Privacy

What lighting a candle records

Every field is optional. You can light a candle without typing anything at all, and it will be counted exactly the same.

• A first name, if you give one. Up to 40 characters. It is shown publicly beside your candle.
• A country, if you choose one from the list. It is counted in the public totals and shown beside your candle.
• A message, if you leave one. Up to 280 characters, read by a person before it appears publicly.
• The moment the candle was lit, and the number it holds in the sequence, so the vigil can be shown in order.
• A small signed cookie in your browser. It identifies this browser as the one that lit that candle, so returning brings you back to your own flame instead of asking you to light a second. It contains a reference to that one candle and nothing else: no name, no email address, no advertising identifier, and no record of anywhere else you have been.

What is never collected

• No account, no sign up, no password.
• No email address. There is no mailing list and no way for this site to write to you.
• No phone number.
• No payment details. Nothing on this site is for sale and no donations are collected.
• No precise location. A country appears only because you selected it yourself from a list.
• No advertising trackers, no third party pixels, no analytics profile, no cross site identifier.
• Nothing about a visitor is sold, rented, traded or handed to a data broker. Not now, and not later.

Network addresses and rate limiting

A vigil anyone can add to needs some protection from automated abuse. When a candle is submitted, the server takes the network address the request arrived from, puts it through a one way keyed hash, and stores only that hash together with a count of how many candles came from it in the current ten minute window.

The raw address is never written to the database. The hash cannot be turned back into an address, it is not linked to your candle, and the counting rows are discarded within a few hours. Their only purpose is to stop one machine from flooding the memorial.

If a submission looks automated, you may be asked to complete a short Cloudflare Turnstile check. It is a challenge, not a tracker, and ordinary visitors never see it.

Messages and review

A message is held until a person has read it. Your candle is never held: it is lit, numbered and counted immediately, and the message is added once it has been reviewed. If a message is not published, the candle remains lit. The community guidelines explain what is and is not published.

The calendar reminder

Choosing to download the reminder produces a small calendar file containing the date, the time and a link back to this page. Your own calendar application opens it. Nothing is scheduled on our side, no account is connected, and we are not told whether you kept it.

The Google Calendar and Outlook options are ordinary links that open those services in a new tab. Once you are there you are on their site, under their terms, and this memorial learns nothing about what you do next.

Sharing

Share buttons are plain links. No social network script runs on this site, so no network is told that you visited unless you choose to open one.

Removing a candle or a message

Ask, and it is removed. Use the contact page and include the link to the candle if you have it. No reason is required.

Changes to this page

If any of this changes, the revised wording is published here. This memorial will not begin collecting something it has told you it does not collect.