How we handle your information
In effect from 7 August 2026.
The short version
TributesForever exists so families can write about someone they have lost. That means most of what we hold was written on purpose, for other people to read - and some of it is deeply personal.
- We do not run advertising, analytics, or third-party tracking of any kind.
- We do not sell or rent anything you give us.
- You decide whether a memorial is public, unlisted, or private.
- You can archive or permanently delete a memorial, and close your account, yourself.
What we collect
Your account
A username, email address, and password (stored only as a cryptographic hash - we cannot read it). Optionally a display name, your first, second and last names, and a profile photo. We record when your email address was verified, and your preferences for email notifications and whether your name appears publicly as a manager. If you choose birthday or memorial anniversary reminders, we also store the tribute, event choices, timing, time zone, subscription status, and secure unsubscribe identifiers.
What you publish about someone who has died
Whatever you choose to enter: their names, dates of birth and death and how precisely those are known, country, city, memorial location, occupation, a life story, a family message, timeline entries, named family members and their relationships, photographs, and an optional service programme or obituary document.
What visitors leave
Tributes and memories (the author's name, email address, stated relationship, and message), lit candles, reactions, and requests for access to private memorials (name, email, relationship, and any note).
Technical records
To count how many times a memorial has been viewed without counting the same person repeatedly, we store a page view record containing a session identifier, a one-way hash of the IP address (never the address itself), the browser's user-agent string, and the path visited. Transactional emails are stored in a queue until they are delivered. Scheduled reminders have delivery records so they are sent at most once for each annual event and can be retried safely.
Information about people who have died, and their families
This is unusual enough to say plainly. A memorial is mostly information about a person who has died, published by someone else. It will often also name living people - surviving relatives in a family tree, friends who leave a tribute, the person who set the page up.
Data protection law in most countries applies to living people, so a surviving relative named on a memorial has the same rights described below even though they never created an account. If you are named on a memorial and want that changed or removed, contact us and we will act on it, whether or not the family agrees.
If you are creating a memorial, please only publish details about living relatives that they would be comfortable seeing on a page other people can read.
Who can see what
- Public - anyone can find the memorial through search on this site and open it.
- Unlisted - it never appears in search or browsing, but anyone holding the link can open it.
- Private - only people the family has approved can see any detail. Everyone else sees only that a private memorial exists and can ask for access.
People invited to help manage a memorial can see it regardless of its visibility, and what each of them may change depends on the role they were given - owner, admin, editor, or gallery curator.
A public memorial is genuinely public. Search engines and anyone on the internet may read, copy and archive it, and we cannot pull those copies back if you later make the page private or delete it.
Other companies involved
We keep this list short on purpose. As things stand:
- Hosting and database - our servers and database, which hold everything described above.
- File storage - photographs and documents may be held in an object storage service rather than on our own disks.
- Email delivery - an email provider transmits verification, password reset and notification messages, and necessarily sees the recipient address and message content.
- Google Fonts and jsDelivr - pages currently load fonts and stylesheets from these services, which means your browser contacts them and they can see your IP address. We are moving these onto our own servers to stop that.
Sharing buttons for WhatsApp, Facebook, X and LinkedIn are ordinary links. Nothing is sent to those companies unless you click one.
How long we keep things
- Memorials - until someone deletes them. Deletion is immediate and permanent, and removes the stored photographs as well as the page.
- Archived memorials - kept indefinitely but hidden from visitors, until restored or deleted.
- Memorials left without anyone to manage them - if the only person who could manage a memorial closes their account, it is hidden immediately and permanently deleted after 30 days, so a mistake can still be undone.
- Your account - until you close it. Closing it is immediate.
- Page view and email delivery records - retained while they remain useful for view counts and reliable delivery. We have not yet set a fixed deletion schedule for these, and intend to.
Your choices and rights
Things you can do yourself, right now:
- Correct your name, display name and profile photo in account settings.
- Turn email notifications off, or hide your name as a manager on public pages.
- Stop reminders for one tribute, or all reminder emails, from links included in every reminder.
- Change a memorial's visibility, or archive it so nobody can see it.
- Delete a memorial permanently, including its photographs.
- Transfer a memorial to someone else rather than lose it.
- Close your account.
Depending on where you live you may also have the right to a copy of your data, to object to or restrict how we use it, or to complain to a data protection regulator. We do not yet have a self-service export, so email us and we will put one together for you.
Security
Traffic is encrypted in transit. Passwords are hashed, never stored in a readable form. Access to private memorials is checked on every request, and email addresses must be verified before they can be used to claim access to a private page or take ownership of a memorial.
No service can promise perfect security. If we ever discover a breach affecting your information, we will tell you and the relevant regulator as quickly as we can.
Children
Accounts are intended for adults. We do not knowingly create accounts for children under 16. A memorial may of course be for a child who has died, and may name children among surviving family - please think carefully before publishing a living child's details on a public page.
Changes to this policy
If we change anything that materially affects how your information is used, we will update the effective date at the top and tell account holders by email before it takes effect.
Contact
Email hello@tributesforever.co.ke for anything in this policy, including requests to correct or remove information about you.
Tributes Forever Limited is responsible for the information described here. Registered address: Nairobi, Kenya.