Privacy Policy
Last updated 21 October 2026
Giftruly helps you remember the people you love and find them the right gift. To do that, it holds things that matter: birthdays, tastes, sizes, notes, and what you gave last year. This page says exactly what we keep, why, where, for how long, and how you stay in control. It covers giftruly.com and the Giftruly app.
The short version
- You don’t need an account. Without one, what you add stays in your browser.
- If you keep your Giftruly, your data syncs through our servers at Amazon Web Services in the United States, so it’s on all your devices.
- The people you add are your private notes. They’re never public, never used for ads, and we never contact them. We don’t even store their email or phone number.
- We don’t sell data and we show no ads. We earn a small commission when you buy through some shopping links.
- When you ask Truly for ideas, what’s needed for the answer goes to an AI model (Claude, run by Amazon Bedrock). It isn’t used to train AI models.
- You can download everything or delete your account yourself, in Settings, at any time.
Who we are
Giftruly is run by Alexis Thomas, an individual based in France (“Giftruly”, “we”, “us”). We are the controller of the personal data described here. Write to us about anything on this page at admin@giftruly.com. At our size the law doesn’t require a data protection officer, so your message reaches the person who runs Giftruly.
Using Giftruly without an account
Most of Giftruly works without an account. This is what the public website does with data.
Finding gifts
Gift descriptions you type are sent to our recommendation service. When AI is switched on, Amazon Bedrock processes them (see Truly and AI). Answers may be cached for up to seven days. Spending records and a hashed form of your network address help prevent abuse; these visitor counters expire after two days. Your shopping country and shortlist are saved in this browser’s local storage. A shared shortlist link contains its gift ideas, and anyone with the link can see it.
Secret Santa groups made with a code and PIN
A Secret Santa group stores what its members type into it: first names, the group’s name, budget, date and note, wishes, and the anonymous messages between givers and receivers. Each person’s PIN and device keys are kept only as one-way hashes. It stores no phone numbers. The draw is made on our server, and each person is only shown their own match; the organizer can reveal the whole draw to the group after the exchange.
Adding an email address is optional. If you add one (or the organizer invites you by email), it is used only to send you this group’s emails: a link back to the group, a note when names are drawn or your person changes, reminders a week before and the day before the exchange, and a heads-up when someone writes to you. Nobody else in the group sees it. Every reminder and update has a one-click unsubscribe; a sign-in link you ask for yourself (if you forget your PIN) is sent once, when you ask. If you ask to be reminded next year, we keep your email address, first name, the group’s name and your language apart from the group, only to send one email in early November of next year; it is deleted once that email is sent (at the latest a month later), and straight away if you turn the reminder off.
A group is deleted automatically 30 days after its exchange day (or 120 days after it was created, if it has no date), and the organizer can delete it at any time. This browser remembers the groups you joined. The one-phone draw never leaves the device.
Wishlists
A wishlist stores what its owner puts on it: a first name, the occasion and its date, the wishes (names, notes, links, prices and pictures) and hints such as sizes. When you paste a link, our server visits that page once to read the product’s name, picture and price, the way a messaging app makes a link preview, and keeps the result for up to seven days (Amazon pages are not read). Product pictures load from the shop’s own servers, without telling the shop which list they’re on. What you write is sent to our AI provider (Claude, through Amazon Bedrock) to turn it into wishes, with an estimated price for each.
The owner’s edit key, and the key that lets someone undo their own “I’m getting this”, are kept only as one-way hashes. Someone choosing a gift (or pledging towards a shared gift) may add their first name: the other people shopping from the list see it, and the owner sees it only after the occasion, to say thank you. They may also give an email address to be reminded a week before and the day before; we use it for those reminders and to send them their own link to their picks, never show it to anyone, and delete it with their picks a few days after the occasion, or when they choose “Don’t want reminders?”. Before the occasion, the owner sees what has been taken only if they turn on “Show me what’s been bought” (people are told before they choose).
Right after you make a wishlist on the website, we ask for your email address (signed in, we use your account’s). We use it to send you the list’s private edit link, to send the links again when you use “Lost your list?”, and once the day after the occasion to tell you who gave what. We keep the address, and which lists it made, in a record of its own; deleting a list takes it off that record.
If you also tick “Send me gift ideas and news from Giftruly”, we may email you about gift ideas and Giftruly from time to time, and we keep a record of when you agreed and the words you agreed to. In the United States, where no tick box is required, the form tells you instead that we’ll send gift ideas now and then, and we keep the same record. Outside the United States this only happens if you tick the box. Every such email has an unsubscribe link, and you can ask us to stop at any time.
A list, or several lists in one link, stays until its owner deletes it, so it can be used again next year. What people chose stops showing a few days after the occasion; a summary of who gave what (the wishes and the first names people gave) stays on the list for its owner until the next occasion. This browser remembers the lists you made or opened.
Shopping links
Giftruly doesn’t sell anything. Shopping links take you to retailers such as Amazon, which have their own privacy policies; some links carry our affiliate tag, so the retailer knows the visit came from Giftruly and may pay us a commission. We never learn what you bought or receive your details from the retailer.
Your Giftruly starts on your device
Your Giftruly (the people, dates, ideas, plans and lists under /you) works before you have an account. Until you keep it, everything you add is stored only in this browser (in its IndexedDB storage) and never sent to our servers, except the parts you choose to send to Truly for ideas. If you used the budget calculator, a shortlist, Secret Santa or wishlists in this browser before, Your Giftruly brings them in from this browser’s storage, on the device.
When you keep your Giftruly, what’s in this browser moves into your account and syncs to every device you sign in on. When you sign out, synced data is removed from that browser; you choose whether to leave a copy on it.
Your account and signing in
An account is optional. You make one by choosing “Keep your Giftruly” and signing in. There are no passwords. You can use:
- An email code. We email you a six-digit code that works for 10 minutes. Wrong codes are limited to stop guessing.
- Continue with Google or Apple. Google or Apple tells us your email address, whether it’s verified, your name, and an identifier for your account with them. We ask for nothing else: not your contacts, not your calendar. With Apple you can hide your real address; we then get a relay address that forwards to you. Google and Apple handle your sign-in with them under their own privacy policies.
- A passkey. Your device keeps the private key. Your account keeps only the public key, the passkey’s name and when you added it.
Your account holds your email address, your name if you give one, your sign-in methods, and the data you add. Accounts are run by Amazon Cognito, in the AWS region in the United States (us-east-1), where all account data lives. Sign-in emails come from hello@giftruly.com through Amazon Simple Email Service.
Signing in sets the cookies described in Cookies. They only keep you signed in; they’re strictly necessary, so they don’t need your consent. A Secret Santa or wishlist you made without an account is attached to your account only when this browser proves it holds that group’s or list’s private link; we keep that link in your account so you can open it on any device.
The people you add
The heart of Giftruly is the people you give to. For each person you can add: a name, how they’re related to you, a drawing and color, a pronoun, a birth year, their dates (birthday, anniversary, name day, holidays and others), interests, things to avoid, sizes, a link to their wishlist, a budget, notes and hints, gift ideas, what you gave them and how it landed, and thank-yous for what they gave you.
The law treats this as their personal data, even though they never signed up. You keep it for your own family and friends, which is personal use. We store it for you, so we are responsible for it, and we take that seriously:
- Only what gifting needs. There’s no field for a person’s email address or phone number, and we never import your contacts on the web. Giftruly never emails, texts or contacts the people you add.
- Private to you. The people you add are seen only by you, and by the members of a household if you choose to add them to that household (see below). They are never public and never shown to the person themselves.
- Never for ads or analytics. We don’t use these details to advertise, build profiles, or sell anything, and they never go to analytics. Dates like Eid, Diwali or Hanukkah, and name days, can hint at someone’s faith: we never ask about religion, and these dates are used only to remind you and to suggest fitting gifts when you ask.
- Deletable. Remove a person, a note or a detail at any time. Deleting your account erases everyone in your own space; people you placed in a household stay there for its other members until they remove them.
- Reminders without an account. If you ask us to email you before a date without creating an account, you confirm your email address first. We then keep that address and, for each date, the first name, the day and month and when to remind you: never your gifts or notes. Every reminder has a link that turns them off and deletes that address and its dates; so does turning reminders off in your settings.
- Please be kind in your notes. Notes are for gift hints. Don’t write things about someone’s health, beliefs or private life that they wouldn’t want kept.
Our legal basis is legitimate interest: yours, in remembering and choosing gifts for the people in your life, and ours, in providing that service. We weighed it against the interests of the people you add. The data is ordinary (names, dates, tastes), it’s used only to give them a better gift, it stays private, and most people would expect a friend or relative to remember their birthday and their sizes. With the safeguards above, we believe their rights are respected.
We can’t tell each person you add that you saved them: we don’t hold their contact details and asking for them would mean collecting more. The law allows this when informing would be impossible or take disproportionate effort. This page is how we make it public instead.
If someone added you. You can object or ask for your details to be deleted at admin@giftruly.com. Because we hold no email address or phone number for people who were added, we usually can’t find a record by name alone; tell us what you can (for example the account owner’s email address) and we’ll do what we reasonably can. If you have your own Giftruly account, you can also link to the person who added you and decide what they see.
Households and linked people
Households
A household is a shared space for a family or a couple, up to 12 members. Every member sees and can edit the people, dates, gift ideas, notes and plans placed in the household, and the members’ names. You join only through an invite link that a member shares with you; it works for 7 days. Anyone who opens the link before joining sees the household’s name, who invited them, and up to 8 members’ first names. You can leave at any time and take a copy of the household’s people and dates with you. What you added stays for the others; if the last member leaves, the household and everything in it is deleted.
The surprise shield
Our server protects surprises, whatever any app or browser asks it to do:
- Gifts, notes and plans about a member of a household can’t be stored in that household. They stay in your own space, which only you see.
- The owner of a wishlist never sees who reserved what before the occasion, unless they turned that on.
- Your Secret Santa match is shown only to you.
- Notifications about reservations and matches go to one person only.
Linked people
If someone you added has their own account, you can send them a one-time link (valid for 14 days) to connect. They decide what you see from their own profile: by default only their birthday, and if they choose, their sizes, interests, wishlist and things to avoid. You see it read-only, on your page for them. They see only your name and the name you gave them, never your notes, ideas or gifts. Either of you can disconnect at any time.
Secret Santa
The new Secret Santa stores, in one record per group: the group’s title, budget and date; each member’s name, optional email address, wishes (up to 10 items with links, likes, sizes and things to avoid), and their personal link’s key, so it can be sent to them again; pairs to keep apart; the draw; and the anonymous messages between each giver and their person.
- Each person sees only their own match. The organizer sees who has opened their link and written wishes, never the draw or anyone’s messages or email address.
- Messages are anonymous for the giver until the organizer reveals the draw. A new draw clears all messages.
- Personal links work through a key after the “#” in the address, which browsers never send to our server.
- So that “Lost your group?” can email people their links, we keep an index from each member’s email address, as a one-way hash, to their groups. It is updated when an address changes and expires with the group.
- When you open your match, its name, wishes and the budget go to Truly to suggest ideas.
- Group and invite pages are never indexed by search engines.
A group is deleted automatically 30 days after the exchange (or 120 days after it was made, if it has no date), or at once when the organizer deletes it. Members can clear their wishes and email address at any time. If someone kept the group in their account, we keep its setup for 400 days after the exchange so it can be run again next year without repeating pairs: the names, which pairs shouldn’t draw each other, the budget and date, and a hashed record of past pairs. The setup holds no email addresses, wishes or messages. A Secret Santa belongs to the whole group, so deleting your account doesn’t delete it for the others.
Chip-ins
A chip-in lets people promise money towards one gift. Giftruly never holds, moves or sees money, and never asks for card details. People pay the organizer directly, with the method the organizer chose.
A chip-in stores the gift, the recipient’s name, the goal, the deadline, the organizer’s name and optional email, and how to pay them (for example a PayPal.me or Venmo username, a phone number for Lydia, Bizum or Satispay, or an IBAN and account holder name). Each promise stores the name given, the amount, an optional note and email address, and whether the person said they paid and the organizer ticked it off.
- Anyone with the link sees the gift, the totals and the first names of people who are in.
- Only people who joined see the payment details.
- Only the organizer sees each person’s amount, note and paid status. Email addresses are never shown to anyone.
A chip-in is deleted 60 days after its deadline, or at once when the organizer deletes it. Chip-in pages are never indexed by search engines.
Your gift page
Your gift page is off until you publish it, and you need an account to do that. It shows what you choose to put on it: your name, your birthday (day and month only, never the year), a note, sizes, what you love, what to skip and a link to your wishlist.
- It opens only through its private link. It’s never listed anywhere and never indexed by search engines.
- Visitors can ask for a reminder two weeks before your birthday. They confirm their email address first; you only ever see how many people subscribed, never who.
- Make a new link at any time and the old one stops working. Turn the page off and it is deleted with its subscribers.
An unconfirmed reminder request is deleted after 8 days. A confirmed one is kept for 400 days after the last reminder was scheduled, and every reminder email has a link to stop.
Emails
With an account, we email you only about your own Giftruly:
- Sign-in codes, when you ask for one.
- Reminders before your people’s dates (by default two weeks and three days before, at 9 in the morning your time), with up to three gift ideas from Truly.
- “How did it land?” the day after a gift was given, so your next gift is even better.
- Emails about Secret Santas, chip-ins and gift pages you take part in.
Turn reminders and check-ins on or off in Settings. Every email except a sign-in code or a confirmation you asked for has a one-click unsubscribe link. We keep a record of an unsubscribe so we keep respecting it; for people without an account we store only a hash of their address. Our emails contain no tracking pixels and their links aren’t tracked. They come from hello@giftruly.com through Amazon Simple Email Service.
The people you add never get emails from us. Others get email from us only when they gave us their own address: a Secret Santa member, someone joining a chip-in, or someone asking for a gift page reminder.
Truly and AI
Truly, Giftruly’s gift assistant, is powered by Claude, a model made by Anthropic and run for us by Amazon Bedrock, an Amazon Web Services product. When you ask Truly about one of your people, the request includes what helps with the answer: their name, relation, age (from the birth year), pronoun, interests, things to avoid, sizes, budget, the next date, up to ten recent notes, past gifts and how they landed, and their wishlist items. Truly also turns a sentence like “Mom’s birthday is May 3, she loves gardening” into people and dates, splits a budget across your people, and prepares the ideas in reminder emails the day before they go out.
- Amazon states that inputs and outputs are not used to train any models and are not shared with the model’s maker. Anthropic does not receive your requests (Amazon Bedrock FAQ).
- We call Bedrock from the US region (us-east-1). To keep answers fast, Bedrock may process a request in another AWS region, which can be outside the United States.
- To match ideas to our catalog, some words (interests, notes, wishlist items) are turned into numbers by Amazon Titan, also on Bedrock.
- We don’t store your requests. We store answers for up to 7 days so the same question isn’t asked twice, and a reminder’s ideas for up to 40 days.
- AI suggestions are ideas, not facts. Check details before you buy.
If the AI is switched off or busy, a simpler engine on our own server answers instead, with no outside service involved.
Analytics and error reports
On giftruly.com we use Google Analytics 4 to count visits and see which pages help people find gifts, including clicks on shopping links. It sets first-party cookies, and Google processes the data on our behalf. In the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom and Switzerland, analytics stays off until you accept it in the banner; elsewhere it is on by default. Advertising storage, ad personalization and ad user data are always off: Giftruly shows no ads and never sells data. In Your Giftruly, analytics counts page views only: page addresses contain random identifiers, never names, and nothing about the people you add is sent. Your choice is kept in this browser, and you can change it here at any time.
When something breaks on a page, an error report goes to Sentry so we can fix it: the error, the page address, and the browser and device type. It may include a short replay of the page’s layout before the error, with all text masked and all images blocked. Error reports carry no name, email address or account identifier and set no cookies.
Why we're allowed to use your data
How long we keep things
Secret Santa groups and wishlists you made with their own link have their own lifetimes, described above, because other people use them too.
Who helps us, and where data goes
These companies process data for us, only on our instructions and under data protection agreements:
- Amazon Web Services (hosting, database, sign-in with Amazon Cognito, email with Amazon SES, AI with Amazon Bedrock), in the United States (us-east-1).
- Google (Google Analytics), with your consent where required.
- Sentry (Functional Software, Inc.), error reports, in the United States.
Google and Apple, when you sign in with them, and retailers you visit from a shopping link, act on their own behalf under their own privacy policies.
Your data is stored in the United States. Amazon Web Services, Google and Sentry are certified under the EU-U.S. Data Privacy Framework (and its UK and Swiss extensions), which the European Commission recognizes as giving adequate protection; their data processing terms also include the Commission’s standard contractual clauses.
Security
- Everything travels encrypted (HTTPS), and our database is encrypted at rest.
- No passwords exist to steal. Your sign-in renewal token is encrypted inside its cookie.
- Private links for groups, lists, chip-ins and invites use long random keys; the keys that let someone edit, join or connect are kept only as one-way hashes.
- The surprise shield and every sharing rule are checked on our server, not just in the app.
- We keep names, email addresses, codes and tokens out of our logs.
No system is perfectly secure. If a breach put your data at risk, we would tell the CNIL within 72 hours and tell you without undue delay when the law requires it.
Your rights
You have the right to:
- See and take your data: Settings › Your data › “Download everything” gives you a complete copy in a standard format (JSON), which you can take elsewhere.
- Correct it: edit anything in Your Giftruly directly.
- Erase it: Settings › “Delete my account” erases your account straight away. Without an account, Settings › “Remove everything saved here” clears it.
- Object to what we do on the basis of legitimate interest, and restrict it while we look into a concern.
- Withdraw consent at any time, with the unsubscribe link or the analytics choice above, without affecting what was done before.
- Complain to a data protection authority: in France, the CNIL (cnil.fr), or the authority where you live or work. We’d love the chance to fix it first.
For anything else, write to admin@giftruly.com. We answer within one month. We may ask you to prove the account is yours, for example by writing from its email address.
Children and teens
Giftruly accounts are meant for adults and teens. We don’t ask your age. If you’re under 16, please use an account only with a parent’s or guardian’s OK. Secret Santa and wishlists work without an account, so younger people can join a group or shop from a list without one.
Children are usually people in a parent’s Giftruly, not users: a parent adds them as a profile, keeps their wishlist and decides what to share. If you’re a parent and think your child gave us personal data without your OK, write to admin@giftruly.com and we’ll delete it.
The Giftruly app
The Giftruly app keeps your dates, lists and notes on your phone; it doesn’t use Giftruly accounts yet. It sends anonymous usage statistics to Google Analytics for Firebase (which screens are used, and actions such as saving a gift or opening a shopping link) and crash reports to Sentry. These never include your name, your people’s names, your notes or your advertising identifier, and are never used for ads. Turn both off in the app under Settings, “Share anonymous usage stats”.
When you ask Truly for gift ideas or a card message in the app, your request goes to the same service and Amazon Bedrock as on the website. For one of your saved people, it includes what you choose to send about them: the occasion, their age and budget, what they love, any notes you leave switched on, and their name when you haven’t said who they are. If you bring in dates from your contacts, the app reads names, birthdays and anniversaries on the phone only and never uploads them. Reminders are scheduled on the phone.
Changes and contact
When we change this policy we update the date at the top. If a change matters for how we use your data, we tell account holders by email before it takes effect. The English version of this page is the reference; translations are provided for convenience.
Questions, requests or worries: admin@giftruly.com. Giftruly, Alexis Thomas, France.