Privacy and the ledger

Hoodie vs Sweats is run from New York. This page states what is recorded, what is published, what stays on the record permanently, and how to have a name taken off the ledger. Read it with the returns policy, which covers the sale itself.

Every purchase creates one trade record: the trade number, the side, the fill price, and the time. Trade records are permanent business records. They are the market itself — the numbers are sequential and permanent, prices are derived from them, and the same numbers are printed on garments that already exist. Trade records are never deleted and never renumbered.

A trade record on its own carries no personal information. It says that trade #0062 was a hoodie at $98 at a stated time. It does not say who made it.

A name is the one part of the ledger that is yours to decide, and it is separate from the trade record in every way:

• Optional. A purchase never requires a name. The ledger shows the bare trade number unless you choose otherwise.
• Consent-based, and only after purchase. A name can be attached only from your own receipt page, using a one-time link issued to you after the sale. No name is ever attached to the ledger before payment. There is no name field on the buy form in either phase — see The launch ramp below for the one-trade-per-side check, which reads what the payment page collects and never touches the ledger.
• 18 or older. Attaching a name requires confirming you are 18 or older, as does buying.
• Reviewed before publication. Every submitted name sits unpublished until a person approves it. Until then the ledger keeps showing the bare trade number. A name that is refused is never published.
• Withdrawable. Write to trades@hoodievssweats.com from the address on the order and the name comes off. Withdrawal blanks the name and keeps the trade record: the ledger goes back to the bare trade number.

Names are limited to 14 characters and are published exactly as approved. Because a name is public once approved, treat it as public: do not submit anything about yourself, or anyone else, that you would not want read by strangers.

Nothing here is sold to anyone under 18, and the checkout asks you to confirm your age. If we learn that a published name belongs to someone under 18, the name is removed on discovery, without waiting for a request. A parent or guardian can write to the address above and the name comes off. The trade record stays, as a business record of a sale that happened, with the name blanked.

Series 01 opens with a ramp: both sides start at $1 and the price doubles with every sale until the market opens. One trade per side is the rule for that phase, and the buy form asks for nothing extra to enforce it. During the ramp, as at every other time, buying is: pick a side, pick a size, pay. There is no email field, no name field and no ZIP field on this site, before payment or after it.

The rule is enforced in two places instead. Before payment, by the one signed cookie described below: a device that has already bought a side is refused that side. After payment, from what you give the payment page anyway — the email address, the shipping name and the postal code Stripe collects to take the payment and ship the order are read once, at the moment the sale completes, and converted to two irreversible sha256 digests: one from the email address, one from the first name, last name and postal prefix together. Only the digests are kept, next to the side and the trade number, so a second purchase on the same side can be recognised and reviewed by a person. The raw values are never written to that table and the columns will not accept them. The digests cannot be read back into an email address or a name, they are used for nothing else, and they are never published: the ledger still shows a bare trade number.

A repeat that gets through is not unwound. The trade stands, the money stands, and the only consequence is a note for review. Nothing about that check ever appears on the ledger.

Being digests is not the same as being anonymous. A sha256 of an email address can be confirmed by anyone who already has that address and this table. Treat the table as what it is: a list of which addresses and names have bought, in a form that cannot be read but can be checked.

• Order information — the trade number, side, size, fill price, and the shipping address and contact email you give at checkout.
• Payment information — handled by Stripe, or by Shopify if you pay with Shop Pay. Not by us. See below.
• A ledger name — only if you submit one.
• An email address — only if you enter one for a series alert. It is used for that and nothing else, and it is deleted on request.
• Two hashes, during the launch ramp only — derived at the moment a sale completes from what the payment page collected, as described above. No email address, name or postal code is stored in that table, and the columns will not accept one.
• One cookie — a signed, opaque identifier the server sets to enforce the per-side purchase limit. During the ramp it also records, against that identifier, which sides it has bought. It records nothing about your device or browser: no fingerprinting, no advertising identifiers, no cross-site tracking.
• Ordinary server logs — including IP addresses, kept short-term for security and abuse control.

There are no advertising cookies, no third-party trackers, and no profiles built about visitors. Nothing collected here is sold.

Payments are processed by Stripe, acting as our payment processor. Card details are entered on Stripe's systems and are never received or stored by us; we see the outcome of a payment, the amounts, and what Stripe needs us to have to fulfil and account for the order. Stripe handles that data under its own privacy policy and its terms as a processor. Chargebacks and refunds are handled through Stripe.

Shop Pay is offered as a second way to pay. If you use it, the payment is processed by Shopify, acting as our payment processor for that transaction. Your card details are entered in Shopify's window and are never received or stored by us; we see the outcome of the payment, the amounts, and the shipping address and contact details needed to fulfil the order. If you already have a Shop Pay account, Shopify recognises you and handles that account under its own privacy policy, separately from us. We do not have a Shopify storefront and no catalogue or browsing data is sent to Shopify. Choosing the card checkout instead means Shopify is not involved at all.

Each garment is made to order. The name and address on the order, and the trade number, side and fill price that are printed on the garment, are passed to the print and fulfilment partner and the carrier for that purpose only.

Write to trades@hoodievssweats.com. Requests are answered within 30 days.

• A published or pending ledger name is removed on request. This is the request most people mean, and it is always honoured.
• A series-alert email address is deleted on request.
• Access, correction and deletion requests for other information are handled to the extent the law requires, and we will tell you plainly what we have and what we are keeping.
• Order and transaction records are retained as business records, including for tax, accounting, fraud and dispute purposes, for as long as the law requires us to keep them. Where a deletion request covers records we are required to retain, we say so, say why, and remove what is not required — starting with the name.

We maintain reasonable administrative, technical and physical safeguards for private information, consistent with the New York SHIELD Act: access to order data is limited to the people who need it, credentials are held as secrets and rotated, payment data stays with Stripe or Shopify, and unpublished names are not exposed publicly. If a security incident affecting private information occurs, affected people are notified as New York law requires.

Security questions and reports go to trades@hoodievssweats.com, which reaches the operator directly.

If this policy changes, the date at the top changes with it. The permanence of trade records and the removability of names are not subject to change: a trade record stays, and a name comes off on request.

Hoodie vs Sweats, New York. trades@hoodievssweats.com.