Privacy
We collect as little as we can. You don't need an account, we don't use tracking cookies, and we don't sell or share your details.
Who we are
The Curious Shelf is run by Gary West, who is responsible for your information under UK data protection law. Contact: [email protected].
Your answers in the gift finder
When you ask for gift ideas, your answers are sent to Anthropic, the company that makes the Claude AI model, so it can suggest products. Please don't include anyone's name, address, or other personal details in the free-text boxes. Anthropic acts on our behalf, deletes these inputs and outputs within 30 days, and doesn't use them to train its models. We don't keep a copy of your answers.
Your shortlist and your people
Your shortlist, the people you save, and a list of the pieces you've recently been shown are stored only in your own browser, on your device. They never reach us. You can delete them at any time by clearing this site's data in your browser settings.
Our website host
Our website runs on Cloudflare, which, like any web host, processes technical information such as your IP address to deliver pages and protect the site from attack. We don't use any advertising services.
When you click through to a shop, we count the click against that shop and month, so we can check the commission shops report to us. We store only that count: nothing about you, your device, or what you searched for.
To see how many people visit and which pages they use, we use Cloudflare Web Analytics. Cloudflare describes it as privacy-first: it doesn't use cookies or fingerprinting to follow you, and it gives us only totals, such as page views and the countries and browsers visits come from, never anything that identifies you.
When you email us
If you email us, we keep your message and email address only to reply, and for as long as we need them for that conversation.
Buying from our shops
When you follow a link to one of our shops, you leave our site. Your purchase is between you and that shop, and its own privacy policy applies. If the shop pays us commission, it may tell us the value and reference of the order, but not who you are.
Your rights
You have the right to ask what information we hold about you, to have it corrected or deleted, and to object to how we use it. Email us at [email protected]. If you're unhappy with our answer, you can complain to the Information Commissioner's Office at ico.org.uk.
Last updated: October 2026.