Privacy Policy

3. Privacy Policy

3.1 Information We Collect

• Personal Information You Provide. For example: your name; birth details (date, time, and place of birth); contact info; and account preferences. You may submit birth details to generate a chart before creating an account (tied to a temporary session).
• Information About Your Family ("Wingmate"). If you add family members, we collect the name, birth details, relationship, and pronouns you provide for them. These people may be minors (e.g., your children). By adding an adult you confirm you have their permission; by adding anyone under 18 you confirm you are their parent or legal guardian. You may request their deletion at any time (see "Your Rights").
• If you sign in and do not finish setting up. When you sign in but have not created your account yet, we keep your email address, which sign-in method you used, and when you last looked at the setup page. It is there so we can notice you got stuck and offer to help, rather than you simply disappearing. It is not a mailing list, we do not use it to advertise to you, and the record is deleted the moment you finish signing up (or after 90 days if you never do). See 3.7.
• Automatically Collected Information. Basic technical data needed to serve the Site securely, such as your IP address and browser type (e.g., in server logs). We use a small number of first-party cookies (essential ones, and one functional one) and no advertising, marketing, or third-party tracking cookies. Our own analytics note the rough country your connection comes from, your device type, browser and operating system, and the site that sent you, without storing your IP address (see 3.3).
• Face ID and passkeys, if you set one up. Your device makes a pair of keys and keeps the private one. We store only the public key, which can check that a sign-in came from your device and can do nothing else, plus the name you give the device and when it was last used. Your face, fingerprint and screen lock never leave your device and we never receive them. If your device syncs passkeys (for example iCloud Keychain or Google Password Manager), that company keeps your passkey under its own terms, labelled with your email address. Removing a device on your account page, or deleting your account, deletes what we hold.
• Messages you turn on. If you choose them: your mobile number for texts, with a record of the consent you gave, and a push address for each device you allow notifications on (see 6).
• When you were last here. We keep one date and time: the last occasion you opened a page while signed in. It is overwritten each visit, so it is a single moment and never a history of where you went or how often. We use it to see whether someone we invited has actually been able to get in. It is deleted when you delete your account.

3.2 How We Use Information

• Generate personalized astrology charts and insights you request.
• Operate, maintain, secure, and improve the Site.
• Communicate with you: service notices, and the messages you choose (see 6), including your daily horoscope by email if you leave that box ticked when you make your account.
• Comply with legal obligations and enforce our Terms.

3.3 Cookies and Tracking

We keep cookies to an absolute minimum. Ask Aunt Starling uses only its own first-party cookies: essential ones that sign you in and run the Site, and one small functional one that remembers which sign-in option you used last. We do not use advertising cookies, cross-site trackers, marketing pixels, or third-party analytics cookies, and we do not sell or share what is stored in these cookies with anyone. Everything below is used internally only, to operate Aunt Starling for you. To understand how the Site is used, we use our own first-party, cookieless analytics, no third party, no cookies, no cross-site tracking, and no advertising. Our analytics never store your IP address: we keep only a daily-rotating, non-reversible hash, so visits can be counted but never tracked across days. At the moment of a visit we look up the rough country your connection comes from, using a database on our own server (nothing is sent anywhere to do it), and keep that with the visit, along with your device type, browser, operating system, the site that sent you and any campaign tags in the link. Visit records are deleted after 90 days. We honor Do Not Track and Global Privacy Control: with either turned on, none of this is recorded. (Our server logs are separate and do record IP addresses; see 3.7.) When you're signed in, we also keep a private, first-party record of how you use your own account (which pages and features) to improve your experience; it's tied to your account, never sold or shared, kept for as long as your account exists, and deleted when you delete your account.

A few small preferences are kept in your browser’s local storage rather than in a cookie, which means they never leave your device and are never sent to us at all: whether you have dismissed this cookie notice, whether you have dismissed the “install the app” bar, whether you have turned on calm mode, and whether you asked us to always load the space-weather pictures on this device (see NOAA / NASA below). Clearing your browser data clears all of them. Two more things are kept only for the life of a browser tab (session storage) and are gone when you close it: your place in a guided tour, and where you had scrolled to on your Nest. The Site also keeps a copy of its own files (pictures, styles and the offline page) on your device, so it opens quickly and works without a connection; none of that is about you.

If you choose to sign in with Google or Apple, your browser goes to their own sign-in page to authenticate you; any cookies they set there are governed by their own policies. Fonts, icons and interface scripts are served from our own Site (not a third-party CDN), so loading our pages does not expose your IP address to a font or script provider. No payment script runs on our pages at all. When you subscribe we send you to Stripe’s own checkout page at checkout.stripe.com, so Stripe sees your IP address there, as the company taking your payment — but only once you have chosen to go, and never while you are simply reading. The space-weather pictures load from NOAA and NASA only if you press “Show this picture”.

You can block or delete cookies in your browser settings. Blocking the session cookie will prevent you from signing in and using your account, because that is the one that keeps you signed in. The others are conveniences: without them the Site still works, it simply forgets which sign-in option you used last and whether you asked to stay signed in.

3.4 Data Sharing, Internal Use Only

Your information is for internal use only. We never sell, rent, trade, or share your personal data with any third party for their own purposes, advertising, or marketing, full stop. The only outside parties who ever touch your data are the trusted service providers that operate Ask Aunt Starling on our behalf, strictly as processors, under confidentiality, and only as needed to run the Site. We would disclose data otherwise only if we are legally required to by law.

3.4b Sending Your Own Birth Details To Someone

You can send someone a link that carries your birth details, so they can add you to their own charts. It is entirely your choice, and nothing happens unless you do it.

• The link holds your name, birth date, birth time and birth place — those four things and nothing else. Not your readings, not the people you have added, and no way into your account.
• Anyone who has the link can see them until it expires, which is 14 days after you make it. Forwarding it passes that on, so send it to the person you mean.
• We do not record who you sent it to. If we email it for you, we use the address once to deliver the message and keep no copy of it.
• If you correct your birth time afterwards the link shows the corrected version: it points at your details rather than carrying a copy of them.

3.5 Where Your Data Is Stored & Processed (Our Providers)

To run Ask Aunt Starling we rely on a small set of established providers. Each handles your data only to deliver its service to us, under its own privacy and security commitments (linked). None of them is permitted to use your data for their own purposes.

Provider details reflect each company's then-current published policies; please refer to the linked policies for the latest.

Payments. If you subscribe, your payment is processed by Stripe, through Stripe Managed Payments. Sold Through Link, LLC — a Stripe company — is our Merchant of Record, and handles checkout, billing, and sales tax. You enter your payment details directly with Stripe; Ask Aunt Starling does not receive or store your card number. Stripe tells us which subscription and plan you have, whether it is currently paid, its dates, and the email address on it, which is how we know what to open up for you. Because Stripe is the seller on the transaction, your subscription can also be managed, and your receipts found, on Stripe’s own site at link.com. See Stripe’s privacy policy, and section 5 for how billing, cancelling and refunds work.

3.6 AI Narrative Generation (Anthropic)

Your personalized readings are written by Anthropic's Claude models, which we call as a processor through Anthropic's commercial API. We send only the minimum needed to generate a reading. Specifically:

We ask you first. Before your first reading we show you a page that names Anthropic, says what goes and what does not, and asks you to agree. Nothing is sent until you do, and declining means there are no readings, because this is how they are written. You can see that page again at /welcome/readings, and we keep a record of the date and the exact words you agreed to.

What we send to Anthropic:

• The astrological details calculated from your birth date, time, and place, for example planetary positions, signs, houses, aspects, life-chapter periods, and upcoming returns.
• Pronouns, so the reading speaks about each person correctly, and, for readings about your family, how each person is related to you.
• The town you are in, when a reading talks about your weather, the daylight where you are, or the sky overhead. This is where you are now — it is not your birthplace, which is never sent.
• No names. You are “you”; everyone else is replaced with a placeholder before a prompt leaves our server, and their name is put back into the reading when it comes back. That includes readings we wrote earlier: when one is quoted into a new prompt, the name in it is replaced first.
• No exact ages, birthdays or birth years. An age goes only as a range (“a child”, “a teenager”, “an adult”). A solar return, whose date is your birthday, goes as a month and year only, and a period of life that began at your birth is described that way rather than dated. The one thing sent as you wrote it is what you type yourself: if you name a saved day “Dad turns 60”, that number goes with it, though the name is still replaced. This covers only the days you add for me to read, not the ones we work out for you, such as a solar return or a new moon.

What we do NOT send to Anthropic: your name or anyone else’s, your birth date, time or place, your email address, password, full mailing address, phone number, or any payment information.

What Anthropic retains and how they use it: Under Anthropic's commercial API terms, your inputs and the generated outputs are not used to train Anthropic's models. Anthropic may retain them only for a limited period (generally up to about 30 days) for trust-and-safety and abuse monitoring, after which they are deleted, unless a longer period is required by law. We do not authorize Anthropic to use your data for any other purpose. See Anthropic's Privacy Policy, Commercial Terms, and Privacy Center for their current practices.

3.7 Data Retention

We keep personal data only as long as we need it for the purpose we collected it:

• Your account, birth details, charts, and readings: for as long as your account is active. When you delete your account we remove it from the live service immediately, and cancel any subscription at the same moment; if you ask us by email instead, within 30 days at the latest.
• Time-limited content we can always regenerate, daily horoscopes, "what to wear," and monthly moon/eclipse meanings: about 60–90 days.
• A birth chart you generate without an account: about 90 days, then deleted.
• The note that you signed in but had not finished setting up (see 3.1): deleted as soon as you finish, and in any case after 90 days.
• Environmental / weather snapshots, including an hourly air-pressure reading for where you are (used to tell you when the barometer moves sharply): about 30 days.
• Historical weather for a city and a month (used for the weather on your birth day): kept indefinitely, because it never changes and keeping it means we stop asking anyone else about it. It is not personal data and holds no link to you or to any account — it is one record of what the weather did in a place, shared by every reader born there that month — so it is not affected when you delete your account.
• Server logs, which record your IP address, your browser type and the pages you request: at most about two weeks, then deleted automatically. The web server’s own log keeps each page’s full address, which can include what you typed into the search box; our application’s request log keeps only the page, never what you typed into it and never your email address. They are used only to keep the Site running and secure.
• Visit analytics: 90 days. Your account-usage record: until you delete your account.
• Backups: a weekly copy of accounts and family members, kept about fourteen weeks, plus our database provider’s own short-term backups. A deleted account ages out of them on that schedule. We restore from them only to recover from a failure.
• Payment records (if you buy a plan): held by Stripe, our payment processor, for as long as tax and accounting law require. We keep only a minimal record of the subscription itself (Stripe’s identifiers for it and its status), and when you delete your account we remove your email address and any link to you from it.
• Your agreement to the automatic renewal (if you subscribe): three years. California law requires us to be able to show what you agreed to when you ticked the box, so this is the one record that survives deleting your account. It is deliberately thin: an internal reference number for the account, the two sentences we published and showed you, which plan and how often, and the date. It holds no name, no email, no birth details, no card and no IP address.

You may request deletion at any time (see "Your Rights").

3.8 Your Rights

Depending on your jurisdiction (e.g., U.S. state privacy laws, EU/UK GDPR), you may have rights to access, correct, delete, or receive a copy of your personal data, and to withdraw consent. You may also have rights to limit or object to certain processing. You can do much of this yourself, from your account page at any time: edit or delete any family member, download a copy of your data (everything we hold about you, your family members and your groups, in a file a text editor opens, with a few security keys left out), and delete your whole account (which also cancels any subscription). For anything else, email askauntstarling@gmail.com. We may take steps to verify your request.

3.9 Data Security

We implement reasonable administrative, technical, and organizational safeguards. No method of transmission or storage is 100% secure, so we cannot guarantee absolute security.

3.10 International Transfers

We may store or process information in the United States and other countries. Where required, we rely on appropriate safeguards for data transfers.

4. Children’s Privacy

The Site is intended for use by adults (18+). Children may not create their own account, and we do not knowingly let a child register or use the Site directly. We check the birth date you give for yourself, and do not accept one that makes you younger than 18. A child or teenager can still be read for — as a family member added by their own parent or legal guardian, who holds the account and agrees to these terms on the family’s behalf.

Because Aunt Starling makes charts for whole families, an adult account holder may add family members ("wingmate") who are minors, for example, their own children, by providing that child's birth details. By doing so, you confirm that you are the child's parent or legal guardian, and you consent on their behalf to our processing it solely to generate that family’s readings. Nobody else may add a child — being close to a family, or trusted with a child day to day, is not the same thing and does not count here. We keep a record of when you confirmed this and the exact words you agreed to, for as long as that family member stays on your account. We do not use a child's data for advertising and never sell or share it. You may review, correct or delete any wingmate's data at any time from your account page, or by emailing askauntstarling@gmail.com. If we learn a child has provided their own data without a guardian, we will delete it promptly.