Privacy

1Who you're dealing with

Fond & Fold is run by one person. For data-protection purposes the controller of your information is legal name / trading entity, registered address, and — if required — an EU or UK representative, reachable athello@fondandfold.com.

Throughout this page, "I" means that person and "the shop" means the website at fondandfold.com. There is no team, no parent company and no investor with a view of your files.

2What I collect

When you make a card

• The photo you upload.
• Which card you picked, and anything you typed to steer it — a name, a note, what to leave out.
• Your delivery email address at checkout.
• If you separately choose the mailing list, your email address and that consent choice. Leaving the box unticked has no effect on making or buying a card.

When you buy

Payment is handled by an outside company that acts as the seller of record — seesection 7. I never see your full card number. What comes back to me is a transaction reference, whether it succeeded, the amount, the country used for tax, and the email address on the receipt.

When you commission something

Whatever you send me in the form or by email: the photos, the references, the brief, the addresses, and the conversation that follows.

Automatically, while you use the shop

• An anonymous signed session that records recent preview requests, result entitlements and reasonable-use limits. It carries no name or advertising identifier.
• Your IP address, and the rough region it implies, used as a second brake on abuse. For IPv6 I group addresses by network block rather than storing the full address.
• Ordinary server logs: the page requested, the time, the browser and operating system version, and whether it errored.

What I don't collect

No account, so no password. No date of birth, no phone number, no address, no contact list. No advertising pixel, no Meta or TikTok tag, no Google Analytics, and no cross-site tracker of any kind. The fonts you're reading are served from my own server, so opening this page doesn't tell Google — or anyone else — that you were here.

3What happens to your photo

This is the part most people actually want to know, so it gets its own section.

1. You choose it. Nothing leaves your machine until you press the button.
2. A quick check runs. Before anything is generated, an automatic check looks at whether the photo is big enough, sharp enough, and whether there's a face in it large enough to work from. If it fails, you're told why and no preview is generated. The check happens in memory; what's kept is its verdict and a couple of measurements like pixel dimensions.
3. It goes to one AI service. Your photo and a text instruction are sent to a third-party image model — name the provider and link its privacy policy; state its own retention window, which is its policy, not mine — which returns one saleable result.
4. You see it watermarked. The preview sits in my storage behind an unguessable address so they can load in your browser.
5. The photo is deleted. Your upload is removed from my serverwithin N hours of the card being generated, whether or not you buy.
6. If you buy, the finished file is stored so it can be downloaded and emailed. See section 8 for how long.

I can't recover a particular photo or a particular card for you after the fact — not as a policy position but because there's no account to look it up in and no index from a person to a file. The one thing that does come back is described next.

4The image number, explained

When a card is generated I compute a short number from the picture as a whole — roughly, a checksum of where it's light and where it's dark, about as long as a phone number. It is stored alongside the card that was made from it.

What it's for. One thing only: recognising that a photo has been through here before. That's what lets the same photo file and the same card recover the stored result instead of creating another model job. It also helps stop the same file being pushed through hundreds of times to drain the service.

What it isn't. It isn't a description of anyone's face. It can't be turned back into a photograph. It can't be used to recognise you, find you, or match you against a different photo of you — change the crop or the lighting and it changes. On its own it identifies a file, not a person.

It's kept longer than the photo, because a benefit that expires in an hour isn't a benefit.State the retention period here, and confirm this section with a lawyer — it's the one clause on this page with no equivalent on comparable sites.

5Faces

Your photos will usually contain a face. So, plainly:

• I do not perform facial recognition or face matching.
• I do not create, extract or store a face template, a face embedding, face geometry, or any other biometric identifier — not from your photo, and not from the illustration.
• Nothing derived from a face is compared against any database, mine or anyone else's.
• The precheck in section 3 detects that a face is present and how much of the frame it fills. It does not work out whose face it is, and it keeps no measurement of the face itself.
• The number in section 4 is computed from the entire image, not from a face within it.

Your photo is passed to the AI service as an ordinary picture, for the single purpose of returning an illustration. It is not passed to anyone else, published, or used as an example.

The illustration that comes back is worth a word too. It keeps what makes someone recognisable to the people who know them — hair, glasses, posture, the clothes, the setting — rather than reproducing a face precisely. It is a likeness of recognition rather than of measurement, so it is not a representation anyone could work backwards from to establish what the subject actually looks like.

6Why I'm allowed to

If you're in the UK or the European Economic Area, the lawful bases are these:

Marketing email is optional. It is sent only if you tick the mailing-list box for new cards, anniversary reminders and occasional notes. Every message has an unsubscribe route, and delivery of a purchased card does not subscribe you automatically.

7Who else touches it

I don't sell your information, and I don't share it for advertising.These are the companies involved in running the shop. Each handles data only to do its job for me.

Beyond that list, information leaves only in three situations: to a recipient you asked me to send a card to; where a law or valid legal order requires it; or, if the shop were ever sold or passed on, to whoever takes it over — under this same policy, and I'd say so here first.

8How long I keep things

9Training

Your photos are not used to train an AI model — not by me, and, under the terms I've agreed with them, not by the AI service either. Verify this against the chosen provider's actual terms before publishing. If it can't be verified, this sentence has to change, not the provider's policy.

The illustrated cards in the shop were arrived at by a process I ran and refined myself: I look for and select the art styles, apply my own eye and imagination, and produce the artwork with AI image tools on prompts and settings I've calibrated in advance. That development work used my own test images, not customers' photos.

10Cookies

One essential cookie identifies an anonymous signed session so the shop can enforce reasonable-use limits, find an eligible stored result and protect paid access without asking you to create an account. It's set to HttpOnly, so scripts on the page can't read it, and it expiresafter N hours.

There are no advertising cookies, no analytics cookies, and nothing shared with a third party for profiling — which is why you aren't being asked to dismiss a consent banner. If you block the cookie, some preview and anonymous-recovery features may not work and the service may fall back to a coarser network check.

11Children

Two different things live under this heading, and they need separate answers.

Children as visitors

The shop isn't meant for children and isn't aimed at them. I don't knowingly collect information from anyone under 13 / 16 — set per jurisdiction. If you think a child has sent me something, write to me and I'll delete it.

Children in the photos

Plenty of these cards are for a new baby or a child's birthday, so photos of children are expected and welcome. By uploading one you're confirming that you're the child's parent or guardian, or that you have a parent's or guardian's permission. The photo is handled exactly as described above: sent once, deleted, never used for training, never subjected to face recognition. If you're a parent or guardian and want a photo of your child removed, write to me and it goes immediately, no explanation needed.

12Your rights

Depending on where you live, you can ask me to give you a copy of what I hold about you, correct it, delete it, hand it over in a portable format, restrict or object to how it's used, or withdraw a consent you gave. You can also complain to your data protection authority; if you're in the UK that's the ICO, and in the EEA it's the supervisory authority where you live.

If you're in California: I don't sell personal information and I don't share it for cross-context behavioural advertising, as those terms are defined there. Asking me to delete something won't get you worse service or a worse price.

To ask for any of this, email hello@fondandfold.com. I'll reply within 30 days, sooner where the law says so. One honest caveat: with no account to log into, I often can't prove that a given upload was yours. If you can tell me the approximate time, the card you used and the email address involved, I can usually find it. If you can't, there may be nothing I can safely identify as yours — which is a side effect of collecting so little, not a way of avoiding the request.

13Where the data sits

The shop runs on a global network, so a page may be served to you from a machine near you while files and records live elsewhere. Your photo travels to whichever region the AI service operates in. That means your information can be transferred across borders, including out of the UK and the EEA.

This section needs real answers from a lawyer: where the controller is established, which transfer mechanism applies (Standard Contractual Clauses, UK Addendum, an adequacy decision), which regions the model provider and storage are pinned to, and — if any part of the operation sits in mainland China — how the PIPL cross-border rules interact with the above.

14Security

Everything travels over HTTPS. Finished files sit behind time-limited links that can't be guessed. The anonymous-session cookie is signed, so it can't be edited to grant more previews or paid access. Access to the systems is limited to one person, with two-factor authentication on the accounts that matter. No prompt, key or model name is shipped to your browser.

None of which makes anything unbreakable — no site can honestly claim that. If something does go wrong in a way that affects you, I'll tell you, and I'll tell the regulator where I'm required to.

15Changes to this page

If this policy changes I'll update the date at the top. If a change actually matters — a new recipient of your data, a new purpose, a longer retention — I'll say so plainly on the site rather than editing quietly and hoping. Consider keeping a short dated changelog at the bottom; comparable sites don't, and it's cheap trust.

16Contact

Questions about any of this, or about a specific photo, go tohello@fondandfold.com. It reaches me, not a queue. Business and press enquiries have their own note on the About page.

Governed by applicable law and venue — to be set alongside the Terms. See also the Terms.