Lights of Love

Yesterday, 27 October, I was thinking about my grandma. I’m 54, and I still miss her. I wanted to light a candle for her—a small light of love, for someone I still carry with me.

That simple wish became Lights of Love.

It’s a quiet place to remember someone who has died. Someone you lost recently, or someone you’ve missed for years. A family member, a friend, a beloved animal, or people whose lives you want to honour.

You don’t need an account or have to give your name. Just light a candle. If you want, leave a few words.

Your candle shines on the globe for 24 hours. A small light, shared with others who are remembering too.

Who runs this site

Lights of Love is a personal, non-commercial project. It is not a product or service of ClearQueue Technologies Inc.

ClearQueue Technologies Inc. operates the site and is responsible for it and for the information described on this page. When this page says “we” or “us”, that is who it means.

Lighting a candle

Every candle is for someone who has died. You can remember one person, a beloved animal, or a group of people, including those lost to war, disaster or illness.

You may add a dedication of up to 280 characters, in any language.

Your candle will light whatever you write. If your dedication cannot be shown publicly, your candle still shines; only your words stay private.

So the globe never feels empty, Lights of Love keeps some lights of its own burning. Tapping one shows “A light kept by Lights of Love”. They are never counted as visitors’ candles.

Making room for grief

You don’t have to find the perfect words. Sadness, anger at an illness or a loss, faith, doubt and your own pain all have a place here.

To protect this shared space, we keep a dedication private if it contains:

• Messages unrelated to someone who has died, including greetings, jokes, tests, general conversation, or quotes and poems that do not remember anyone.
• Messages for a living person, such as get-well wishes or a message to an ex. Mentioning living people within a memorial is welcome: “Mum, Lea and I miss you.”
• Attacks, insults, mockery or wishes of harm directed at a real person, living or dead, including someone blamed for a death.
• Contempt for a group of people because of their nationality, ethnicity, religion, gender, sexuality, disability or another shared characteristic.
• Sexual content.
• Advertising, promotion, sales, fundraising or spam.
• Political campaigning, support for a side in a conflict, or messages blaming governments or opposing sides. Remembering those who died in a war or disaster is welcome.
• Links, web addresses, email addresses, phone numbers, social media handles or street addresses.
• Threats of violence.

Please respect these boundaries. Instructions asking the automatic screening system to ignore or change its rules are treated as unrelated to remembrance.

How dedications are checked

Before your words appear: An automatic screen checks each dedication. Links, email addresses and phone numbers are never shown.

If a dedication cannot be published: Your candle still lights. If the screen finds a rule has been broken, is unsure, or is unavailable, your words stay private. You will see a short message explaining this.

If someone reports a dedication: Anyone can report words they find hurtful. A dedication is hidden automatically after reports from two different visitors. Each visitor’s report counts once.

Human review: A person reviews private and reported dedications once a day. They can publish, hide or delete them. Threats of violence trigger an immediate alert, but the alert does not contain the dedication itself.

To help prevent spam, each visitor can light about five candles in 24 hours and add one dedication every ten minutes. We also use Cloudflare Turnstile to help distinguish people from bots.

What we keep, and for how long

We keep as little information as we can and delete it on a fixed schedule.

Your candle and dedication

Your candle and dedication are stored while the candle shines. After 24 hours, they are permanently deleted, along with any reports about the candle. Deleted dedication text is overwritten in our database, rather than simply marked as deleted.

There is one exception: if your dedication is flagged for possibly breaking a rule, or hidden after visitor reports, a separate copy of the text and its region is kept for review for up to 30 days. We may delete it sooner after review.

Your IP address

We never store your IP address. To limit spam and count each visitor’s report once, we store a scrambled code derived from it, called a hash. This uses a secret key that is replaced every 24 hours. The old key is deleted, so older codes cannot be traced back to you or linked to one another. Rate-limit records are deleted after 24 hours.

The place you choose

We don’t look up where you are. You choose the place for your light yourself, by picking a city, region or country from a list.

If you pick a city and select Show only the approximate area, no city is stored, and your candle is placed and labelled by region only. Every candle’s position is blurred within its chosen city or region.

The December relight

If you select Also let my light shine again on December 13, we keep only your chosen region and the date your candle was first lit. These details are kept separately, without a link to your original candle or dedication, so a light can shine again for it on our yearly relight night.

Counts and backups

We count the candles and dedications lit in each region each day. For a daily summary to the person running the site, we also count candles per country and hour; those counts are deleted after 40 days. None of these totals contain information about individual visitors.

Our backups contain only the daily counts and the December relight list of regions and dates. They never contain dedication text.

Server logs

Our server logs record which page was requested, whether the request succeeded, and how long it took. They contain no IP addresses, locations or dedication text.

Cookies and your browser

We use no tracking cookies. Your browser temporarily stores the codes of candles you have lit so the site can show them to you. Each code is removed when its candle goes out. This information stays on your device and is not sent to anyone.

Asking us to remove a dedication

We do not collect visitor names or email addresses, and there are no accounts, so we usually cannot identify which candle belongs to you. If you want your dedication removed, contact us with its exact wording and roughly when you lit it.

The automatic screen

We use Claude, an AI model made by Anthropic, to help check dedications against our house rules.

Only your dedication text and our written rules are sent to Claude. We do not send your IP address, location or candle code.

Dedication text is not included in analytics, alerts or logs.

Anthropic deletes the text from its systems within 30 days. It keeps it longer only if its automated safety systems flag it as possible misuse of its service (then for up to two years), or where the law requires.

Other services we use

• Cloudflare provides the Turnstile check that helps tell people from bots.
• Anthropic provides the automatic dedication screening described above.

We do not sell data, display advertisements or share information with advertisers.

When grief feels overwhelming

If a dedication suggests you may be thinking about ending your life, the words stay private and the site shows support information for your chosen region.

If you are in immediate danger, call your local emergency number. You can find a free, confidential helpline in your country at findahelpline.com.

Lights of Love is a place for remembrance. It is not a counselling or emergency service, and nobody reads dedications in real time.

Contact

For questions, concerns or help removing a dedication: hello@lightsof.love

Credits

• Place names from GeoNames (geonames.org), CC BY 4.0.
• Country and region shapes from Natural Earth (public domain).
• Typefaces Playfair Display and Plus Jakarta Sans, under the SIL Open Font License.