Privacy notice

The shop is not open yet. You cannot order a video, and nobody has. The only thing we collect at the moment is an email address, from people who have asked us to tell them when we open.

This notice covers the whole service, including the parts that only start working when we open. We have published it early so that you can read it before you give us anything.

Letter to Lapland makes personalised video messages from Santa for children. We are a small British company.

We never ask for a photograph of your child. We do not use face recognition, voice recognition or any other biometric technology, and we do not track children. A child has no account with us and gives us nothing directly.

For each child we hold a first name, the words you write about them, and the video we make. For you we hold an email address and your order.

We do not sell your information, and we do not advertise to you or to your child. There are no subscriptions.

Crackle AI Limited (15818201), registered at 128 City Road, London EC1V 2NX, United Kingdom, trading as Letter to Lapland.

We are the data controller for the information described here. You can contact us at hohoho@lettertolapland.com about anything in this notice, including a privacy request.

We are registered with the Information Commissioner’s Office under registration ZB824467. The register still shows our former name, Crackle Energy Limited. It is the same company, with the same company number. We changed our name and are updating the register.

We do not ask for your child’s surname, age, date of birth, school, address or photograph, and there is no field in our system for any of them.

The free text boxes accept whatever you type, so please leave out anything you would not want us to hold. Each box is limited to 200 characters, and we reject text that is not suitable for a message from Santa.

Your child is not our customer and has no account. You are the customer, and you decide what to tell us about them.

We follow these rules for information about children:

• No photographs and no biometrics. This was decided before the product was built and we do not intend to change it.
• No profiling. We do not build a profile of your child, we do not use what you write to target anything at anyone, and we do not use it to train our own models.
• No advertising to children, and no advertising in the product.
• We do not knowingly collect information directly from a child. If your child has used your device to write to us and you want that deleted, tell us and we will delete it.

We use a small number of suppliers to run the service. They act on our instructions and may not use your information for their own purposes.

Anthropic and kie.ai receive your child’s first name and the words you wrote, and both are outside the United Kingdom. The companies that run the AI models need that information to make the video, and the models do not run in Britain.

The shop is not open, so we have not made a video and nothing has been sent to either of them. Before we make the first one we will put in place the transfer protections the law requires with both, and we will list them here. What will leave the country is a first name and up to 200 characters that you wrote. It will not include a surname, a photograph, or anything your child gave us directly.

We do not share your information with anyone else, and we do not sell or rent it. If a court or the police required us to hand something over we would do so, and we would tell you unless the law prevented us.

When the video is ready we put it at a web address that contains two long random codes. The address is not listed anywhere and cannot realistically be guessed, but it is not password protected, so anyone who has the link can watch the video.

We set it up this way because parents send these videos to grandparents, to family group chats and onto social media, and a login would get in the way. It also means that once you share the link, whoever receives it can watch.

If you want the link to stop working, ask us and we will delete the video.

When the time is up we delete the video file and the words. What remains in the order record is the financial side of the sale. We keep the two apart because two legal duties pull in different directions: we must keep accounting records, and we must not keep a child’s letter for longer than we need it.

You can ask us to:

• Show you what we hold. We will send you a copy within one month.
• Correct it if it is wrong.
• Delete it.We will delete your child’s name, what you wrote, the letter and the video. We have to keep the order record for the period described above, and we will tell you what remains.
• Restrict what we do with it.
• Give you a portable copy to take elsewhere.
• Stop marketing to you. If you withdraw your consent we will take you off the list the same day.

To make a request, write to hohoho@lettertolapland.com. It costs nothing. We will normally reply within a few days, and always within one month.

Please write from the email address on the order, since that is how we confirm that the order is yours.

There are two limits on deletion. We cannot recall anything you have already downloaded or sent to other people, such as a video in a family group chat. And deleted information can remain in our suppliers’ encrypted backups for up to 30 days, until those are overwritten in the ordinary course.

We use one cookie to remember the order you are part way through. Once you sign in, our sign in system also sets the cookies it needs to keep you signed in. Both are strictly necessary for the site to work, so we do not show a cookie banner.

We use no advertising cookies, no third party tracking and no social media pixels.

We count visits with an analytics tool that sets no cookies. It tells us how many people read each page. It does not follow you to other websites and it does not identify you.

If you join the waitlist we will email you when we open, and occasionally before then if there is news about the launch. That is what you signed up for.

We will not add you to a mailing list because you bought something, and we will not pass your address to anyone. There are no subscriptions of any kind. You can tell us to stop at any time and we will, and every marketing email we send will carry its own unsubscribe link.

If you think we have got something wrong, please contact us first at hohoho@lettertolapland.com, as that is usually the quickest way to put it right.

You can also complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office, the UK’s data protection regulator, at ico.org.uk or on 0303 123 1113. It costs nothing, and you do not have to contact us first.

If we change this notice we will change the date at the top. If we change something that materially affects information we already hold about you, we will email you rather than only updating this page. That includes a change in the company behind Letter to Lapland, which may happen as the business is set up.