Privacy

What you write

The words you write never leave your device. They are held only in your browser’s memory while you are on the page, are never sent to us or to anyone else, and are not saved, logged or analysed. If you choose “Keep them on my keepsake”, the certificate, GIF and video are made inside your browser and the words still never leave it; they exist only until you leave the page, unless you download a file that carries them. The optional “one thing you’ll do differently” note is saved only in your browser, on your device, and you can clear it at any time.

What we collect, and for how long

• Usage counts: that someone opened the site, began a ritual, chose the real flash, downloaded a wallpaper, and the like. Each count is linked to the random browser id below so that we can count visitors once and see which shared links bring people. They are not linked to your name, email or payment. Kept for 13 months.
• Three first-party cookies, each lasting a year: a random browser id (to count you once), the price you were shown (so it stays the same for you), and the link that brought you here (so we can see which sharing works, and credit a creator whose link you followed). They identify a browser, not a person. No third-party tracking, advertising or session-replay tools run on this site, and no third-party scripts load on the pages where you write.
• For a real-flash ritual: the flash paired with it, the time you released it, and the order record (what was bought, the price shown, its status, the link that brought you, and that you agreed to immediate delivery). Kept for as long as accounting and payment-dispute rules require, typically up to seven years.
• Your email is not stored in our database. Stripe keeps it with your payment record, for your receipt, disputes and its own legal duties, and Resend keeps a delivery log for the link email we send you. Their retention follows their own policies.
• Technical logs of requests to the site, kept by Cloudflare for 7 days, which include the addresses of pages visited, so a private link may appear in them briefly.
• Support emails, kept in our mailbox until the matter is settled and for up to two years after.

Who else is involved

• Stripe processes payments. We never see your card details.
• Cloudflare hosts the site, keeps its short logs, and checks that checkout requests come from a person.
• Neon stores the small database described above.
• Resend delivers the link email.
• Railway runs the program that reads the public lightning data.

All of these are based in the United States, and your data is stored there. If you are outside the United States, that means your data is transferred to it.

Your choices and rights

You can use the illustrated storm without buying anything or giving any details. You can clear the cookies above in your browser at any time; the site keeps working. You can ask us to delete the record of a purchase by writing to struckritual@gmail.com; we delete what we hold, while Stripe keeps the payment record for as long as the law requires. If you live somewhere that gives you rights to see, correct, delete or object to the use of your data, or to complain to a data-protection authority, those rights apply, and the same address is the place to use them.

Changes

If this page changes, the date at the top moves.