Privacy Policy

Introduction

This policy explains what Melora does with your information, in the order you are likely to care about it: who we are, what we hold, why we are allowed to hold it, who else touches it, and what you can make us do about it. It covers this website, the host dashboard and every event gallery.

Who is responsible for your data

Melora is run from Croatia by one independent developer, and that person is the data controller for everything described here. There is no registered company behind the Service yet; when there is, its name, address and registration number will replace this paragraph. Until then there is no privacy department to route you through. Write to [email protected] and the person responsible reads it. If you think we have handled your data badly you can also complain to a data protection authority, which in Croatia is AZOP, the Personal Data Protection Agency.

Information we collect

Account information

• Email address
• Name, if you give one
• Password, stored only as a salted hash
• Which events you own, and what you have done with them

Event information

• Event name, date and description
• Photos, video, voice notes and private video messages uploaded by you and your guests
• The name a guest types when they arrive, if they type one
• Whether a photo has been approved, rejected or liked
• Which challenges a guest was offered, and whether they accepted, skipped or answered them

Technical information

• IP address, used to apply rate limits and to block abuse
• Browser and device details, sent by your browser with every request
• Which page was viewed, stored without anything that identifies you (see below)
• Error and access logs kept on our own server

Why we are allowed to hold it

Under the GDPR every use of your data needs a legal basis. Ours are:

• Running your event and your account, which is the contract between us
• Taking payment, and keeping the records that tax law requires of us
• Keeping the Service secure and stopping abuse, which is our legitimate interest and yours
• Following up on something you started with us, such as an event you set up but did not finish paying for, which is our legitimate interest and which you can stop at any time
• Anything optional, such as a message you choose to receive, which is your consent and which you can withdraw at any time

Your event, and your guests' photos

For an event you create, you decide who gets the code, what stays in the gallery and when it goes. We hold that material and act on your instructions, which under data protection law makes you the controller for it and us the processor. If a guest asks us to remove something they uploaded, we will pass it to you as the host, and we will act ourselves where the law requires it. If you are a guest and cannot reach the host, write to us anyway.

How we use your information

We use your information to:

• Run your event and show your gallery to the people you shared it with
• Process your payment and send you a receipt
• Send the emails the Service has to send: verification, password resets, event links
• Send you a small number of follow-up emails: a reminder about an event you started and did not finish, occasionally an offer on it, and a note before your gallery stops taking photos. Every one of them has an unsubscribe link, and stopping them never stops the emails above
• Answer you when you write to us
• Find and fix faults, and see which pages people read
• Detect and prevent fraud or abuse

Film notifications

If you ask for a film notification, we store your email address, language and the gallery it relates to. You must confirm the address before we send the film-ready notification. We use it only for this notification, never for marketing. You can cancel using the link in the confirmation email. We remove the email address after notification or cancellation, or after 90 days. Unconfirmed requests are removed after 14 days. The host receives a service email when their requested film is ready.

Photo storage and processing

Photos uploaded to Melora are:

• Stored on servers and object storage in Germany, inside the EU
• Processed to create the smaller versions the gallery displays
• If the host requests the included recap service, approved gallery photos and videos are edited into a short film shared in that gallery. Private voice and video messages are not used for this film
• Reachable only through your gallery code or a link you shared, and kept out of search engines unless you publish the gallery yourself
• Never used for advertising, never sold, and never used to train anything
• Kept until you ask us to remove them — we do not delete them automatically

How we count visits

When you allow analytics, we use a random first-party browser identifier to measure public pages, language, referring website, campaign labels, country, device category, page performance, active time, scroll depth and clicks. We save the first and latest known source when you create an account and use your saved payment records to see which sources bring customers. We do not collect form contents, names, email addresses or private gallery codes in visit records, and we do not use IP addresses to identify visitors. Older records used daily IP and browser hashes; those records are also treated as personal data. Analytics is off until you agree, and we honour Do Not Track and Global Privacy Control. You can reject or withdraw through Privacy settings. Withdrawal removes linked optional visit and attribution records from the active database. An optional discovery-source answer has its own consent, is separate from analytics and can be removed in Account.

Who else touches your data

We do not sell your personal information and we do not share it for anyone else's marketing. To run the Service we rely on these companies, and no others:

• Stripe: takes the payment. Your card details go to Stripe, not to us, and we never see or store a card number.
• Hetzner (Germany): provides the servers, the object storage and the backups. Your photos, your account and the database live here, in the EU.
• Cloudflare: sits in front of the site to protect it from attacks and to serve images quickly, so traffic passes through it.
• Titan: delivers the email we send you, and hosts our own mailbox.
• Legal requirements: we will hand over data where the law genuinely requires it, and we will tell you unless we are forbidden to.
• A future sale of the business: if Melora is ever sold or merged, this data would move with it, under this same policy until you are told otherwise.

Where your data is

Your photos, your account and our backups are in Germany and stay in the EU. Two of the providers above, Stripe and Cloudflare, are part of international groups and some of their processing can happen outside the EU; where it does, it is covered by the European Commission's standard contractual clauses. We do not move your photographs out of the EU for any other reason.

How long we keep it

Different things have different lifespans:

• Photos and event data: for the gallery period in your plan, and after that until you ask us to remove them. Nothing is deleted automatically.
• Your account: for as long as you keep it. Deleting it closes your account and galleries immediately. A background task removes the associated media and retries failures until they are resolved.
• Payment and invoice records: for as long as tax and accounting law requires us to keep them, which is longer than the rest and is not something we can shorten.
• Recovery backups: a rolling 30-day window. Current copies of required financial records are preserved separately from deleted galleries. Minimal signed deletion records keep account and event identifiers and the deletion date so an older backup cannot reopen a deleted account.
• Guest session network details: new guest sessions do not save IP addresses or browser descriptions. Historical values are removed after 30 days.
• Server logs: a short rolling window, kept for security and for debugging.
• Analytics visit records, source attribution and optional discovery answers: 90 days, with expired records removed by an hourly cleanup. Minimal consent receipts keep the notice version and dates for 180 days from consent, without source histories after expiry or withdrawal. New backups omit analytics table data. Older recovery backups may contain historical analytics; those records are restricted to recovery and must be discarded before a restored database is used.

Data security

We implement appropriate security measures to protect your information, including:

• Encrypted connections (HTTPS) for everything you and your guests send us
• Passwords stored only as salted hashes, never in a form anyone can read
• Galleries reachable only through your own code or link, and never listed publicly unless you publish one yourself
• Rate limiting and abuse protection on sign-in and uploads
• Servers and backups in the EU (Germany)

Your rights

The GDPR gives you the rights below, and you exercise all of them by writing to [email protected]. We answer within a month, usually the same week, and we do not charge for it.

• See what we hold about you
• Correct anything that is wrong
• Have your data deleted, and your account closed with it
• Get a copy of your photos and your data to take elsewhere
• Object to a use we have based on our legitimate interest, or ask us to restrict it
• Withdraw consent you gave, without that affecting what was done before
• Complain to a supervisory authority, which in Croatia is AZOP

Cookies

Essential cookies support sign-in, language, guest features and payment security. A privacy-preference cookie remembers an analytics refusal for 180 days without a unique visitor identifier. Only after you choose Allow analytics do we set a random analytics identifier for 90 days, without extending it on each visit. Analytics is optional, uses our own server and does not send your data to an external analytics provider. Accepting and rejecting are equally available, and Privacy settings lets you change your choice. Refusing analytics does not affect access, prices or purchases.

Children's privacy

Melora is not for children. You must be at least 16 to create an account. A guest uploading to a gallery does not create one, and we do not knowingly collect anything from a child. If you believe a child's data has ended up with us, write to us and we will remove it.

Changes to this policy

We may update this policy. If a change matters to you we will tell you by email or in the app before it takes effect, and the date at the top of this page always says when it was last touched.

Contact us

For any question about this policy, or to exercise any of the rights above, write to [email protected].