Privacy

The most important thing to know

A memorial created here carries a name, dates, a life story, and photographs, and all of it is fully public. No login hides it, and we do not hide it from search engines. If you search for someone's name and their memorial is here, it can appear in the results, the same as any other public web page. That is deliberate. Someone who remembers a name but not where the tree stands should still be able to find it. Treat anything published here as something the world can read, rather than something shared with a small circle.

A memorial may need to come down because it names the wrong person, because it contains something it shouldn't, or because a family has changed its mind. Any of those is reason enough. See Request a removal.

What we collect, and why

• Tributes. When you leave a tribute on a memorial, we store the words you write and, if you choose to give one, the name you type. Leaving the name field blank is fine, and the tribute will show as "Anonymous." Nothing publishes immediately. The grove's caretaker reads every tribute first, and it appears only once they approve it.
• Removal requests. When you use the removal form, we store your name, your email address, your connection to the memorial if you tell us one, and your message. It goes into the same queue a tribute does, and the caretaker reads it there. It is never published. It exists so the caretaker can act on your request and write back to you.
• A scrambled form of your IP address. When you submit a tribute or a removal request, we take the IP address it came from and run it through a one-way function, storing only the scrambled result. We never keep the address itself, and the scrambling cannot be reversed to recover it. That scrambled value lets us count how many submissions arrive from one connection in an hour, which is how we keep the grove from filling with spam. It is never shown on the site and never sits alongside your tribute or your name.
• A caretaker session cookie. If you sign in to manage a grove as a caretaker, we set one cookie, named hg_session, holding a random token that identifies your signed-in session. The token is a key rather than a record, carrying no personal information. Ordinary visitors reading or leaving tributes never receive it. Page scripts cannot read it, it travels only over an encrypted connection, and it expires 30 days after your last sign-in. Signing in again refreshes it. Because keeping a caretaker signed in is the only thing it does, the guidance we followed treats it as strictly necessary, so we show no cookie banner.
• A bot check on our forms. The tribute and removal forms use Cloudflare Turnstile, which tells a person apart from an automated script without the distorted-text puzzles some sites use. It runs on Cloudflare's infrastructure rather than ours. We use it to stop abuse of the two forms, and for nothing else.

What we don't collect

We don't run advertising or analytics scripts, and we don't build a profile of who visits a memorial. Reading a memorial page requires no account, no cookie, and leaves nothing behind on our end beyond the ordinary server activity every website generates.

How long we keep things

• Memorials and approved tributes stay as long as the memorial does. They are the public record a family chose to keep. When a caretaker declines to publish a tribute we keep a record of that decision rather than erasing it, in case someone needs to revisit it later. Either way it never reaches the public page.
• Removal requests stay with the caretaker's other records of decisions made about a memorial.
• The scrambled IP value lasts one hour. A scheduled job deletes anything older, whether or not anyone has visited the site since. Our nightly backups are deleted after 30 days, so no copy of that value outlives a month.
• The session cookie and the record behind it expire 30 days after your last sign-in.

Who operates this site

This grove is maintained by its caretaker. Write to privacy@heartwoodgrove.org with any question about this policy or about anything collected here. A real person reads it.

Requesting a change or a removal

If you'd like a memorial taken down, or something about it corrected, the fastest path is the removal request form. You can also write to the contact address above.