Privacy Policy

Name Change Works is operated by Archelaus LLC, a New York limited liability company. This policy explains what we collect, why, how long we keep it, and how to make us delete it.

What we collect

Almost all of it is what a form asks for, minus one thing. Every item in the list below is there because a box on a document you are buying asks for it, and none of it is collected for any other purpose. After the list is a short account of the technical records that running a website produces.

For Form SS-5: your name before and after the change, any other names you have used, your date and place of birth, your parents’ names, your citizenship status, your mailing address, and a daytime telephone number. The form also asks your sex, your ethnicity and your race; those three are voluntary on the form and they are voluntary here, with a “prefer not to say” answer that leaves the boxes empty.

For your state’s license or ID form, where your state publishes one: your height, weight, eye color and hair color; the license, permit or ID you currently hold and, in the states whose form prints it, its number and issuing state; and the questions that state’s own form asks — its credential history, its medical, organ-donor, veteran and voter questions, and, where a state asks in its own wording, race and ethnicity. Which of these you see depends entirely on which state you live in, and every one of them is a box on the form you will be handing across a counter.

For the passport forms, if you tell us you hold a passport: the name on it, the book or card number and its date of issue, its condition, which document you are applying for, your height, eye color and hair color, your occupation and employer or school, and — if you choose to give one — an emergency contact’s name, address, telephone number and relationship to you. The State Department’s forms ask for all of it.

For the checklist and the letters: the date of the event that changed your name and the county and state that issued your document, its reference number if you give us one, and the names of the organizations you ask us to write to — with, for each one and only if you choose, an account or policy reference, a mailing address, and a line of your own you want that letter to include.

For delivery: your email address, to send your package and to let you retrieve it later, and to send one reminder if you start checkout and don’t finish it. If you buy a printed package, the postal address you enter at Stripe’s checkout — we do not prefill it from anything you told us in the interview, and it is the only place we hold it.

Technical records. Running the service produces a few records that are not answers to a form. We keep a record of which interview step you reached, which question stopped a screen from continuing (the question’s name, never your answer), how far through your state’s questions you got, and which documents have been built. Those records are tied to your kit so that we can find where the service or an interview question is getting in the way. When you open one of the “not sure” explanations on the first screen, we count that it happened — the question it was and the situation you had picked, with no link to a kit, a session or a person, and never the answer itself, which is not saved until you give one. The first time a browser tab opens one of our public pages, we count that visit the same way: the page, the source, campaign and keyword labels in its address, and whether an ad click identifier was present. That count never holds the identifier itself, your IP address or your browser’s identifier, and it is stored apart from any kit. When you ask us to resend your link, and when we count one of those openings or visits, we store the IP address of that request as a keyed hash and never as the address itself, so that we can rate-limit the request without holding the address; those rows are deleted within two days and are kept apart from the count itself. And our hosting provider keeps the ordinary server logs any website has, for a short period.

When you arrive from a Google ad, we keep the click identifier Google put in the address, the campaign labels in that address, the page you landed on, and the IP address, browser identifier and country supplied with that first request. Those details are stored with your kit so a later purchase can be counted against the ad that brought you here.

We never ask for your Social Security number. No screen in the interview has a box for it, we never hold it, and it is never printed on anything we prepare. Every form that asks for one reaches you with that field blank, and your kit names each of those fields so you can write the digits in yourself.

We do not ask for and do not want copies of your marriage certificate, decree, court order, or identity documents. Nothing in the service uploads them.

How it is stored

Your interview answers are encrypted with AES-256-GCM before they are written to storage and are decrypted only at the moment a document is being generated for you. They are not stored in searchable columns or written to application logs. Your interview answers are never used for analytics; only the separate technical records described above are used to measure ads. Your email address is stored encrypted alongside a keyed hash used solely to look up your own package when you request a link.

We do not own the machines. Our application runs on a cloud hosting provider, Vercel, and our database and file storage are a managed Postgres provider, Supabase. Both are in the United States and both act only on our instructions.

We use Sentry for error monitoring. When the application fails, Sentry may receive a technical stack trace and the URL where the error happened. Credential and personal query values (such as email addresses and access tokens), and the token in any /kit/open/ link, are redacted before an error leaves the application. Sentry does not receive interview answers, request bodies, cookies, email addresses, delivery addresses, IP addresses, browser identifiers, or country headers from us. We keep those error reports for no more than 90 days.

How long we keep it

Interview answers are destroyed one year after your package is first delivered, by a scheduled job that runs automatically. Rebuilding your documents after you change an answer does not restart that year. The year matches how long we will re-prepare a form for you if an agency sends it back: doing that means reading the answers you gave us, so they have to outlast the offer. The delivery address for a printed package is encrypted the same way and destroyed by the same job, and so is the address for a reprint ordered before then. If you order a reprint after your answers have been deleted, the address you give for it is deleted once that reprint has been sent to the printer or cancelled.

Your finished documents are kept after your answers are deleted, so that you can download them again whenever you need to. Because they are filled in from your answers, they still contain what is printed on them: your name, your date of birth, your address, your parents’ names, and any license, passport or account numbers you entered. They stay in your kit until you ask us to delete them, as described under “Your rights” below. Your email address is kept for as long as the kit exists, because it is how you reach it. A record that a purchase occurred — amount, date, tier — is retained for accounting and tax purposes as required by law.

If you leave a kit unfinished, all of the Google-ad details stored with it are deleted after 90 days. If you purchase, the scheduled retention job deletes those details with your interview answers. Paid orders keep only the accounting record described above.

Who else sees it

Payment card details are handled by Stripe and never reach our systems. Stripe’s checkout page sets its own cookies, under Stripe’s privacy policy rather than ours. Email delivery is performed by an email-delivery provider, which receives your address and the contents of the message sent to you.

The letters are drafted with a language model operated by Anthropic. It receives the facts needed to write those letters: your former and new legal names, the city and state you live in, and the kind of document that changed your name (for example, a marriage certificate). For each organization you ask us to write to, it also receives the organization’s name, what kind of organization it is (a bank, an insurer, your employer and so on), the account or policy reference you gave for it if you gave one, and an internal identifier that means nothing outside our service. It does not receive your date of birth, your street address, your parents’ names or the date of your name change, and it never receives a Social Security number, because we do not have one. The line you write yourself for a particular letter is printed exactly as you typed it and is never sent to the model at all. Under our agreement with Anthropic, what we send is not used to train its models, and it is deleted from Anthropic’s systems within 30 days.

When you type your street address in the interview, what you type is sent from your browser to Google’s Places service, which suggests matching addresses; picking one fills in the rest of the address for you. Google receives that text, along with the IP address and browser details any web request carries, under Google’s own privacy policy. Nothing else from your interview is sent to Google this way.

Printed packages are not currently offered for new purchase. Where you have already bought one, this paragraph continues to apply. If you buy a package that includes a printed copy, a third-party print-and-mail provider receives the delivery address you gave at checkout and the documents themselves, in order to print and mail them. Those documents contain what is on your forms — your name, date of birth, address, and your parents’ names. They do not contain a Social Security number, on the printed copy or on the files you download, because we never collected one. Nothing is printed or mailed unless you bought a printed package.

We send no newsletters or promotions. The messages you will get from us are your package, the link to it when you ask for one, and — if you chose to look your documents over before the envelope goes out — a reminder that it is still waiting on you. If you start checkout and don’t finish it, we send one email with a link back to it, once per checkout. That email has an unsubscribe link; using it stops every future checkout reminder to your address and does not affect email about a kit you have bought.

After a purchase, we send Google Ads the click identifier, a one-way SHA-256 hash of the contact email you gave us in the interview, the IP address and browser identifier, an opaque order reference, and the amount paid. This lets Google count the sale against the ad. We never send Google your name, your interview answers, or your documents. For visitors in the EEA, the United Kingdom or Switzerland — and visitors whose country we cannot determine — we omit the hashed email and IP address.

We honor Global Privacy Control when your browser sends it. If your browser sends that signal when you continue to payment, we treat it as a request to opt out of sharing for advertising: we record it with that payment and never report the purchase to Google Ads, so none of the details above are sent. There are no ad tags on this site for it to switch off. Everything else, including the service itself and our own records of how the site is used, works the same.

We do not sell personal information. Apart from the Google ad measurement described above, we do not share it for advertising.

Your rights

You can correct an answer yourself at any time while we still hold it: your interview stays open after you buy, and changing an answer there rebuilds the documents that use it. You may also ask us at any time to delete your interview answers before that year is up, to send you a copy of what we hold, or to correct it for you. Deletion covers both halves — the answers you gave and the documents we rendered from them — and deleting the documents ends your ability to download them again, so we say so plainly when we confirm what we have done. Email support@namechangeworks.com from the address you used and we will act within 30 days. Depending on where you live you may have additional rights under state law, including the California Consumer Privacy Act; we honor those rights for all customers regardless of residence.

Children

The service is for adults. We do not knowingly collect information about anyone under 18, and we do not prepare documents for a minor’s name change. If we learn that we hold information about a child, we delete it.

If there is a breach

If a breach affects your private information and you live in New York, we will notify you as New York General Business Law § 899-aa (the SHIELD Act) requires — in the most expedient time possible and without unreasonable delay, and no later than 30 days after the breach is discovered, unless a law-enforcement agency determines that notice would impede a criminal investigation. Wherever you live, we will also notify you as other state and federal breach-notification law requires.

Cookies

We set one cookie. It holds a random session identifier so your answers can be saved as you work and retrieved when you come back. It is not used for advertising and is not shared. There are no third-party tracking cookies on this site. Stripe’s checkout runs on Stripe’s own pages and sets its own cookies there, under Stripe’s privacy policy.

Contact

Archelaus LLC, a New York limited liability company, doing business as Name Change Works — support@namechangeworks.com
348 4th Avenue #1040, Brooklyn, NY 11215, United States