Privacy

The data controller is Baby Names Arena Ltd, a company registered in England and Wales under number 17421342, at 29 Clay Lane, Hale, Altrincham, WA15 8PJ.

For anything on this page, write to privacy@babynamesarena.com.

Voting needs no account and never will. Used that way, the site never learns your name, your email address, your age, or anything about your pregnancy, your family or your plans — there is no way to tell it who you are, and no way for it to ask.

An account exists for one purpose: to remember the names you pick, so you can come back to them. It is optional.

We store, and only store:

• your email address
• which names you picked, and when

There is no password. Signing in means clicking a one-time link we email you, which stops working after fifteen minutes and cannot be used twice. We hold no password to lose, and you have none to reuse somewhere else.

We never ask for a due date, a child's name, a partner, an address or an age. We are aware that a list of baby names attached to an email address suggests something private about the person it belongs to. That is exactly why the list stays where it is: it is never sold, never shared, never used to target advertising, and no third party is given access to it.

When you sign in, votes already cast from that browser that day are attached to your account, so the list is not empty when you arrive. Older votes are not, and cannot be — the code that groups anonymous votes changes every day by design.

Deleting your account deletes your list. Write to us and it goes, along with your email address and every sign-in session. The votes themselves stay in the rankings with nothing attached to say who cast them — the same state as every anonymous vote beside them. We would rather not quietly rewrite what people chose; removing you from the data is erasure, un-saying what you said is something else.

When you pick one name over another, four things are written down:

• which name won and which lost
• how long you took to decide, in milliseconds
• a one-off identifier for that particular matchup, so one vote cannot be counted twice
• a short code standing in for “whoever cast this” — described next

Your IP address is not stored. The short code is a one-way hash built from your IP address, your browser's user-agent string and the current date, mixed with a secret key held on the server. It cannot be turned back into an IP address.

Because the date is part of it, the code changes every 24 hours. The same person visiting tomorrow produces a different code, so it cannot follow you between days or be used to build a picture of you. It exists to stop one person voting thousands of times and to spot automated ballot-stuffing, which is the only thing that could wreck the rankings.

We describe this as pseudonymous rather than anonymous, because that is what it is: with the server's secret key it would be possible to check whether a particular IP address voted on a particular day. It is treated as personal data accordingly.

The short code is erased after 30 days, automatically, by a job that runs every night. After that the vote remains — which name beat which, and when — with nothing attached that relates to a person.

30 days is longer than the code stays meaningful, since it already stops matching anything after a day. The margin exists so a sudden burst of suspicious voting can still be investigated.

We use Vercel Web Analytics to see how many people visit, which pages they read, and roughly where they came from. Without it we would be working blind.

It records, for each page view:

• which page, and when
• the site that linked you here, if any
• country, region and city — not a precise location
• browser, operating system, and whether you are on a phone, tablet or computer

It sets no cookie. Visits are grouped using a short code derived from the request, discarded after 24 hours — the same approach used for votes, and for the same reason: it distinguishes one visit from another without being able to follow you. Your IP address is not stored, nothing is kept that could identify you, and nothing follows you to any other website.

We chose it over Google Analytics deliberately. Google Analytics would have meant cookies, which would have meant asking every visitor to accept them before the page worked properly. That is a poor trade for numbers we do not particularly need.

One cookie, and only if you sign in. It is what keeps you signed in, it contains nothing but a random value, and it is set at the moment you use a sign-in link — never before. Signing out deletes it.

And the advertising cookies. Pages that carry advertising load Google AdSense, which sets cookies of its own to measure whether an ad was seen and to limit how often the same one is repeated. Those are Google's cookies rather than ours, and they only load once you have made a choice in the banner.

That banner is why you were asked to accept something. You can change your answer at any time from the link in the footer, and refusing does not take anything away — every page, every name and every vote works the same either way.

Some pages carry advertising from Google AdSense. It is what pays for the database, the domain and the time. Ads are labelled, and they appear only on pages with something to read on them — never on the voting screen, and never on a name page that has nothing to say beyond the spelling.

We do not give Google anything about you. It sees the page you are on and whatever your browser sends it, the same as any site running ads. What it does with that is governed by its own policies, not ours, which is precisely why you are asked first.

Nothing you do here is passed to an advertiser. Not your email address, not the names you picked, not a single vote. Those never leave this site, and a list of baby names attached to an address is not something we would sell at any price.

For the vote record, including the short code: legitimate interests. A site whose entire content is built from votes has to be able to defend those votes from being manipulated, and there is no less intrusive way to do it than a rotating, irreversible code. We have weighed that against the intrusion, which we judge to be very small: nothing identifying is stored, nothing follows you between visits, and no profile is built.

For advertising: consent. That is the one thing on this page we cannot do without asking, which is what the banner is for, and why refusing it changes nothing else about the site.

For visitor counts: legitimate interests as well. Knowing whether anyone is reading a page is a normal thing for a site to want, and the version of it we chose is close to the least intrusive one available — aggregate figures, no cookie, no identifier lasting beyond a day, and nothing shared with an advertising business.

For accounts: performance of a contract. You asked us to remember the names you pick; holding your email address and that list is how we do it. Stop wanting it and the basis goes with it — which is why deletion is on request and without argument.

Nobody. The data is not sold, shared, or passed to any third party for any purpose, and none of it is used for advertising. Two suppliers necessarily hold it in order to run the site: Vercel, which serves the pages and provides the visitor counts described above, Neon, which hosts the database, and Resend, which delivers sign-in emails and therefore handles your email address in order to send them. All three act on our instructions only. The database is hosted in the European Union.

Under UK GDPR you can ask what is held about you, ask for it to be corrected or erased, object to it being processed, and ask for a copy.

If you have an account, all of that is straightforward: we know which data is yours because it is attached to your email address, and we can hand it over or delete it on request.

Without an account there is a limit worth being straight about: because we store no identifier that lasts beyond a day, and never store your IP address, we usually cannot find your votes even if you ask us to. That is a consequence of collecting so little, not an excuse for refusing. If you can tell us the day and approximate time you voted we will do what we can.

You can complain to the Information Commissioner's Office at ico.org.uk at any time.

The names on this site come from official statistical publications: the US Social Security Administration and the UK Office for National Statistics. They are aggregate counts of how many babies received each name. No individual is identified or identifiable, and no page here is about a person.

Name meanings and origins were generated by a language model and are not authoritative. Where no established etymology could be found, the site says so rather than inventing one. See how it works.

This page previously promised that it would be rewritten before any analytics were added, rather than after. Visitor counts were added in August 2026 and this page was updated in the same change — see “Counting visits” above. Nothing was added that requires your consent, because nothing added uses cookies.

The same promise still stands for anything that comes next. If advertising is ever added, or anything that does need consent, this page will say so first and you will be asked.