Privacy Policy

Effective date: 13 October 2026. If we change this policy, we will update this date.

Your privacy is our top concern. We work hard to earn and keep your trust, so we adhere to the following principles to protect your privacy.

Who we are

This website is run by CountingDownTo, PO Box 1299, Garibaldi Highlands, BC V0N 1T0, Canada. We are responsible for the personal information described in this policy. For any privacy question or request, email [email protected] or use our contact page at countingdownto.com/contact.

Information we may collect about you

We may collect nonpublic personal information about you only in connection with providing you with the services that you request or in connection with your visiting our website. The types of nonpublic personal information we collect vary according to the services that we perform for you. This information may include:

Information we receive from you (such as your name, address, business information, financial, or payment information).
Information about your relationship and past history with us (such as the types of services we provide to you, your invoice balances, and payment history).
Information that we receive, with your authorization, from third parties.
Technical information your browser sends when you visit, such as your IP address, browser type and the pages you view.

If you ask for a reminder about a countdown, we store your email address to send up to three reminders about that countdown, and anything else only if you tick the box asking for it.

Why we use your information

We use your information for the purposes below. For visitors in the European Union and the United Kingdom, the legal basis for each is shown in brackets.

To run your account and countdowns, take payments, and send the emails you ask for, such as sign-in links and countdown reminders (performance of our contract with you).
To keep the service secure, prevent abuse and fraud, fix errors, and run and improve the service (our legitimate interests in a secure, reliable service).
To send customers occasional emails about our service, which you can unsubscribe from at any time (our legitimate interests in telling customers about our service).
To measure how our website is used with analytics cookies (our legitimate interests in understanding how our website is used so we can improve it). You can block analytics cookies in your browser settings, or opt out of Google Analytics entirely with the Google Analytics opt-out browser add-on (tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout).
To keep the records we must keep for tax, accounting and other legal reasons (legal obligation).

How we handle your information

We do not disclose any nonpublic, personal information about you that we have collected, except to the service providers described below, as authorized by you, or as required by law, to anyone outside CountingDownTo.
Any sensitive information that you provide will be secured with reasonable industry standard protocols and technology.
We maintain physical and procedural safeguards to protect the nonpublic personal information that we collect about you.
Any information you may disclose on a website visited from a link from our website is not covered by this privacy policy, and we recommend you use discretion in disclosing information.
We use cookies to run our website, for example to keep you signed in, and to measure how it is used.

Service providers

We use other companies to run parts of our service. Each receives only the information it needs for that work:

Hosting, database, file storage, content delivery and log providers process the information our website handles, including IP addresses and browser details. Our error monitoring records technical details about errors, such as the page and browser involved.
Payment processors (Stripe, and PayPal for older subscriptions) receive your payment details directly from you and also use them under their own privacy policies, for example to prevent fraud. We do not receive your full card number.
Our email provider receives your email address and the content of the emails we send you. For some emails it records whether the email was opened or a link was clicked.
Messages you send us through Help or our contact form, and your email address, are stored on our own systems, and our replies are sent through our email provider. If you chat with our assistant, your messages are also sent to our AI provider so it can answer.
We use Google Analytics, which uses cookies and your IP address to measure how visitors use our website. You can opt out with the Google Analytics opt-out browser add-on (tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout). More information: How Google uses information from sites or apps that use our services
Some pages load fonts, maps, images or videos directly from other companies, such as Google Fonts, Google Maps, YouTube and Pexels. Your browser sends them your IP address and browser details when it loads that content.

Our servers and most of these providers are in the United States, so your information is stored and processed there and in other countries where they operate, which may be outside your own country.

How long we keep information

We keep account, countdown and order information while your account is active, and after that for as long as we need it for legal, tax and accounting purposes.
The records that keep a per-visitor countdown running (see Countdown widget cookies below) are deleted about 90 days after that countdown ends.
The cookie that keeps you signed in lasts up to 14 days.

Your rights

You can ask for a copy of your personal information, ask us to correct or delete it, and object to or ask us to limit how we use it. To make a request, email [email protected], from the address on your account if you have one. We will respond within the time the law requires.

If you are in the European Union or the United Kingdom, you can also complain to your local data protection authority.

Do Not Track

Our website does not respond to Do Not Track signals sent by browsers.

Countdown widget cookies

Our countdown widgets can run in a “per‑visitor” (evergreen) mode, where each visitor’s countdown begins on their first view and continues from where it left off on later visits. To remember a visitor’s countdown without restarting it, the widget stores a single random identifier — it contains no name, email, or other personal information, and is used only to keep that visitor’s countdown consistent. It is never used for advertising or shared with third parties.

vid — set by our countdown when it is shown in an iframe. It is a partitioned cookie (CHIPS): the browser keeps a separate copy for each website the countdown appears on, so it cannot be used to track a visitor across different sites. Lasts up to ~180 days.
cdt_vid — set on the website where a countdown is embedded, but only when the site owner uses the optional continuity snippet included in the embed code. It is a first‑party cookie (SameSite=Lax) that lets a visitor’s countdown carry over when they switch networks or browsers, including on Safari. Lasts up to ~180 days (Safari limits it to about 7 days).

When a countdown is embedded on someone else’s website, that website’s operator is the data controller for its visitors and is responsible for disclosing these cookies, and the fact that our countdowns may load fonts from Google Fonts, in their own cookie or privacy notice; we act only as their processor.

Honest Deadlines

Honest Deadlines lets a Pro customer give each of their email subscribers a personal deadline. For this we process the subscriber's information on the customer's behalf: the customer is the data controller, and we act only as their processor, under the processor terms in our terms of use.

We receive a subscriber's email address when the customer's email platform tells us that they have subscribed, or when they click the customer's tracking link. We store a one-way keyed hash of the address, not the address itself, together with the time their deadline started and the time it ends.
For the 10 most recent notifications from the customer's email platform on each campaign, we keep a masked address (for example b***@example.com) so the customer can check that their setup works.
The tracking link and the countdown image in the customer's emails contain the subscriber's email address. When the subscriber clicks the link or their email app loads the image, the address passes through our content delivery and hosting providers. We filter subscriber addresses out of our request logs and error reports.
The cookie _hd_lead is set when a subscriber clicks the tracking link. It holds a signed reference to their deadline record, not their email address, so that our countdown page can show them their own deadline when they return. It is sent only to our website and lasts for the length of the campaign plus 7 days.
We delete each deadline record about 90 days after its deadline has passed. When a customer's account is deleted, their campaigns, deadline records and masked addresses are deleted with it.

A customer who uses Honest Deadlines must tell their subscribers, in their own privacy notice, that they use CountingDownTo for personal deadlines, that subscribers' email addresses are sent to us in links, images and notifications from their email platform, and that we set the cookie above. Subscribers who want to use their privacy rights should contact the customer who sent them the email; we will help the customer respond.