Last updated: October 3, 2026
We Love Kitties (“we”, “us”) runs welovekitties.com, a gallery of cat photos and stories. This policy explains what information the site collects, why, who else handles it, how long we keep it, and the choices you have. It describes what the site actually does today.
The short version
- No ads, analytics, or tracking. The site shows no advertising, uses no analytics service, and sets no tracking cookies, so you won’t see a cookie banner.
- We collect only what you send us through the contact form, the Share your cat form, the daily cat signup, or a comment, plus the basic records every web server keeps.
- We never sell or rent your information, or share it for advertising.
- Ask us anytime to see, correct, or delete your information, or to take down a photo you shared. Use the Contact page or email [email protected].
What we collect and why
When you visit
Like every website, our server records each request it receives: your IP address, your browser type, the page you asked for, the page that linked to it, and the time. We use these records only to keep the site running and secure, for example to block attacks. We keep them for 14 days.
Our network provider, Cloudflare, sees the same information as it delivers the site and protects it from attacks. Cloudflare may set a strictly necessary security cookie if it needs to check that a visitor isn’t a bot.
When you use the contact form
We collect your name, your email address, your phone number if you give one, and your message. We use them only to reply to you. Each message is emailed to us and also saved in the site’s dashboard, so none is lost. We delete messages once we no longer need them, or sooner if you ask.
When you share your cat
The Share your cat form collects:
- your photo, your cat’s name, a title, and your story, which we publish if we choose your submission;
- the name you’d like shown with it (optional), which is published with the photo;
- your email address, which is never published. We use it only to tell you when your cat is posted and, if needed, to ask you about your submission;
- a record of what you agreed to on the form, and when.
Before your photo is saved, the site removes the hidden details that phones and cameras store in photos, including where the photo was taken. Photos waiting for review aren’t visible to the public.
If we publish your submission, it appears on welovekitties.com with your story and the name you gave, and may be shared in our daily email and on our Facebook, Bluesky, and Pinterest pages, as the form explains. We use it only on welovekitties.com, in the daily email, and on those pages, and we never sell it or license it to anyone else. If we decide not to publish it, we delete it, photo included, within 30 days.
You can ask us to take down a published photo at any time. We’ll remove it from the site and from our own social media posts.
When you sign up for the daily cat
The daily cat is one cat a day by email. When you sign up, we collect your email address, when you signed up and confirmed it, and how it reached us. We use it only to send you the daily cat, and first an email with a link to confirm that the address is yours. Nothing else is sent until you confirm, and signups that aren’t confirmed are deleted within 7 days.
The emails have no tracking pixels or tracking links. When your email app shows the day’s photo, it downloads it from welovekitties.com, which our server records like any visit, for 14 days.
If you signed up for a daily cat on our old site, or made an account there, we moved your address to the daily cat when we moved the site. Your first email says so.
Every email has an unsubscribe link, and unsubscribing takes one click. When you unsubscribe, we delete your address and keep only a scrambled code made from it (a keyed hash), so that importing an old list can never sign you up again.
When you comment
If you leave a comment, we collect the name, email address, and website you enter, your comment, and your IP address and browser type, which help us spot spam. Your name, website, and comment are public. Your email address is not. Comments from new commenters wait for our approval.
If you tick “Save my name, email, and website in this browser”, your browser keeps those details in a cookie for about a year, so you don’t have to type them again.
Next to comments, the site may show a profile picture from Gravatar, a service run by Automattic. To find it, a scrambled code made from your email address (a hash) is sent to Gravatar. See Automattic’s privacy policy.
Signing in
Only the site’s administrators have accounts, and visitors can’t create one. Signing in sets the cookies WordPress needs to keep an administrator signed in.
Content from other websites
- Linked pins. Some pins quote a story from another cat website (Love Meow, CatTime, Cole & Marmalade, Catster, or I Can Has Cheezburger?) and show that story’s photo directly from the publisher’s website. When your browser loads one of these photos, the publisher receives your IP address and can tell that you were on welovekitties.com. Their privacy policies apply to that.
- Sharing buttons are plain links. Nothing is sent to Pinterest, Facebook, X, Reddit, WhatsApp, or any other network unless you click one, which takes you to that network.
- Links to other websites are covered by those websites’ own privacy policies.
Cookies
Visitors get no cookies from the site unless they choose to save their comment details. Administrators who sign in get WordPress’s sign-in cookies, and Cloudflare may set a strictly necessary security cookie. We use no advertising or analytics cookies.
Who else handles information
We use a few service providers to run the site. They handle information only to provide their service to us:
- Oracle Cloud hosts the website and its database in the United States (Ashburn, Virginia), and sends the site’s emails.
- Cloudflare delivers and protects the site, and forwards email sent to welovekitties.com addresses to our inbox.
- Google provides the inbox where contact messages and new submissions arrive.
- Gravatar (Automattic) shows commenters’ profile pictures, as described above.
- Facebook (Meta), Bluesky, and Pinterest receive the stories and photos we share on our pages there. They never receive email addresses, or anything that isn’t already public on the site.
We may also disclose information when the law requires it, to protect the site or its visitors, or as part of a transfer of the site to a new owner, who would have to follow this policy.
How long we keep it
- Server and security logs: 14 days.
- Records of emails the site sends: 30 days, at Oracle.
- Contact messages: until we no longer need them, or sooner if you ask.
- The daily cat: your address until you unsubscribe, and 7 days at most if you never confirm it. After you unsubscribe, only a keyed hash of it.
- Submissions we don’t publish: deleted within 30 days of our decision.
- Published submissions and comments, with the email addresses stored with them: until you ask us to remove them, or until we take them down.
- Spam protection: for one hour, the forms remember a scrambled version of your IP address so they can limit how often one visitor sends them.
- Backups: the site’s database, which includes everything above, is backed up every night. Copies are kept for 14 days on the server and for up to 90 days in a private copy, and one copy a month is kept longer so the site can be rebuilt after a disaster. Copies of the whole server are kept for 4 weeks. If we ever restore a backup, we’ll delete again anything you asked us to remove.
Your choices and rights
Wherever you live, you can ask us to:
- tell you what information we hold about you, and send you a copy;
- correct it;
- delete it, including a photo or comment you shared;
- stop using it for something you agreed to, such as the daily cat or a submission we haven’t published yet.
Use the Contact page or email [email protected]. We’ll answer within 30 days, and we may ask you to confirm that the information is yours, for example by writing from the email address you used.
In the European Economic Area, the UK, or Switzerland: we use your information with your consent (submissions, the daily cat, and saved comment details), to answer you (contact messages), and for our legitimate interests in running a secure website and keeping out spam (server logs and comments) and in keeping in touch with people who made an account on our old site (the daily cat, for addresses we moved from there). You can also object to how we use your information, ask us to restrict it, and complain to your data protection authority.
In California and other US states with privacy laws: we don’t sell or share your personal information as those laws define it, and we don’t use it for targeted advertising. We won’t treat you differently for using your rights.
Children
The site is for a general audience and isn’t directed at children under 13. To share a cat, you must be 13 or older, and if you’re under 18, a parent or guardian must agree. If we learn that a child under 13 has sent us personal information, we’ll delete it. Parents can contact us to have it removed.
Security
The site uses encrypted connections, a firewall, and automatic security updates, and only administrators can see contact messages, submissions, and the daily cat’s subscribers. No system is perfectly secure, so please don’t send us anything sensitive.
Visitors outside the United States
The site’s server is in the United States, and our providers may handle information in other countries. If you use the site from elsewhere, your information is processed in the United States.
Changes to this policy
When our practices change, we’ll update this page and the date at the top. For significant changes, we’ll also put a notice on the site’s homepage.
Contact us
For questions or requests, use the Contact page or email [email protected].