Privacy Policy

Effective date: September 9, 2026 Last updated: September 9, 2026

Paper Route is operated by ThePaperRoute, Inc., a Delaware corporation ("Paper Route," "we," "us"). This policy explains what personal information we collect, how we use it, who we share it with, and the choices you have. It applies to our website (paper-route.com), our subscription service, and any forms or tools we use to collect content.

The short version: we collect what we need to make a private magazine for one person. We never sell personal information, we never share it for advertising, and we don't show ads. We use a small number of vendors (payments, storage, AI writing tools) to run the service, we do not let those vendors train AI models on your content, and we delete everything within 30 days after a subscription ends.

1. Who this policy covers

• Subscribers: people who buy a subscription.
• Recipients: the people who receive the printed magazine. Recipients usually don't interact with us directly; their information is provided by the Subscriber and Contributors.
• Contributors: family and friends who submit photos, stories, and updates.
• Website visitors.

2. What we collect

From Subscribers

• Name, email address, phone number.
• Billing information. Payments are handled by Stripe; we see the last four digits of your card, the card type, and the billing address, but not the full card number.
• Your relationship to the Recipient.
• Account communications and support requests.

About Recipients (provided by the Subscriber and Contributors)

• Name, mailing address, and date of birth or age.
• Biographical information: where they grew up, family members, career, interests, favorite teams, hobbies, and similar details gathered during onboarding.
• Photos and stories in which they appear.
• The name of the residence or community where they live, if that is part of the mailing address.

From Contributors

• Name, email address, and/or phone number, and your relationship to the Recipient.
• Everything you submit: photos, captions, stories, updates, voice notes, and messages. Submissions may include information about other people, including children, who appear in them.

From website visitors

• Our hosting provider (Netlify) keeps standard server logs, including IP address and browser type. We do not run analytics, tracking pixels, or advertising cookies, and we set no cookies of our own.

We do not knowingly collect health information. Please do not submit medical details about the Recipient or anyone else unless we have asked for it for a specific issue.

3. How we use it

We use personal information only to:

• Produce, print, and mail the Recipient's issues, including using AI tools to organize, write, edit, and lay out content.
• Tailor each issue to the Recipient's interests and the topics provided at onboarding, including producing interest-based content in months when contributions are light.
• Communicate with Subscribers and Contributors about deadlines, proofs, delivery, billing, and support.
• Process payments and prevent fraud.
• Improve the service using de-identified, aggregated information (for example, how many photos a typical issue contains). This never involves using your actual content, names, or photos.
• Meet legal obligations and enforce our Terms of Service.

We do not use your information, the Recipient's information, or Contributor content for advertising, for marketing to anyone, for building profiles about you, or for training our own or anyone else's AI models. Nothing in an issue and nothing submitted for an issue will be used as a sample, testimonial, or marketing material unless every Contributor whose content is involved and the Recipient (or their legal representative) give us permission.

4. AI processing

We use third-party AI services, currently Anthropic's Claude, to help draft, edit, and lay out issues. Content and Recipient details are sent to those services to do that work. We use these services only under terms that do not permit the provider to train its models on our data. AI output is reviewed by us and proofed by a family member before printing, as described in our Terms of Service.

5. Who we share it with

We share personal information only with the vendors we need to run the service, only for that purpose, and under contracts or terms that restrict what they can do with it:

Google Workspace hosts our own company email. If you write to us, that message is in our mailbox. It is not used to store submissions or Recipient information.

Issues are printed and mailed by Paper Route directly; no outside printer receives your content or the Recipient's address. If we begin using a print or mail vendor, we will add it to this table and update this policy before sending it anything.

We may also disclose information if required by law or legal process, to protect the rights or safety of a Recipient or any person, or as part of a merger, acquisition, or sale of assets (in which case this policy continues to apply to the transferred information).

We never sell personal information and never share it with anyone for advertising or marketing purposes.

Within a family. Content you submit appears in a printed issue. The Recipient will see it, and so may anyone the Recipient shows it to. Other Contributors to the same Recipient may see your submissions during proofing. We may share a Contributor's name with the Recipient and other Contributors (for example, as a byline or caption).

6. Storage and security

Submissions and Recipient information are stored in our Supabase database and file storage, scoped to each Recipient, with access limited to the people at Paper Route who need it to produce issues. Photographs and voice notes are stored as private files that are not publicly reachable; links to them are generated on demand and expire. Our vendors store information on their own systems under their own security programs. We use reasonable administrative and technical safeguards, including access controls and two-factor authentication on our accounts, but no system is perfectly secure and we cannot guarantee against unauthorized access.

If we learn of a breach affecting your personal information, we will notify you as required by law.

7. How long we keep it

While a subscription is active, we keep submissions and Recipient information for up to 12 months from the date they were submitted, then delete them. When a subscription is cancelled, we delete all submissions, Recipient information, and Contributor information within 30 days after the cancellation takes effect. Because of this, we cannot reprint issues or restore content after that point.

We keep billing and transaction records for as long as tax and accounting rules require, and we may keep information we need to resolve a dispute or comply with law. You can ask us to delete sooner at any time (see Section 8).

8. Your choices and rights

Anyone covered by this policy can:

• Access a copy of the information we hold about them.
• Correct it.
• Delete it. Deleting a Contributor's content removes it from future issues; we cannot recall issues already printed.
• Withdraw as a Contributor at any time.
• Ask questions about how their information is used.

Email support@paper-route.com. We will respond within 30 days and may ask you to verify your identity. If you are a Recipient or the legal representative of a Recipient, you can exercise these rights for the Recipient.

Residents of California, Colorado, Connecticut, Virginia, Oregon, Texas, Washington, and other states with consumer privacy laws may have additional rights. Because we do not sell personal information or share it for targeted advertising, there is nothing to opt out of on that front, but the access, correction, and deletion rights above are available to everyone regardless of where they live. We do not respond to browser "Do Not Track" signals because we do not track visitors across sites.

9. Children

Our website and service are for adults. We do not knowingly collect personal information directly from children under 13. Photos and stories about children are submitted by adult Contributors, who confirm that they are the parent or guardian or have the parent's or guardian's permission. If you believe a child has submitted information to us directly, contact us and we will delete it.

10. Future features: photo libraries and social media

We do not currently access anyone's phone, photo library, or social media accounts. We may offer optional features in the future that let a Contributor connect these sources to make contributing easier. If we do, we will ask for your separate, explicit permission before accessing anything, tell you exactly what we will access and why, use it only to produce the Recipient's issues, and let you disconnect at any time. We will update this policy before launching any such feature.

11. Where your information is processed

We are based in the United States and process information here. If you contribute from outside the United States, your information will be transferred to and processed in the United States.

12. Changes to this policy

We may update this policy. If a change is material, we will email Subscribers and active Contributors before it takes effect and update the date at the top. Continued use of the service after the effective date means you accept the change.

13. Contact

ThePaperRoute, Inc. 1522 Western Ave, Ste 24320 Seattle, WA 98101 hello@paper-route.com for general inquiries support@paper-route.com for privacy requests, account, and content questions