Legal
Written in-house, not yet reviewed by a solicitor. These are the terms that apply to purchases today.

Privacy Notice

This notice says what personal data we hold, why we hold it, who else receives it and what your rights are. Two things here are worth knowing before anything else, because you might not expect them.

The universe is public. System names, owner display names, coordinates and vanity URLs are published, indexed by search engines and included in our sitemap.

Every link you save is sent to Google Web Risk to be checked for phishing and malware, when you save it and once a week afterwards.

Who is responsible for your data

The controller of your personal data is Red Kite 9 Ltd, a company registered in England and Wales (company number 13157267), registered office Riverside House, 3 Place Farm, Wheathampstead, Hertfordshire, AL4 8SB, England. For anything about your data, contact us at support@charteduniverse.space.

We are registered with the Information Commissioner's Office as a data controller, registration reference ZB247030.

Purchases made before 28 October 2026 were sold by Red Kite 9 Ltd, and the terms that applied at the time still apply to them.

What we hold

  • Your email address. You sign in with a link we send to it, and we use it for messages about your account and purchases.
  • Your display name, if you set one. It is shown publicly as the owner of your systems.
  • What you put on your systems: names, tooltips, colours, links and a star logo if you upload one. All of it is public.
  • A record of what you have bought: the product, the amount, the date and the payment reference from Onelink or Stripe. We never see or hold your card number.
  • A card fingerprint from Stripe. It is a code that identifies a card without revealing its number. We use it to notice when the same card is behind more than one account.
  • Your IP address, briefly, to limit how fast one visitor can search, report, check names or start a checkout.
  • Who referred you, if you arrived through another member's referral link.
  • For a gift: the recipient's email address, the name given to their star and the dedication. See the section for gift recipients below.
  • Reports. If you report a system while signed in, the report is linked to your account. If you are not signed in, it is not linked to you.

What we do not collect

There is no per-visitor analytics here. We do not track where you are, where you came from or what you look at, and we set no advertising or tracking cookies. The view and click counts an owner sees are plain totals, counted without cookies and not tied to any visitor. The only cookie we set ourselves keeps you signed in.

Why we use it, and our lawful basis

  • To give you what you bought and run your account — your email address, your purchases and the content of your systems. The lawful basis is our contract with you.
  • To keep the universe safe for visitors — sending saved links to be checked, handling reports, and freezing content under review. The lawful basis is our legitimate interest in not hosting phishing or malware.
  • To prevent abuse and fraud — IP-based rate limits, the bot check and the card fingerprint. The lawful basis is our legitimate interest in protecting the service and the people who use it.
  • To keep financial records. The lawful basis is a legal obligation: tax law requires us to keep them.

What is public

A system you own is a public page with a public address. Its name, the names, tooltips and links on its planets, your display name as its owner, its coordinate and any vanity URL can be seen by anyone, appear in search and on the map, and can be picked up by search engines. Your email address is never public.

If you would rather not be named, leave your display name empty.

Who else receives your data

These companies process data for us, each for one job:

  • Google Cloud hosts the website (on App Engine). It receives visitors' IP addresses and browser details in its request logs.
  • Supabase hosts our database, sign-in and file storage. Everything in "What we hold" is stored there.
  • Resend delivers our emails. It receives the recipient's address and the message.
  • Cloudflare Turnstile tells people from bots when you sign in, buy a gift or send a report. It receives your IP address and details of your browser.
  • Google Web Risk checks links. It receives each link saved on a system — the address only, not who saved it.

For purchases sold through Onelink, Stripe, through its affiliate Sold through Link, LLC, collects your payment, billing and tax details as merchant of record. It decides itself how it uses them, under its own privacy policy, and is not processing them on our behalf. It shares the order details with us — your name, email address, billing country, what you bought and the amount — and we hold those as this notice describes.

Where a payment is not sold through Onelink — for example, the renewal of a vanity URL subscription that started before we switched — Stripe still takes the payment for us as our processor.

We do not sell personal data and we do not share it for advertising. We may disclose it where the law requires us to.

Transfers outside the UK

Some of these companies process data outside the United Kingdom, including in the United States. Where each one holds it, and what protects it there:

  • Supabase: the EU (Frankfurt, Germany). This is covered by the UK's adequacy regulations for the EEA.
  • Google Cloud (hosting): servers in London.
  • Stripe and Resend: the United States. They are certified under the UK Extension to the EU-US Data Privacy Framework, and their data processing terms also include the UK Addendum to the EU standard contractual clauses.
  • Cloudflare (Turnstile) and Google Web Risk: the United States, under the UK Addendum to the EU standard contractual clauses in their data processing terms.

How long we keep it

  • Your email address and display name: for as long as your account is open. When you delete your account your display name is erased at once and your email address is kept for 30 days so that you can change your mind, then erased.
  • The content of your systems: for as long as it is on the system. On account deletion you choose, system by system, whether it keeps showing without your name or is blanked. See Account Deletion.
  • Financial records: 6 years, because the law requires it. After account deletion they are kept with your personal details stripped out. Onelink (Stripe) keeps its own records of purchases sold through Onelink, under its own privacy policy, and Stripe keeps its own copy of any other payment records. Our deletion reaches neither.
  • IP addresses used for rate limiting: cleared after about 1 hour.
  • A gift recipient's email address: held to deliver the gift and its claim link. It is removed 12 months after the gift was sent if the gift is never claimed, or 30 days after it is claimed. The copies of the star name, dedication and email address on our order record are removed at the same time. The star's name and dedication on the system itself stay, as content of the star.
  • A coded form of a gift recipient's email address (a one-way keyed code, not the address itself): kept while the gift is unclaimed so that only someone signed in with that address can claim it. It is kept after the readable address is removed on the schedule above, and deleted when the gift is claimed.
  • Sign-in records: our sign-in provider, Supabase, logs each sign-in, including the IP address it came from, in its own service logs. We do not copy them into our database. They are deleted automatically after no more than 7 days; deleting your account does not remove them sooner.
  • A card fingerprint: 12 months after the order it came from.
  • Who referred you: until your account is deleted.
  • A wish (the design you share so someone can gift you that star, and its coordinate): its link works for 12 months unless you renew it. The wish itself is kept until you delete it, or, once it has been granted, so that its link can still say so. All your wishes are deleted when your account is erased. Your email address is never shown to anyone buying a wish.
  • Reports: 2 years after the report is closed. If the person who made a report deletes their account, their details are removed from it.

Erased data can remain in our daily database backups for up to 7 days before they are overwritten.

If someone gave you a star

If you received a gift, we did not get your details from you. The person who bought it gave us your email address, the name for the star and the dedication. We use your email address only to send you the gift and the link to claim it, and to make sure only you can claim it: claiming needs the link and signing in with the email address the gift was sent to. The lawful basis is our legitimate interest in delivering a gift someone has paid for. We remove your email address 12 months after the gift was sent if you never claim it, or 30 days after you claim it. Until you claim it we keep a coded form of your address, so that only that address can claim the gift; it is deleted when the gift is claimed.

If you ask us to erase your email address from a gift you have not claimed yet, we remove both the address and its coded form. The gift then cannot be claimed until the person who sent it sets a new address. If you have already claimed it, the coded form was deleted when you claimed it, and your address is removed 30 days after the claim. If you delete your account, the copy on the gift order is removed at once, and the address itself when the 30 days of the deletion period are up, if that is sooner. If the sender changes the recipient address, we email the sender a notice showing the new address only in part.

The star's name and the dedication are public, like everything else on a system, and were chosen by the buyer rather than by you. If you would like them changed or removed, or you want us to stop holding your email address, contact us at support@charteduniverse.space. You have all the rights listed below, whether or not you ever claim the gift or create an account.

Your rights

You can ask us to:

  • give you a copy of the personal data we hold about you;
  • correct it if it is wrong;
  • erase it;
  • restrict what we do with it, or stop doing something we do on the basis of legitimate interests;
  • give it to you in a form you can take elsewhere.

To use any of these, contact us at support@charteduniverse.space. We will reply within one month. You can change your display name yourself from your account page. How deleting your account works is set out in Account Deletion.

Erasing your personal data does not release your coordinates. They were bought permanently and they stay charted.

Automated decisions

We make no decisions about you by automated means that have a legal or similarly significant effect. The link check is automatic, but all it decides is whether a link is clickable, and you can ask us to look at the result.

Complaints

If you are unhappy with how we have handled your data, please tell us first. You also have the right to complain to the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO), the UK's data protection regulator, at ico.org.uk.