Memorials should be submitted by adults. If you believe a child has sent us personal information, please contact us and we will remove it.
Security
Access to the administration area, where submissions and messages are read, requires signing in, and administrator-only information — such as submitter email addresses and consent records — is not readable through the public site. Photographs and memorial records are held with our database provider, Supabase, and the site is served over an encrypted connection.
We have described only what we can point to. No website can promise that information will never be compromised, and we would rather say that plainly than make a claim we cannot stand behind.
Complaints
If you are unhappy with how we have handled your information, please tell us first — it is usually the quickest way to put something right.
You also have the right to complain to the UK’s data protection regulator, the Information Commissioner’s Office, at ico.org.uk/make-a-complaint, or by telephone on 0303 123 1113.
Changes to this policy
If this policy changes, we will update the date at the top of the page. If a change materially affects how we use information you have given us, we will make that clear rather than quietly editing the text.
How to contact us
You can reach us through the contact form on Once Spoken. Choose the option that best matches what you need — including asking for a memorial to be removed — and a person will read it.