Privacy policy

This policy explains what personal data Stranger Hands collects when you use strangerhands.com, buy from us, send us an enquiry, use our figurine generator or sign up to our emails, what we do with it, who else handles it, and the choices you have.

Who we are

Stranger Hands is an independent maker studio in London SE10 0ES, United Kingdom. We are the controller of the personal data described here: we decide how it is used, and we are responsible for looking after it. For anything in this policy, email [email protected] or call +44 7900 001195.

What we collect and why

Each item below gives the lawful basis we rely on under UK data protection law.

When you place an order

• Your email address, name, phone number if you give one, and delivery address.
• What you ordered, the price, delivery and any discount code, and the order's progress through making, dispatch and delivery.
• We use these to take payment, make and deliver your order, send you order and delivery emails, handle cancellations, returns and refunds, and answer questions about your order. Basis: performing our contract with you. We keep order and payment records because tax and accounting law requires it. Basis: legal obligation.
• You enter card and wallet details on Stripe's or PayPal's own payment pages. We never see or store your card number.

When you create an account

• Your name, email address, password, a saved delivery address if you add one, and the orders placed with the account.
• Your password is stored only as a salted one-way hash, which cannot be turned back into the password.
• We use these to let you sign in, follow your orders and check out faster. Basis: contract.
• While you are signed in, we also note which products you add to your basket, how often and when, so we can see what you were interested in and help if a checkout went wrong. Basis: legitimate interests.

When you send an enquiry

• Your name, email address, phone number if you give one, your message, any files or photos you attach, and our reply.
• We use these to answer you and, if you go ahead, to quote for and carry out the work. Basis: taking steps at your request before a contract, and our legitimate interest in replying to people who contact us.

When you request a 3D print quote

• We collect your name and email address, printer process, selected material and colour, project notes, and STL, OBJ or GLB files you upload. We use the files to calculate approximate model measurements and material use, then review the request and reply. Basis: taking steps at your request before a contract.
• Original model files are stored privately with our file storage provider for studio review; they are not published on the website.

When you subscribe to our emails

• Your email address, your name if you give it, and when and where you signed up.
• We use these to send occasional news from the workshop. Basis: consent. Every email has a one-click unsubscribe link, and it takes effect straight away.

When you leave a review

• The name you give, your rating, your words, any photos, and the order and product the review is about. A review with photos can earn a one-use discount code, which we link to the review.
• Reviews are published on the website under the name you give. Basis: consent, which you can withdraw by asking us to remove your review.
• Some reviews on the site were left for us on our Etsy shop between 2016 and 2018. They are shown with the reviewer's name, words and location as they appeared publicly on Etsy. Basis: legitimate interests. If one of them is yours and you would like it removed, email us and we will take it down.

When you use the figurine generator

• The photos you add (up to three), the description you type, the style, theme and pose you choose, and the picture the generator makes. If you are signed in, these are linked to your account; if you are not, to a random id in a cookie on your browser.
• To make the picture, we send your photos, description and choices to Google, which processes them through its Gemini API and sends the picture back. We use Google's paid API service, whose terms do not allow Google to use what we send to improve its products; Google may keep it for a limited time to detect abuse, as those terms describe. We do not use your photos to identify anyone.
• Only add photos of people who have agreed to it. If anyone in a photo appears to be under 18, the generator makes only an age-appropriate, fully clothed figurine.
• We use these to make your picture, show it to you, and, if you ask us for a quote on it, to discuss making the figurine. Basis: taking steps at your request to provide the service you asked to use, and our legitimate interest in preventing misuse of it.
• The free try. If you generate without an account, we record that you have had your one free generation in three ways: the random id in the sh_figurine_try cookie; a keyed one-way hash of the network you connected from (the first three parts of an IPv4 address, or the first half of an IPv6 address); and a keyed one-way hash of a summary of your browser's settings (screen size, time zone, language and graphics details), worked out in your browser when you press Generate. We never store your IP address or those settings themselves, and the hashes cannot be turned back into them. Basis: legitimate interests in keeping the free try to one per person, which is what lets us offer it.
• We also count how often each network and each account presses Generate, so the generator cannot be used to run up costs; the counts are kept against a hash of the network, not the address, and deleted once the hour they cover has passed. Basis: legitimate interests.
• If you register, the free generations that come with an account are recorded against your email address in a normalised form (lower case, without dots or "+" tags for Gmail, without "+" tags for other providers), so they are given once per inbox. We also record, as the same kind of keyed one-way hashes described above, that this browser has had them — the cookie id and the browser summary, never the network — so that a second account made in the same browser is given one generation rather than the full set. Those hashes are deleted after 30 days, with the rest of the free-try records. Basis: legitimate interests in keeping the free generations to one set per person.
• If you buy generations, Stripe takes the payment as it does for an order. We record the amount, Stripe's reference and the time you confirmed you wanted the generations straight away. Basis: contract, and legal obligation for the payment record.
• The page keeps your photos, description and choices in your own browser's storage, so they are still there if you register or reload. That copy stays on your device and is deleted when you press Clean.

When you visit the website

• Our hosting and security providers process your IP address and basic browser information to deliver pages and to protect the site from attacks and abuse. Basis: legitimate interests.
• When anyone tries to sign in, we count the attempts against the email address and the IP address used, so that password guessing gets blocked. The counts are deleted once the lockout period has passed. Basis: legitimate interests in keeping accounts secure.
• When something is refused because it looks like abuse — repeated sign-in attempts, spam or automated form submissions, forged calls to our payment and email connections, or attempts to get more free figurine generations than allowed — we record what happened, when, how often, and a one-way code made from your network address (never the address itself). If you are signed in we note your account, and for a sign-in lockout we keep the first letter and domain of the email address that was tried. Basis: legitimate interests in protecting the site, our customers and our costs.
• When a page or form on the site fails, we record the error so we can fix it: what went wrong, the page it happened on (without anything after a "?" in the address), the kind of browser and device, and, if you are signed in, your account's email address. Basis: legitimate interests in keeping the site working.
• We count how many times each product page is viewed per day. These counts are not linked to you, your device or your IP address.
• We keep a log of the emails we send you (the address, the subject and whether delivery succeeded), so we can check that an order or account email reached you. Basis: legitimate interests.
• Analytics and advertising tools only run if you accept them in the cookie notice. See "Cookies, analytics and advertising on this website" below.

Where our pieces go

The website shows where pieces have been sent, on a map and in small notifications. For an order, this shows only the product and the town or city it went to, placed at a random point within about three kilometres of the town centre. It never shows your name, street, postcode or order number. Basis: legitimate interests. If you would rather your order was not shown, email us and we will remove it.

Who we share it with

We do not sell your personal data. We share it only with the companies that run parts of this service for us, and only what each of them needs:

• Stripe: card and wallet payments at checkout.
• PayPal: payments made with PayPal.
• Railway: hosts the website and its database.
• Cloudflare: delivers the website, protects it from attacks, and runs our domain.
• Resend: sends our order, account and newsletter emails.
• Microsoft 365: our studio email, where your emails and enquiries arrive.
• Our file storage provider: stores the photos and files you upload with an enquiry, a review or the figurine generator, the pictures the generator makes, and private model files submitted with a 3D print quote.
• Google (Gemini API): makes the figurine generator's pictures from the photos, description and choices you send it.
• The courier or postal service delivering your order: receives your name and delivery address, and your email address or phone number where it sends delivery updates.
• OpenStreetMap: the map on our orders page loads its map images from OpenStreetMap's servers, which receive your IP address when they do.
• Google and Meta: only if you accept analytics or advertising cookies, as explained below.

Stripe and PayPal also act as controllers of the payment data they collect, for fraud prevention and their own legal obligations, under their own privacy notices.

We may also disclose personal data where the law requires it, to establish or defend legal claims, or to a buyer of the business, who would have to keep using it under this policy.

International transfers

Several of these providers are based in, or use servers in, the United States and other countries outside the UK. Where your data leaves the UK, it is protected by UK adequacy regulations (including the UK–US data bridge, for companies certified under it) or by the UK International Data Transfer Agreement or Addendum to the standard contractual clauses.

How long we keep it

• Orders and payment records: for as long as UK tax and accounting rules require, which is up to six years after the end of the financial year the order falls in.
• Accounts: until you ask us to close your account. Orders placed with it are then kept as above; the note of products you added to your basket is deleted with the account.
• Enquiries that do not lead to an order: up to two years after our last contact.
• 3D print quote original model files: deleted about 12 hours after upload by an automatic cleanup process. An upload that is not submitted as a quote has the same lifetime. If cleanup fails, we retry automatically.
• 3D print quote details and estimate: kept for the studio-selected period (365 days by default, configurable from 30 to 730 days), then deleted by the same cleanup process.
• Email subscriptions: until you unsubscribe. After that we keep only your email address and the date you left, so that we never email you again by mistake.
• Reviews: for as long as they are published, or until you ask us to remove them.
• Sign-in attempt counts: until the lockout period ends.
• Daily visitor codes: the random value that could link one to a device is deleted at the end of each day. The codes, which then identify nobody, are kept only as counts of visitors.
• Records of refused suspicious activity: deleted after 90 days.
• Records of site errors: deleted once the same error has not happened for 90 days.
• Email delivery logs: up to two years.
• Figurine generator photos you add: deleted 30 days after the picture is made.
• Figurine generator descriptions and generated pictures: deleted 12 months after the picture is made. We keep the record that a picture was made — the style chosen, the model used and what it cost us — without them, for our accounts.
• Records of anonymous free tries: deleted after 30 days.
• Generation credits and purchases: as long as your account exists, and purchases as long as payment records are kept (see above).

How we protect it

The site is served only over encrypted connections, passwords are never stored in readable form, and the admin area is limited to the studio and protected against password guessing. The providers above are bound by contract to keep your data secure and to use it only on our instructions.

Your rights

Under UK data protection law you have the right to:

• ask for a copy of the personal data we hold about you;
• have inaccurate data corrected;
• have your data deleted, for example when we no longer need it or you withdraw your consent;
• object to, or ask us to restrict, how we use it, including any use based on our legitimate interests;
• receive the data you gave us in a portable format;
• withdraw your consent at any time, for example by unsubscribing or changing your cookie settings. This does not affect what we did before you withdrew it.

To use any of these rights, email [email protected]. We will reply within one month and there is no charge. We may ask you to confirm your identity first.

Children

This website and shop are not aimed at children under 16, and we do not knowingly collect their personal data. If you think a child has given us their details, email us and we will delete them.

Changes to this policy

When we change this policy, we update the date at the top of this page. If a change affects how we use data you have already given us, we will email you before it takes effect.