Privacy at birthday.video
In a few sentences
Birthday videos are full of family photos, children’s faces and private jokes, so this site is built never to see them. The editor is a web page that works inside your browser tab: it reads the photos, clips and song you pick, draws the card, and encodes the finished MP4 on your phone or computer. We never receive a copy, and there is no account to attach one to. We do count visits so we know which templates and guides are worth improving, and the only counter that uses cookies can be turned off from any page. If you rate the site, or a page crashes, we keep that rating or technical report without any cookie or identifier.
Your photos, clips, song and words
Everything you add is opened by your browser on your device: pictures are decoded and drawn onto the card there, clips are played and re-encoded there, and the song is mixed there. The name, age and message you type are drawn into the frames in the same way. The export is written by your browser and handed back to you as a download or through your phone’s share sheet. None of your pictures, sound, words, file names or template settings is sent to birthday.video or to anyone else.
What stays in your browser
- Your projects. So you can close the tab and finish tomorrow, the editor keeps your project in this browser: the words and settings in IndexedDB, with a small preview picture, and copies of the photos, clips and song you added in the browser’s private file storage (the Origin Private File System). They are listed on the projects page, where you can delete any of them; older projects are removed automatically when there are many. They never leave this device, and clearing this site’s data in your browser settings removes them all.
- A spoken birthday message, if you record one. The microphone switches on only after you tap the record button and your browser asks your permission, and it stops when you tap stop. The recording is mixed into your video on your phone or computer and kept with the project like your other files; it is never sent to us.
- A birthday countdown, if you start one: the name, the date and time and the
look, saved as
vt-countdown:birthdayin local storage so the countdown is still there after a reload. Nothing about it is sent anywhere. - Your theme (light, dark or automatic), saved as
vt-themein local storage. - Your analytics choice, saved as
vt-consentin local storage, so the notice doesn’t reappear and an objection keeps working. - When you last rated birthday.video or dismissed the rating card, saved as
vt-feedbackin local storage. - Whether you have saved projects, a single flag in local storage that lets the home page make room for “Continue where you left off” before it loads.
These stay on your device until you delete them or clear the site’s data.
Files your browser can’t open by itself
Most photos and clips open with your browser’s built-in decoders. If one doesn’t (an older video format, or a photo format some browsers can’t read), the page fetches an open-source converter (ffmpeg.wasm, around 10 MB, or a small image decoder) and converts the file on your device. These converters, the template fonts, the Happy Birthday arrangements and the icons all come from birthday.video itself (or are made in your browser), so no other server is contacted and your files are never part of a request.
The rating card and crash reports
After you download or share a video, a small card may ask how birthday.video did, with five stars. Ignoring or closing it is fine. With four or five stars you get a thank-you and a link to leave a public review on Trustpilot or to share the site; following that link simply opens trustpilot.com, a separate company with its own privacy policy, and we send it nothing. With one to three stars you can pick a reason and add a note; please keep personal details out of the note.
With the stars we store the reason and note if you gave them, whether you went on to review
or share, what prompted the card (a download, for example), the page path (with the
project id hidden), the site version, a two-letter country worked out from the connection,
browser family and major version, operating system family and whether it was a phone, tablet
or computer. Your IP address is used for an instant to stop abuse and is not stored. There
is no cookie or identifier, and nothing about your photos, clips, song or words. Ratings are
deleted within 24 months. vt-feedback keeps the card away for 180 days after a
rating, 21 days after you close it, and permanently after three closes. Google Analytics,
under the cookie choice below, receives the number of stars and the reason, never the note.
If the editor hits an error we didn’t expect, your browser sends us a short technical report
so we can fix it: the error message and where in our code it happened, the page path, the
site version, a random id for that single page view (new every time and not saved), browser,
operating system, device type and country. Addresses are shortened and anything resembling
an email address or a media file name is stripped out first; the report never includes your
pictures, clips, song or anything you typed. There is no cookie or identifier, and the IP
address is only used for the same instant check. Individual reports are deleted after 30
days, and the grouped summary of a problem (message, count, first and last seen) within 180
days of its last occurrence. Google Analytics receives one js_error event per
page view with only the kind of error.
Ratings and crash reports are kept in Cloudflare Workers and Durable Objects storage, with Cloudflare acting as our processor. Our lawful basis is legitimate interests in keeping the editor working and making it better (UK GDPR Article 6(1)(f)), and for a note, your choice to write it. To object or ask for deletion, write to the address below.
Hosting
Cloudflare serves birthday.video. To deliver each page and keep the site safe from abuse, its servers see every request, including your IP address and browser details, and keep short-lived logs. We rely on our legitimate interest in running a fast and secure website. Cloudflare describes its practices in its privacy policy.
How we count visits
Two cookieless services give us simple totals: Cloudflare Web Analytics and Ahrefs Web Analytics. They tell us how many people visit, roughly where from, and which ideas and guides get read, without storing anything in your browser or following you elsewhere.
Google Analytics 4 is the one that uses cookies. Apart from page views, it hears about a few editor actions in general terms: which template category was opened, that photos were added (as a rounded count), that a song was added, which format was exported, that an export finished or was cancelled. Names, ages, messages, photos, clips, songs and file names are never included. We use the figures only to see which templates and features earn their place. Google signals is off, every advertising consent signal is set to denied, no advertising product is linked, and Google deletes event data after 14 months.
Google processes this information for us, partly on servers in the United States, with transfers covered by the EU-US Data Privacy Framework. Google explains its part in its privacy policy and on its page about partner sites. Our lawful basis is legitimate interests in improving the editor and its guides, and for the cookies themselves the statistics exemption in PECR (the UK’s cookie rules, as amended by the Data (Use and Access) Act 2025). Visitors from the EU, the EEA and Switzerland are covered by different rules, so for them Google Analytics runs without cookies and sends only anonymous pings.
Cookies, and turning them off
The Google Analytics cookies are _ga and _ga_<id>, set on
birthday.video and lasting up to two years. A short notice mentions them on your first
visit. You can say no at any time: open
Cookie settings at the bottom of any
page and choose Turn off analytics; Turn analytics on
reverses it. If your browser sends a
Global Privacy Control signal, we treat it
as the same request, keep analytics off and skip the notice. We sell no personal data and
show no adverts.
Who runs birthday.video
birthday.video is an independent, self-funded project with no investors and no advertisers. Nobody signs up, so there are no profiles: the only records are the analytics figures, ratings and crash reports described above, none of which carries a name. Send privacy questions and requests to hello@birthday.video; the contact page says what helps us reply quickly.
Your rights
Under UK and EU data protection law you can ask what personal data we hold about you and ask us to correct it, delete it, limit it, give you a copy or stop using it. Because your photos, clips and songs never reach us, there is nothing of that kind to hand over or erase; your saved projects live only in your browser, where you can delete them yourself. Analytics records are pseudonymous: stop them with Turn off analytics or by deleting the cookies. Ratings and crash reports aren’t linked to you, so to have one removed, tell us roughly when and what it said. Write to hello@birthday.video. If you are unhappy with our answer, you can complain to a data protection regulator; in the UK that is the Information Commissioner’s Office.
When this page changes
If the way the site handles data changes, this page is updated in the same release and the date at the top moves on.