PawForge Art ("we," "us," "our") respects your privacy. This Privacy Policy explains what information we collect when you visit pawforgeart.com or commission a portrait, how we use it, who we share it with, and the choices you have. By using the Service, you consent to the practices described here.
1. Information we collect
Information you provide directly
- Photographs of your pet — uploaded as input to the portrait generation. Stored on our backend (Convex, U.S.-based) for the lifetime of the commission, plus a retention period (see Section 4).
- Optional notes about your pet — name, coat colour, temperament, anything you'd like the studio to know. Used as prompt context for generation.
- Free generator details — if you use our free portrait generator, the photograph you upload and the email address you give us. The address is used to send you your proof; where the studio is at capacity, to hold your place where we can; and to keep count of how many free portraits have been made from it, so that the free studio stays open to everyone. To decide how many it may make, we also check whether the same address is on a paid order with us, either as the email address on the order or as the one given to Stripe at payment, because an address with a paid order may make more. The email that brings your proof also mentions the option of having it printed. Beyond that, we do not use your address to send you marketing unless you have separately agreed to that; such consent is never pre-ticked, and you may withdraw it at any time. Some apps and assistants can ask us for a free portrait for you through our connector API. When one does, it sends us your photograph and the email address you gave it, and we send the finished portrait's image link and a link to buy it back to that app. We handle your photograph and address exactly as described here, including the email with your proof. We do not show portraits requested through our connector API in our gallery or marketing.
- Patron details — your name and email address, used for order confirmation, the proof-ready notification, and dispatch updates. Once an order is paid, the email address on the order, and the one given to Stripe at payment, each let its own address make more portraits with our free generator.
- Shipping address and (optional) phone — used to quote shipping, dispatch your order, and provide delivery updates from the carrier.
- Gift recipient details (if applicable) — if you order a portrait as a gift, you give us the recipient's name and delivery address. If you tick the box asking us to tell them the gift is on its way, you also give us their email address and, optionally, a gift message. By providing these you confirm you may share them with us. We use them to print and dispatch the order — the name and delivery address are passed to our print and fulfilment partner for that purpose, and their email address is not — and, only if you ticked that box, to email them once, through our email provider Resend, to say the gift is on its way, with your gift message. All of these, their email address included, stay on the order record for as long as we keep orders, so that we can help with any question about the gift, and a copy of the name, address and gift message stays with our print partner. Their email address is not part of the records we must keep for tax and accounting, so we erase it whenever they or you ask, and we erase it along with your own details whenever you ask us to erase those. If you have received a gift from us and would like to know what we hold about you, or want it erased, write to curator@pawforgeart.com; we will tell you what we can erase and what we have to keep, since order records are held for the periods in Section 4 for tax and accounting reasons.
- Marketing preferences — if you subscribe to our newsletter, your email address and the source of the subscription.
Information collected automatically
- Device and browser information — type, operating system, viewport size, language preferences. Used for compatibility and analytics.
- Usage data — pages visited, which link in our menu you choose, the steps you take to make a portrait and to check out, which of our pages brought you to a portrait, and the site or campaign link that brought you to us. Measured without cookies and without storing a visitor identifier on your device (see Section 6). Your name, email, street address and payment details are never sent to our analytics provider; a purchase event recorded on or before 2026-10-05 may also include the order amount and the country you ship to; from 2026-10-06 on, they include neither. You can turn this off at any time, in the browser you are using, with the “Analytics opt-out” button in the site footer, and if your browser sends a Global Privacy Control or Do Not Track signal, we do not load our analytics at all.
- IP address — received by our hosting provider with every request, and by Google when your browser loads our fonts (Section 3). Our analytics provider states that it uses it to form the daily visit code described in Section 6; it does not store it with our usage events. We do not use your IP address to locate you. Analytics records of purchases made on or before 2026-10-05 may include the country you ship to; from 2026-10-06 on, they do not. Photographs you upload on our website are stripped of embedded location data in your browser before they reach us. Photographs an app sends us on your behalf are stripped of embedded location data and other photo metadata on our servers before we store or use them; we keep only what is needed to display the picture correctly, such as its colour profile. The app that sends them may keep its own copy under its own privacy terms.
- Cookies and browser storage — see Section 6 below.
Information collected through Stripe
Payment is processed by Stripe, our PCI-DSS-compliant payment processor. PawForge Art does not see, store, or have access to your full payment card details. We receive only metadata from Stripe (such as the last four digits of your card, your billing country, the email address used at payment, and the payment status) sufficient to associate the payment with your order. That email address is also one of the two our free generator checks for a paid order (see "Free generator details" above). Stripe's own privacy practices apply to the card information you provide them — see stripe.com/privacy.
2. How we use your information
- To produce, fulfil, and dispatch the portrait you commissioned
- To communicate with you about your order — confirmations, proof-ready notifications, dispatch updates, support replies
- To let an email address with a paid order make more portraits with our free generator
- To process payments and prevent fraud
- To send marketing emails about new collections and patron-only previews only if you've opted in; you can unsubscribe at any time via the link in every marketing email
- To analyse aggregate Site usage and improve the Service
- To comply with our legal obligations (tax, accounting, dispute resolution)
- To enforce our Terms of Service and detect violations
Portraits made with the free generator
The free generator is free, and in exchange PawForge Art may show the portrait it generates — never the photograph you upload — in our gallery, in social posts and in our marketing. That exchange is stated in our Terms of Service (§5).
You can opt out at any time, before or after a portrait is made. Email curator@pawforgeart.com and ask us to stop showing your portraits. We record that request against your email address in a one-way scrambled form, so it also covers portraits you make later. As soon as we have your request we stop using them in anything new, and we take down what is within our control — our gallery, and our own posts on social platforms. We cannot guarantee copies outside our control, such as third-party caches, archives and re-shares, and anything already printed and distributed cannot be recalled. Section 7 gives the time we take to respond.
Featured portraits (optional)
At checkout, you may grant PawForge Art explicit permission to feature your commissioned portrait on our marketing channels — the public gallery page, Instagram, X (Twitter), other social platforms, landing pages, and email previews. This consent is OPTIONAL and never a condition of placing or fulfilling an order. We provide a small discount as our thanks for letting us share your portrait.
If you opt in, you may also tell us how you'd like to be named in the post — a social handle, your first name, or anonymously (leave the name field blank). The name you choose is the ONLY identifying information we'll publish alongside the portrait; your full name, email, and shipping address never appear in any public asset.
Your opt-in is revocable. Email curator@pawforgeart.com with "Revoke image rights" in the subject line. We'll remove the portrait from active marketing within 30 days, clear the associated credit name from our records at the same time, and stop featuring it in any new asset immediately. Already-published posts on third-party platforms (Instagram, X) will be deleted on a best-effort basis; we cannot guarantee third-party caches and archives are also purged.
3. Service providers we share information with
We work with carefully-chosen service providers to operate the Service. Each receives only the minimum information necessary for the function they perform.
- Convex (backend-as-a-service, U.S.) — stores orders, generations, subscriber records, and uploaded photographs.
- OpenRouter / Google (Gemini) — receives your uploaded photograph and the generation prompt as input to the AI portrait model, and your photograph again when the model checks each portrait against it. For a phone case, it also receives the portrait itself, to compose it for the case. Per OpenRouter's and Google's policies, data submitted to the Gemini API is not used to train their models.
- Replicate (image upscaling) — receives the generated portrait for resolution upscaling before print. Image is not retained by Replicate after the upscale completes.
- Printify (print fulfilment) — receives your shipping address and the approved portrait file to print and dispatch your order.
- Stripe (payments) — see Section 1 above.
- Resend (transactional email) — receives your email address, and a gift recipient's if you ask us to email them, and the email content (order confirmations, proof notifications, gift messages, marketing).
- Cloudflare (hosting, DNS, DDoS protection) — receives request metadata for every page view.
- Google Fonts (web fonts, Google LLC, U.S.) — when your browser downloads the typefaces our pages use from Google's servers, Google receives your IP address and browser details. We send Google nothing else through this, and these requests set no cookies.
- PostHog (product analytics, U.S. cloud) — receives pseudonymous usage events (page views, which link in our menu you choose, and the steps of making a portrait and checking out), without cookies or a visitor identifier stored on your device. These events never include your name, email, street address or payment details; a purchase event recorded on or before 2026-10-05 may also include the order amount and the country you ship to. We do not record sessions.
We do not sell your personal information to third parties. We may disclose information when required by law (e.g. subpoena, court order), to protect our rights or the safety of others, or in connection with a corporate transaction such as a merger or sale of assets — in which case we will notify you in advance via email.
4. Data retention
- Photographs and generated portraits — paid commissions — retained for the lifetime of your order plus 12 months thereafter, to support reorders and customer service. This does not apply to a photograph deleted before you ordered: it is not kept for this period, and it is not restored. You may request earlier deletion (see Section 7).
- Photographs and proofs — the free generator — we keep these for 30 days from when you start the proof. After that they are deleted automatically: the deletion runs every day, and the files themselves leave our storage within a few hours of that run. A photograph used for more than one proof is kept until the last of those proofs is deleted. You can ask us to erase yours at any time (see Section 7). A free proof has no order attached to it, so nothing here is kept for the periods described above. If you want to keep your proof, save the image; the link we email you stops working once the proof is deleted.
- Photographs and proofs — a commission that was not paid for — kept for 7 days from when you start the proof, then deleted on the same daily schedule. If you went on to the payment page (for a commission, or for a free proof you chose to buy) and did not pay, we instead keep them for 30 days from when that checkout closed, counting from the last one to close if you opened more than one. If a payment may have reached us after a checkout closed, we keep them as we would for a paid commission. For a free proof you chose to buy, these periods apply to the proof itself; the photograph you uploaded stays on the free generator's schedule above. If you tried to pay 10 or more times for one portrait without completing, these schedules may not apply, and we may keep its photographs and proofs until you ask us to delete them. You may request earlier deletion (see Section 7).
- Photographs uploaded but never turned into a proof — deleted automatically once they are 2 days old. In the rare case that our systems failed to record an upload, we delete it by hand when our daily checks find it.
- Backup copies — we keep backup copies of our data for no longer than 14 days, and then delete them. Something we delete under this section, or at your request, can remain in a backup until that backup is deleted.
- Free generator email addresses — where a portrait was generated, kept alongside it for 30 days, so we can send you the proof, so that a later request to erase your data can be matched to it, and so we can keep count of how many free portraits have been made from that address. A portrait stops counting once it is older than 30 days, and it is deleted on the same daily schedule. Where the studio was at capacity and no portrait was made, we keep the address on a waiting list so we can tell you when it reopens — unless that list is itself full, in which case we keep no address at all. Ask us and we will remove your address from that list.
- Marketing objections — if you ask us to stop showing a portrait you made with the free generator, we record that request and keep it indefinitely. We keep it as a one-way scrambled form of your address, never the address itself, so that we cannot read it as a list of people and cannot use it to contact you. It has to outlast everything else on this page: if we deleted it with your portrait, a later portrait from the same address would not be covered, and the promise in Section 5 of our Terms of Service would only hold until the next time you used the generator. Scrambling is not the same as anonymising — the record is pseudonymous, meaning someone who already knows an address, or who holds a list of addresses to test, can check which of them appear — so we treat it as personal data. We will keep it even if you ask us to delete everything else we hold about you, because deleting it would undo the very request it records. If you change your mind and would like us to start showing your portraits again, email us and we will remove it.
- Address confirmation — when we email you a link to confirm your address, we keep that address and the link's one-time code so we can check the link when you click it. This record is created when we send the link, whether or not you ever confirm. Signing in with a code we emailed also confirms the address. If there is no record yet, signing in creates one holding the address and when it was confirmed, plus an internal code that was never sent to anyone and opens nothing. It is kept for 12 months from the last time we wrote to you about it or you signed in with it, then deleted automatically. It is kept longer than the 30-day period above because a confirmation that expired with your portrait would mean confirming your address over and over. Ask us and we will remove it sooner (see Section 7).
- Order records (purchase amount, shipping address, order metadata) — retained for 7 years after the order date for tax and accounting compliance. Until we mark an order as failed (for example after it is cancelled), the email address on it, and the one given to Stripe at payment, continue to raise the free generator allowance for that address (a refund on its own does not change this); we do not keep an order any longer for that reason.
- Marketing email subscribers — where you answered an optional question about updates when making a request (such as a free portrait), that answer is kept with that request's record, for as long as the record is kept. Where you subscribe through the newsletter form, your address is retained until you unsubscribe; the unsubscribe action removes your address from future sends and your record from our active list within 30 days.
- Site usage analytics — pseudonymous usage events, retained no longer than needed for the analyses described above. These events carry no name, email, street address, account or order number, and we do not link them to you. A purchase event could still be matched to your order by its time, and one recorded on or before 2026-10-05 may also carry the order amount and the country you ship to. Our analytics provider does not let us delete individual events once they are recorded. To stop being measured, use the “Analytics opt-out” button or your browser's privacy signal (Section 6).
5. How we protect your information
We use industry-standard security measures to protect your information, including TLS encryption for data in transit, at- rest encryption on our backend storage, scoped access controls, and regular security reviews. However, no internet transmission or storage system is perfectly secure, and we cannot guarantee absolute security.
Payment information is processed exclusively by Stripe under their PCI-DSS Level 1 compliance — we never see your full card number.
6. Cookies and browser storage
We do not set cookies.
What the Site keeps in your browser
The Site does save a few things in your own browser. They stay on your device unless you send them to us — by filling in a form, or when your browser hands back something we gave it, such as the key to a portrait you are buying. Where one is sent automatically, it says so.
- Your work in progress — a portrait you are making (including the description you typed and a link to the photograph you uploaded), a free portrait you have chosen to buy, and your choice about sharing your portrait, so a refresh or a return visit does not lose them. A commission or free portrait in progress is removed when you come back to it after 24 hours, and the rest stay until you finish or start again; an entry you never come back to waits on your device until you clear your browser storage.
- What you type into a checkout — your name, email address, phone number, delivery address, whether it is a gift, your gift note, and whether to email the recipient and their email address, kept for that browser tab only so you do not lose them if you go back or reload. They are cleared once the order is settled — paid or failed — when you choose “Back to your proof”, and when you start a new portrait; otherwise they go when you close the tab. Card details are never handled by us — Stripe collects those on its own pages.
- Two short notes for the tab — which of our pages brought you to a portrait, which is sent with our usage events; and which steps have already been counted, so one action is not counted twice, which is read only in your browser. Your browser may restore them if it restores the tab.
- Your analytics opt-out, if you choose it, so we remember not to measure you. It stays until you turn analytics back on or clear your browser storage.
The Site uses no advertising or cross-site tracking.
How we measure visits without cookies. Our analytics provider states that it counts a visit using a code it calculates on its own servers from your IP address, your browser's description of itself, our site's name and a random value that changes every day and is then deleted, so the code cannot be turned back into your IP address and does not recognise you from one day to the next. Within a day, it uses that code to group the pages you view into visits.
To stop being measured, use the “Analytics opt-out” button in the site footer; it applies in the browser where you choose it. If your browser sends a Global Privacy Control or Do Not Track signal, we do not load our analytics at all.
7. Your rights
Depending on your jurisdiction, you may have one or more of the following rights regarding your personal information:
- Right to access — request a copy of the personal information we hold about you.
- Right to correction — ask us to correct inaccurate or incomplete information.
- Right to deletion ("right to be forgotten") — request deletion of your information, subject to our retention obligations under tax, accounting, and other applicable laws. Site usage analytics are the exception: individual events cannot be deleted (see Section 4).
- Right to portability — request your information in a structured, machine-readable format.
- Right to object — object to certain processing, including direct marketing, and to our analytics, which we carry out on the basis of our legitimate interest in improving the Service. Use the “Analytics opt-out” button in the site footer, or send a Global Privacy Control or Do Not Track signal from your browser.
- Right to withdraw consent — for processing based on consent (e.g. marketing emails).
- Right to lodge a complaint — with your local data protection authority. EU residents may contact their national supervisory authority; UK residents the Information Commissioner's Office; California residents the California Privacy Protection Agency.
To exercise any of these rights, email curator@pawforgeart.com with the subject "Privacy Request" and a brief description. We will respond within 30 days (or sooner where required by law).
8. California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) disclosures
California residents have specific rights under the California Consumer Privacy Act ("CCPA") and California Privacy Rights Act ("CPRA"), in addition to those listed in Section 7:
- The right to know what personal information we collect, use, disclose, and sell about you
- The right to delete personal information collected from you
- The right to correct inaccurate personal information
- The right to opt out of the sale or sharing of personal information (we do not sell or share for cross-context behavioural advertising)
- The right to limit use of sensitive personal information (we do not use sensitive personal information beyond what is necessary to provide the Service)
- The right to non-discrimination for exercising any of these rights
9. European Economic Area, UK, and Swiss residents (GDPR)
If you are located in the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom, or Switzerland, we process your information on the following legal bases:
- Performance of a contract — to fulfil orders you place
- Legitimate interests — to improve the Service, prevent fraud, operate the free generator fairly, and communicate with patrons
- Consent — for marketing emails
- Legal obligation — for tax, accounting, and dispute records
You have the right to withdraw consent at any time without affecting the lawfulness of processing based on consent before its withdrawal.
10. Children's privacy
The Service is not directed to children under the age of 13 (or 16 in the European Economic Area and the United Kingdom). We do not knowingly collect personal information from children. If you are a parent or guardian and believe your child has provided information to us, please contact curator@pawforgeart.com and we will delete it promptly.
11. International data transfers
Our service providers are primarily located in the United States. If you access the Service from outside the U.S., your information will be transferred to and processed in the U.S. and other countries that may have data-protection laws different from those in your country. Where required, we rely on appropriate transfer safeguards, including the Standard Contractual Clauses approved by the European Commission, with our service providers.
12. Changes to this policy
We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. The "last updated" date at the top of this page reflects the most recent revision. Material changes will be communicated via email to active patrons before they take effect.
13. Contact
Questions, requests, or complaints about this Privacy Policy? Reach the studio at curator@pawforgeart.com. For privacy-specific requests, please use the subject line "Privacy Request" so it routes to the right person.