This policy explains what Holiday Spirit collects, why, who it goes to, and how to get rid of it. It is written to be read, not survived.
Holiday Spirit is operated by Krampus, LLC, a Pennsylvania limited liability company. We are the controller of the personal information described here.
Krampus, LLCPrivacy contact: support@krampus.studio
| What | Why | Kept |
|---|---|---|
| Account details Email address, display name, avatar, an optional bio, and your holiday and notification preferences | To create your account, attribute your submissions, and let you sign back in | Until you delete your account |
| Year of birth The year only — never a full date of birth | To check you meet the minimum age of 13. Asked once, when you first open the app | Until you delete your account. It cannot be changed once set |
| Holiday display submissions The pin you place, a description, and photographs you choose to submit. The street address is worked out from the pin by the phone’s own map service, not stored from anything you type. If you search for an address to place the pin, only the pin is kept | To show the display to other users on the map | Retained after account deletion in anonymized form — see below |
| Your device location Approximate and precise, while the app is open on your phone or car screen, or a lights drive is running | To center the map on you and find displays near you. Sent to our server as part of the search request, and to Google as the area of map on your screen and, if you ask for a tour from where you are, as the start of the route — see who your information goes to | Not stored by us. Not written to any database table. The exceptions are a spot you choose to save during a lights drive, described below, a tour route you start from where you are, cached for ten minutes, and the record of each Street View lookup, described below |
| Lights-drive spots Your position, heading, speed and the time at the moment you tap Spot during a drive, with a few seconds of trail either side | To hold the place for you until you turn it into a display listing. A spot is private to you; no other user can see it | Until you delete your account. Finishing or dismissing a spot takes it off your list but does not delete it |
| Check-ins and visits Which displays you confirmed or checked in at, and when, plus any note you add to a Halloween candy check-in | To count your contributions and show your activity to other users. Because a check-in is you, at a street address, at a time, treat it as a record of where you have been | Confirmations and visits are destroyed when you delete your account, not anonymized. Halloween candy check-ins are kept without your name, like reviews |
| Purchase records Which Lantern pack you bought, when, and the order identifier and purchase token Google Play gives us | To give you the Lanterns and Lightkeeper days you paid for, make sure one purchase is never granted twice, and handle support and refund queries | Seven years from the purchase, then deleted. If you delete your account sooner, the record stays for the rest of that time without your name, as a business record for tax and accounting |
| Lanterns you send The display you sent to, the phrase you picked, how many, and when | To show your thanks on that display’s Lantern Wall, where other users see your display name and the phrase, and to make the display glow on the map | Kept on the display. If you delete your account, they stay without your name |
| The display you mark as yours If you tap This is my display, which display you marked | So that Lanterns other people send there count toward your titles. No other user can see which display you marked — only that someone has | Until you release it or delete your account |
| Reports and blocks When you report something: what you reported, the reason you chose, any note you add, and when. When you block someone: who, and when | So we can review reports and act on them, and so the people you block stay out of your app. Only we can read reports, and the person you reported is never told who reported them. Only you can see your blocks | A report you filed stays after you delete your account, without your name. Reports about you, and blocks in either direction, are deleted with your account. Photographs moved to private storage during a review are deleted 90 days later, unless a report on them is still open |
We want to be specific about this, because it is unusual:
Holiday Spirit sells Lantern packs. A Lantern is a small token of thanks you send to a holiday display: it appears on that display’s Lantern Wall and makes the display glow a little warmer on the map. Each pack also includes some days of Lightkeeper, a supporter status shown as a title while it lasts. Lanterns can also be earned by adding and confirming displays. Buying is optional, and nothing about finding or submitting displays is behind a payment.
Payments are handled entirely by Google Play. Your card details go to Google, not to us. What we receive is a purchase token and an order identifier telling us the transaction succeeded and which pack to grant. We keep that record for seven years from the purchase, so the same purchase can never be granted twice and so we can answer support and refund questions. After that we delete it, keeping only a one-way fingerprint of the order identifier — no name, no product, no date — so that the same order is never granted again.
Refunds are handled under Google Play’s refund policy. Contact us at support@krampus.studio and we will help, but the refund itself is issued by Google.
Lanterns have no monetary value outside the app. They cannot be exchanged for money, transferred to another account, or recovered after account deletion. You cannot send Lanterns to a display you keep or own.
Please read this before you submit a photo. Photographs you submit are stored in a publicly accessible location. Anyone who has the image link can view the photograph without signing in to Holiday Spirit, including people who do not use the app. Image links are not indexed by us, but they are not secret.
Do not submit a photograph you would not be comfortable being seen publicly, and do not submit photographs of people without their agreement.
We remove the hidden metadata from your photographs before storing them. A photo taken on a phone normally carries embedded information the picture itself does not show — commonly the exact GPS coordinates where it was taken, along with the device model and timestamps. Because these images are publicly reachable, that information would otherwise be readable by anyone holding the link. We strip it before upload. The picture is not altered: the image data itself is copied across untouched, so nothing about how the photograph looks changes.
We also went back and removed this information from every photograph that had already been uploaded before we started doing it.
If you upload photos to add a display, we read the location tag in those photos, and the date each was taken, on your device to suggest where the display is and to group photos of the same place. Those tags, and all other photo metadata, are removed before the photo is uploaded. We read them only for photos you pick through Upload a photo; the camera, and the older gallery button, never ask for them.
Photos you have picked but not yet finished submitting stay on your device only, in the app’s private storage, until you finish or discard them. The photos themselves are not sent to us until you submit a display. When you open a group to place it, its suggested pin may be used to look for a Street View panorama, as described under who your information goes to.
You can arm a lights drive before setting off. While it is armed, Holiday Spirit keeps a notification on screen and reads your position once a second, holding only the last ten seconds in memory. Nothing from the drive leaves your phone unless you tap Spot. Then your position at that moment, with a few seconds of trail either side, is saved to your account as a private spot for you to finish into a listing later. The drive ends when you stop it, after ten minutes without moving faster than walking pace, ten minutes after you leave the vehicle, or if Android shuts the service down.
Drives can also start on their own. How that works, and what the app is told in order to do it, is set out under activity detection on Android and Android Auto.
The first time you start a lights drive by hand, the app asks whether drives should start on their own. If you say yes, Android asks for its physical activity permission, which Android calls ACTIVITY_RECOGNITION. Holiday Spirit is not a health or fitness app. Starting and ending lights drives is the only thing this permission is used for.
With the permission granted, the app registers with Android for two events: your phone has entered a vehicle, and your phone has left one. That is all it receives. No step counts, no exercise or workout data, no activity history, and no position. The app uses the two events only to start a lights drive in the weeks around a holiday and to end one after you leave the vehicle. Nothing from this feature is stored on our servers or shared with anyone. The events are handled on your phone and are not written to any database table.
You can turn automatic drives off in Settings, or withdraw the physical activity permission in Android’s settings, at any time. Lights drives still work without it: you start them yourself from the app or its launcher shortcut.
If you open Holiday Spirit on your car’s screen through Android Auto, it lists the displays near you. It uses your location the way the phone does: it sends your position to our server to find displays nearby, and nothing about the search is stored.
While Holiday Spirit is on your car screen, it checks your position about every 45 seconds and compares it, on your phone, with the displays it has already found. When you come within about 150 meters of one, it shows a notification on the car screen with the display’s name and a Check in button. You get at most one per display each time you connect, and no more than one every five minutes. To keep the list current, your position is sent to our server about every ten minutes as the same search. It is not stored. The checks stop when you disconnect from the car.
Checking in from the car, from that notification or from a display’s screen, records that you confirmed the display, the same as a confirmation on the phone. It is kept and deleted as set out under check-ins and visits above.
Navigate hands the display’s location and name to the navigation app your car uses, such as Google Maps or Waze, which handles them under its own privacy policy. We are not told which app you use or where you go.
Opening Holiday Spirit on Android Auto in the weeks around a holiday starts a lights drive, even if you have not allowed automatic drives, because being on the car screen means you are driving. The drive shows its notification as usual and can be stopped from it, and it ends ten minutes after you disconnect from the car. Tapping Spot on the car screen saves a private spot exactly as it would on the phone.
So that the car screen works without signing in again, the app keeps a copy of your sign-in session in its private storage on your phone, where other apps cannot read it. It is replaced or removed as you sign in and out on the phone.
Holiday Spirit is about displays that people put up where they can be seen, and many are at private residences. If a display at your property has been listed, you have two options and neither requires you to become a regular user of the app.
Both require us to verify that the property is yours, and we do that by email and by hand. Write to support@krampus.studio from any address with the listing and the property address. We check what you tell us against what is already on the listing, and we may write back with a question or two that somebody at the address would be able to answer. What we do not do is put you through an identity check: no identity documents, no proof of purchase, no phone number. You never have to tell us why you want a listing gone — that part is your business, and we will not ask. We keep the correspondence only as long as it takes to settle the request, and we use it for nothing else.
No account is needed for either. We reply within 48 to 72 hours.
Marking a display as yours in the app is different. A signed-in user can tap This is my display on one display, so that Lanterns other people send there count toward their titles. It gives no control over the listing, and other users cannot see who marked a display — only that someone has. If the property is yours, the email route above still applies, and once we have verified it, nobody else can mark it.
We do not sell personal information, and Holiday Spirit carries no advertising. There is no ad network in the app, so no advertising identifier and no device profile leaves it.
Three companies process data for us, on our instructions and for no purpose of their own:
Google receives data from the app in four places as you use it, besides signing in with Google, covered below, and handles it under its own privacy policy, not on our instructions:
If you sign in with Google, Google tells us your name, email address and profile picture. That is all we ask for, and it happens only because you chose that button.
We may disclose information where legally required, or where necessary to investigate abuse, protect someone’s safety, or enforce our Terms.
You can delete your account from inside the app, or from krampus.studio/delete-account without reinstalling.
When you delete your account, we remove your account record and the identifiers linking you to your submissions. The display listings, photographs, reviews and Halloween candy check-ins you submitted remain in the app in anonymized form, because other users rely on them to find displays. Once anonymized they are no longer associated with you and we cannot re-link them to you.
That is the default rather than a requirement. If you want those removed as well, email support@krampus.studio from the address on the account and say so; the deletion flow has no option for it, so it happens only if you ask. What we remove and how long it takes is set out under deleting some of your data.
Account deletion happens immediately. It is a single operation, not a queued request: when it returns, your account record is gone and the identifiers linking you to your submissions have already been removed. There is no waiting period and no window in which it can be undone.
Our hosting provider keeps rolling daily snapshots of the database, retained for no more than seven days on our current plan. A copy of a deleted account record can therefore sit in a snapshot for up to a week before it ages out. Snapshots exist for disaster recovery and are never used to restore a deleted account. Photographs are held in separate file storage that database snapshots do not include.
You do not have to close the account to get rid of something, and if you are closing it you can ask for these to go at the same time. Comments, applause and follows you can remove yourself in the app, and they go immediately. Displays you submitted, their photographs, reviews you wrote, and Halloween candy check-ins have no in-app control yet, so those go by email and we handle them by hand.
The steps, what is removed, what is kept, and how long it takes are set out on deleting some of your data. You do not have to give a reason, and we reply within 48 to 72 hours.
Sometimes we invite people to try an early look at a game and tell us what they think. If you take part, we keep the email address we invited, your answers, and when you opened and sent them. We use them only to design our games. They are stored with Supabase, our database provider, and are not linked to a Holiday Spirit account.
To have your answers deleted, reply to the invitation or email support@krampus.studio.
Data is transmitted over encrypted connections and stored with our hosting provider under their access controls. No system is perfectly secure, and photographs you submit are deliberately public as described above.
Holiday Spirit is not intended for children. You must be 13 or older to create an account. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children. If you believe a child has created an account, email support@krampus.studio and we will remove it.
Depending on where you live, you may have rights to access, correct, delete, or obtain a copy of your personal information. Email support@krampus.studio and we will respond. We will not treat you differently for exercising these rights.
If we change this policy we will update the date at the top and, where the change is significant, tell you in the app before it takes effect.
support@krampus.studio · Krampus, LLC, 951 Viewmont Dr # 1081, Dickson City, PA 18519, United States
This policy is governed by the laws of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, United States.