Privacy Policy

This page explains what personal data Ouvella processes, why, on what legal basis, for how long and who can access it. It covers everyone who uses the site: people who create and give a gift, people who sign a group card, people who receive a gift, and visitors.

Data controller

The data controller is the publisher of Ouvella. For any question about your data or to exercise your rights, write to contact@ouvella.com.

1. Creating and buying a gift

• Why: to create your gift (interactive gift, surprise calendar or group card), save it as you edit, deliver it after payment and let you manage it afterwards.
• Legal basis: performance of the contract and of pre-contractual steps taken at your request (Art. 6(1)(b) GDPR). To meet our legal obligations (Art. 6(1)(c)), we keep proof that you agreed to immediate delivery and waived your right of withdrawal with your order, for as long as you do not delete it, as well as billing data (see retention below).
• Data: what you put in the gift (title, text, photos, voice recordings, music or a link to music, dates, the first name of the person celebrated…), the secret word if you choose one (never stored in plain text: it is hashed), your email address, the site language, the date and version of your consent at payment, and the payment status.
• Retention: an unpaid creation is deleted after 6 months without activity, and the email address entered on an unpaid creation is erased after 30 days without activity. A paid gift and its content stay online for at least 5 years, unless you delete it sooner. Billing data (amount, date, payment reference) is kept for as long as our accounting obligations require, in principle 10 years.
• Who can access it: you, from your private management link; anyone you give the gift’s link or QR code to (and the secret word, if there is one); us, for support; and our technical providers listed below.

2. Paying

• Why: to collect payment for your order and prevent fraud. Legal basis: performance of the contract (Art. 6(1)(b)).
• How: you enter your payment details in the secure form of Stripe, our payment provider, to which we pass your email address and the order amount. Ouvella never receives your card details: only the result, amount and reference of the payment. Depending on your device and country, Stripe offers card, Apple Pay, Google Pay, PayPal or Link.
• Separate controllers: Stripe also processes some data on its own behalf (fraud prevention, regulatory obligations). If you choose PayPal or Link (Stripe’s saved-payment service), these services process your data as separate controllers, under their own privacy policies; so do Apple and Google if you pay with Apple Pay or Google Pay.
• Payment log: each time you try to pay, we record on our servers the result (form opened, code declined, error…), the kind of discount code entered (never the code itself), the kind of browser (an app’s built-in browser such as Instagram or TikTok, or a regular browser) and the system (iOS, Android, computer), without any cookie, to spot failing payments and fix them. Legal basis: our legitimate interest in keeping payment working (Art. 6(1)(f)). Retention: like billing data (see 1), even if you delete your gift; this log contains neither your email address nor the gift’s content.

3. The emails you receive

• Service emails (legal basis: performance of the contract): the confirmation with the gift link, its QR code and your private management link; the link to share so people can sign a group card; the alert when your gift is opened or a reaction is waiting for you; reminders for your calendar or group card; and emails you request yourself, such as resending your links.
• Reminder to finish (legal basis: our legitimate interest in helping you finish a creation you started, Art. 6(1)(f)): if your creation is still awaiting payment, we may send you the link to resume it, once. You can object with the unsubscribe link it contains, or by simply replying to that email.
• Reminder before a calendar’s first door (legal basis: your consent, Art. 6(1)(a)): if you tick the box when asking for the link to continue your calendar, your address is used only to send you one single email, between three days and the day before the first door opens, as long as the calendar is not paid. It is erased right after that email, as soon as the calendar is paid, or once its first door has opened. To withdraw your consent before then, simply reply to the email that contains your link.
• Discount code and review requests (legal basis: our legitimate interest in offering you products similar to the one you bought, Article L34-5 of the French Postal and Electronic Communications Code): after your purchase, your confirmation email contains a 10% discount code for your next gift, and we may ask for your review. You can refuse these messages at payment, with the box provided, then at any time and free of charge, with the one-click unsubscribe link included in each of them.
• Retention: your address is kept with your order (see 1). If you unsubscribe, we keep it on a suppression list for as long as needed to respect your choice.

4. Signing a group card

• Why: to add your message to the group card an organiser invited you to sign, and deliver it to the person celebrated. Legal basis: the legitimate interest of the organiser and of Ouvella in putting together the card you chose to sign (Art. 6(1)(f)).
• Data: the name you enter, your message, the colour you pick and, if you add them, a photo and a voice message. A code saved in your browser lets you edit or withdraw your message later, from the same device.
• Who reads it: the person celebrated, in the final card, and the organiser. Other signers never see your message. We may access it for support or to handle a report.
• Retention: your message lasts as long as the card (see 1). You can withdraw it at any time from the same device; the organiser can also delete it, and you can write to us to have it deleted.

5. Receiving a gift

• Opening: when you open a gift, we record the date of the first and last opening and how many times it was opened, to let the person who gave it to you know — never where from or on which device. Legal basis: our legitimate interest, and that of the person giving you the gift, in providing the service they ordered (Art. 6(1)(f)).
• Reactions: if you send a reaction (and, if you like, a short message), it is passed on to the person who gave you the gift, who can delete it from their management link. Legal basis: our legitimate interest in passing on what you chose to send (Art. 6(1)(f)).
• A calendar’s morning reminder: if you ask for it from a calendar you received, your e-mail address is used only to send you a short e-mail each morning a door opens. It is never shown to the person giving you the calendar. Legal basis: your consent (art. 6.1.a), which you withdraw in one click with the link in every e-mail. Duration: your address is deleted at the latest two days after the last door, even if you stopped the reminders earlier.
• Retention: this information lasts as long as the gift (see 1).

6. Customer reviews

• Why: to collect your review of your gift and, if you agree, publish it on the site. Legal basis: your consent (Art. 6(1)(a)), which you can withdraw at any time.
• Data: the first name or nickname you choose, your rating, your text, the gift’s occasion and the date of the review.
• Retention: your review is kept for 5 years at most, or until you ask us to remove it at contact@ouvella.com if that comes first; it is then taken off the site. The publication rules are set out in our terms and conditions of sale.

7. Where sales come from

• Why: to know which sites, campaigns or shares bring us customers (search engine, AI assistant, social network, another gift…), to make Ouvella better known.
• Legal basis: your consent (Art. 6(1)(a) GDPR and Article 82 of the French Data Protection Act), given by clicking “Accept” in the cookie banner. Without it, nothing is recorded. You can withdraw your consent at any time from the cookies page.
• Data: a random identifier of your browser, the source of your visits (referring site, campaign, landing page), and your country and device type; this information is linked to your order.
• From a gift you received: if you create your gift with the link offered at the end of a gift you received, that link carries a code identifying the original gift, without giving access to its content. This code is saved with your order even without consent in the banner, since no tracker is involved; legal basis: our legitimate interest in knowing how many gifts lead to new ones (Art. 6(1)(f)).
• Your answer to the question about how you discovered Ouvella (optional, one choice from a list, asked after payment): it is saved with your order, whether or not you accepted the cookie banner. Legal basis: your consent, given by answering (Art. 6(1)(a)); you can withdraw it by writing to us at contact@ouvella.com.
• Retention: in your browser, as stated on the cookies page; once linked to an order, it is kept with that order (see 1).

8. Audience measurement

Ouvella measures site traffic with Vercel Web Analytics, without cookies and without storing anything on your device: the tool produces aggregated statistics (pages viewed, referring site, country, device and browser type), with no identifier kept for more than 24 hours and no tracking across sites. Legal basis: our legitimate interest in understanding how the site is used (Art. 6(1)(f)).

9. Security and abuse prevention

• Why: to protect the service and your data (mass submissions, attempts to guess a secret word, payment fraud). Legal basis: our legitimate interest in securing the service (Art. 6(1)(f)).
• Data: a fingerprint of your IP address (hashed, never stored in clear) used to limit the number of requests, and our host’s technical logs (IP address, page requested, date and time, browser).
• Retention: the fingerprint erases itself after 24 hours at most; technical logs are kept for 30 days at most.

10. Writing to us

If you write to us at contact@ouvella.com, we use your message and address to reply (legal basis: performance of the contract if your request concerns an order, otherwise our legitimate interest in answering the messages we receive), and we keep them for as long as needed to handle and follow up on your request. Emails sent to contact@ouvella.com are forwarded by Cloudflare (Email Routing) to a Gmail inbox (Google), which stores them, including in the United States.

What Ouvella never does

Your content is never used for advertising, nor sold or rented to third parties. Ouvella sets no advertising cookies, does no profiling and makes no decision based solely on automated processing.

Recipients and subprocessors

Your data is shared with the people listed above and with the technical providers below, which process it on our behalf, on our instructions, under a data processing agreement (DPA). Vercel also provides the cookieless audience measurement. Stripe, PayPal, Apple and Google also process some data on their own behalf (see 2).

• Vercel Inc. — Application hosting and cookieless audience measurement (Vercel Web Analytics). Location: United States (EU regions available, including Frankfurt). Transfers outside the EU governed by: EU Standard Contractual Clauses (SCC) 2021/914 + EU-US Data Privacy Framework. DPA
• Neon Inc. (a Databricks company) — Database. Location: European Union — Frankfurt (AWS eu-central-1). Transfers outside the EU governed by: EU Standard Contractual Clauses (SCC) 2021/914 + EU-US Data Privacy Framework. DPA
• Cloudflare, Inc. — Media storage (photos, audio). Location: European Union (R2 "eu" jurisdiction). Transfers outside the EU governed by: EU-US Data Privacy Framework + EU Standard Contractual Clauses (SCC) 2021/914. DPA
• Stripe Payments Europe, Ltd — Payment (no card data passes through the site). Location: Ireland (EU); processing may involve the United States. Transfers outside the EU governed by: EU Standard Contractual Clauses (SCC) 2021/914 + EU-US Data Privacy Framework. DPA
• Plus Five Five, Inc. (Resend) — Sending emails. Location: United States. Transfers outside the EU governed by: EU Standard Contractual Clauses (SCC) 2021/914 + EU-US Data Privacy Framework. DPA
• Upstash, Inc. — Rate limiting (Redis). Location: European Union — Frankfurt (AWS eu-central-1). Transfers outside the EU governed by: EU-US Data Privacy Framework + EU Standard Contractual Clauses (SCC) 2021/914. DPA

Transfers outside the European Union

Our database (Neon), media storage (Cloudflare R2) and rate limiting (Upstash) are hosted in the European Union. Several providers are nonetheless US companies (notably Vercel, Resend and Stripe), which may process data in the United States. These transfers are governed by the safeguards given for each provider in the list above: the European Commission’s adequacy decision of 10 July 2023 (EU-US Data Privacy Framework) for certified companies, and the Commission’s standard contractual clauses (Decision 2021/914). You can get a copy by writing to us.

Your rights

• Access and portability: get a copy of your data, and receive the data you gave us in a common, machine-readable format.
• Rectification and erasure: correct inaccurate data or have your data erased.
• Restriction and objection: ask us to temporarily freeze the use of your data, or object to processing based on our legitimate interest; your objection to discount and review-request emails always applies, without any justification.
• Withdrawing consent: withdraw your consent at any time (review publication, where sales come from), without affecting what was done before.
• Instructions after your death: decide what happens to your data after your death (Article 85 of the French Data Protection Act).

To exercise these rights, write to contact@ouvella.com, if possible from the address linked to your order or with your gift link, so we can check that the request really comes from you. We reply within one month, which may be extended by two months for a complex request (we will let you know).

You can also act on your own, at any time, from your private management link: edit your gift, disable it, or delete it permanently. The gift, its photos, recordings, reactions and, for a group card, the signers’ messages are then erased from our servers, with no way back. All that remains, without your email address or the gift’s content: on our side, the sale record (amount, date, product and, where applicable, its origin, see 7) and the payment log (see 2), for our accounts and statistics; at Stripe, the payment data it keeps for its own legal obligations.

If you believe your rights are not being respected, you can lodge a complaint with the CNIL, the French data protection authority (www.cnil.fr), or with the data protection authority of your country.