Privacy Policy

Serany (“we”, “us”) provides a hosted platform that lets funeral homes publish a farewell website for someone they're caring for. Serany is currently operated by Tristan Clark. Any questions about this policy, or about your own data, go to hello@serany.app.

Who this comes from, and what it is:

• Funeral home accounts. The name, email address and company details of anyone who signs up, plus the branding (logo, colours, subdomain) they set up.
• Prospective funeral home contacts. Before a funeral home signs up, we may hold a firm's name and address, the names and business email addresses of people who work there, and any correspondence with them. This comes from what the firm itself has published, such as its own website, a business directory or Companies House, never bought or scraped from a third party.
• Farewell website content. What the funeral home, or a family member they've given an editing link to, enters about the person who has died: their name and dates, an obituary, service details, and any photographs uploaded for the website or its gallery.
• Visitor contributions. If someone visiting a farewell website marks themselves as attending an event, or leaves a memory, we store the name, message and any photograph they choose to submit.
• How a farewell website is being used. When someone opens a farewell website, or shares it, saves a card, prints something from it, or follows a link on it to a charity or a livestream, we record that it happened: the time, which page, how the visitor's browser and device describe themselves, and whether the request looked like a person or a machine. We also record a scrambled version of the visitor's network address, so that one person opening a page five times is counted once rather than five times. The scrambling key is replaced every day and the old one is destroyed, so after a day even we cannot tell that two visits came from the same place. None of this names anyone, and it is not stored on the visitor's device.
• What staff did in the account. When someone changes something in a funeral home's account, we record who did it and when, which record they changed, and the value before and after. We usually record their signing in and out too, though not always when the person is one of us: we never record our own signing out, and some of our visits leave no sign-in record either. Family members editing through an editing link are recorded as the family rather than by name. We don't keep copies of free text such as an obituary, or of a family contact's own details: for those we record only that they changed. The record belongs to the funeral home's account, and they can ask us for it at any time.
• Payment details. Card details are entered directly into Stripe, our payment processor. We never see or store a card number ourselves.
• Venue lookups. If a funeral home searches for a service venue, that search is sent to Google Places to find the address, and the venue's address and coordinates are stored so we can show a map on the website.

To run the service you've signed up for: publishing and hosting Farewell Websites, checking what visitors submit before it appears on one, processing payments, sending you the email link you use to log in, showing a map next to a service's address, and fixing things when they break.

Before a funeral home signs up, we also use publicly available business contact details to reach out about the service, on the basis of our legitimate interest in telling UK funeral homes a product built for them exists. See “Your rights” below for how to object.

We use a small number of specialist providers to run the service, rather than building everything ourselves:

• Supabase: our database and file storage.
• Vercel: hosting for the website itself.
• Stripe: payment processing. We never see full card details. When a funeral home is charged for publishing a farewell website, the invoice line names the person it is for, so that the funeral home can match the charge to the funeral and pass it on. That name reaches Stripe and appears on the funeral home's own invoice.
• Resend: sending the email link you use to log in.
• Google (Places and Maps): looking up a venue's address and showing it on a map. We also use a Google Workspace mailbox to send outreach emails to prospective funeral homes.
• Anthropic (Claude): checking what visitors submit, before it appears on a farewell website. When someone leaves a memory, the name, message and any photographs they included are sent to be checked automatically for abuse, and so is a name someone asks to show on a public list of people attending. Nothing else about a visitor is sent, and nothing a funeral home or a family enters is.
• TikTok and Instagram: on our funeral poems pages, where a poet has published a reading of their own work, we show it using the player those platforms provide. The player sits in a frame of its own, so it cannot see the page around it, but TikTok or Instagram can see that your browser asked them for it, in the same way they would if you visited their own site. We do not send them anything about you, we run none of their code on our own pages, and the rest of our website has no connection to them at all.
• Wikimedia Commons and Open Library: photographs of poets and pictures of book covers on those same pages are loaded from where they are published rather than copied onto our website, so your browser asks those sites for the picture.
• PostHog (hosted in the EU): error reports, so we know when something has broken. This includes errors that happen in your browser, which means we run a small script on the page. It only reports errors. We are never sent the address or the title of the page you were on, so we never learn whose farewell website you were visiting. Nothing is stored on your device, we don't record sessions, we don't track what you look at, and we don't build a profile of anyone.

We don't sell your data, or anyone else's, to anyone, for any reason.

We use a cookie to keep a funeral home account signed in, and a small cookie to remember a currency preference on our pricing page. We don't use advertising or behavioural tracking cookies, for funeral home staff or for visitors to a farewell website. Counting how a farewell website is being used, described above, stores nothing at all on a visitor's device.

A published farewell website stays online even if the funeral home behind it stops paying. We don't take a website down for non-payment. Account and billing records are kept for as long as we need them to run the service and meet our own legal obligations. You can ask us to delete personal data at any time; see “Your rights” below.

A prospective funeral home's own contact details are kept for as long as they help us follow up sensibly, and never for longer than we need them. If a firm signs up, this becomes part of the funeral home account above.

The record of what staff did in an account is kept for as long as the account exists. We don't delete it on a schedule, because its purpose is to answer questions about changes made months earlier.

Under UK GDPR, you can ask us to show you what we hold about you, correct it, delete it, or stop using it for a particular purpose. Email hello@serany.app and we'll respond as quickly as we can. You can also complain to the UK Information Commissioner's Office (ico.org.uk) if you think we've got something wrong.

If you left a memory or marked yourself as attending on a farewell website without giving your name, there's no account behind that entry, so we can't automatically match a request to it. Email hello@serany.app, tell us what you posted and which farewell website it's on, and we'll find and remove it by hand.

If we've contacted your funeral home about Serany and you haven't signed up, you can ask us to stop at any time: reply to the email, or email hello@serany.app. We'll record that and won't contact you again.

If this policy changes in a way that matters, we'll update the date at the top of this page.