Privacy

Plain English, because this is about photographs of your family. Last updated 16 September 2026.

Who holds your data

Month by Month is run by PLACEHOLDER — your name or company name, PLACEHOLDER — your registered or business address, who is the data controller. Questions, or any request below: PLACEHOLDER — privacy@yourdomain. We are registered with the Information Commissioner's Office under PLACEHOLDER — ICO registration number.

What we hold

Your account: your email address, the name you chose, and a password if you set one. Passwords are stored hashed by our sign-in provider; nobody here can read them.
Your photos and videos, and what the file says about them — the date taken, the size, and where they were taken if your camera recorded it.
What you do in an album: comments, likes, favourites, the people you tag, and who you invite.
Orders: the books printed for you and the postal address they went to, including any address you add for somebody else.
Payments are handled by Stripe. We keep a record that a payment happened; we never see or store your card number.

Photographs of children

Most albums here are mostly photographs of children. Those photographs are personal data belonging to the child, and we process them on the basis that the parent or guardian who uploads them has the authority to decide that, and does so in the child's interest.

Practically, that means: albums are private and invitation-only, there is no public page and nothing is indexed by search engines; we do not use anybody's photographs to advertise, to train software, or for any purpose beyond showing them to the family and printing the book; and a parent can remove a photograph or the whole album at any time.

If a photograph of your child is in an album you cannot reach, write to us at PLACEHOLDER — privacy@yourdomain and we will deal with it.

Faces

The iPhone app can group photographs by who is in them. That happens entirely on the phone, using Apple's software. The measurements it takes of a face never leave the device and are never sent to us. Only the name you confirm is saved, as an ordinary label on a photograph. We hold no face recognition data, and the website does not do this at all.

Why we are allowed to hold it

To provide what you asked for — an album and a printed book. That is our contract with you.
To meet our legal obligations — records of sales have to be kept for tax.
Our legitimate interests — keeping the service secure and working, and answering you when you write.

How long we keep it

Full-resolution originals: 2 years. After that the original file is deleted automatically. The photograph stays in your album at the size the album shows, and the printed books you already have are unaffected — but a photograph older than 2 years cannot be reprinted at full quality or downloaded exactly as your camera wrote it. Download anything you want to keep at full size before then; Settings has a button for it.
Everything else in your album — the photographs as displayed, comments, likes — for as long as your account exists.
When you delete your account, your albums, photographs and files are deleted. It is not a flag on a row: the files are removed from storage.
Records of orders and payments are kept for six years, because tax law requires it. That is a name, an address and what was bought — not your photographs.

Who else handles it

These companies process data on our behalf, under contract, and may not use it for anything else:

Supabase — Database, photo storage and sign-in. London, United Kingdom.
Vercel — Runs the website. European Union and United States.
Stripe — Takes payments; we never see your card details. European Union and United States.
Gelato — Prints and posts the books. European Union.
Resend — Sends sign-in and invitation emails. European Union and United States.

Where data goes outside the UK it is protected by the standard contractual clauses those companies use. We do not sell anybody's data, and we never will.

Your rights

You can ask us to:

Show you what we hold — Settings → Your data gives you all of it immediately, as a file.
Correct anything wrong.
Delete everything — Settings → Delete my account, or write to us.
Give you your photographs to take elsewhere — the same Settings page downloads them.
Stop or limit what we do with it.

We answer within one month. If you think we have got it wrong, you can complain to the Information Commissioner's Office at ico.org.uk — but please tell us first, so we can put it right.

Cookies

We store a small amount of information in your browser to keep you signed in and remember which album you were looking at. That is all it is for. There is no advertising, and no third-party tracking, so there is no cookie banner to click through.

Security

Albums are private by default and readable only by the people invited to them, enforced by the database itself rather than only by the app. Photographs are served through links that expire. If something goes wrong that puts your data at risk, we will tell you and the ICO as the law requires.