Privacy

The short version

• No ads, and your family's information is never sold.
• No tracking: no analytics, no advertising cookies, no third-party scripts watching what you do.
• We don't use what you write, record or upload to train AI models.
• The person who wrote a story decides who reads it, and the person it is about can take it down.
• You can download everything, free, at any time.

What we hold

• About you: your name, email address and language, and anything you add to your own page, such as dates and places, a short biography, and, if you choose, a gender used only for wording.
• What you add: stories, notes, photographs, recordings and their transcripts, voice memos, voice capsules, interviews, family trees and the relationships in them, and the names you call people.
• About other people: most of an archive is about relatives, many of whom have no account and some of whom died long ago. We hold what you add about them because you added it. See "People who aren't on Handed Down" below.
• Photographs at the quality you upload them. A file from a camera or phone can carry hidden details, such as where and when the picture was taken and which device took it. We remove those details as the photograph arrives and keep only how it should be turned upright. HEIC and TIFF files, which we can't yet read, are kept as sent.
• Recordings: the sound of an ordinary recording is kept until its words are checked, and at most 30 days after the words exist. After that only the words remain. A voice memo and a voice capsule keep their sound, because keeping it is their purpose.
• Activity and security: a record of significant actions, such as who published, took down or flagged a story or recorded a death, so that consent and disputes can be checked later. Signing in stores a session with your IP address and browser, which ends after two hours without use. We don't keep IP addresses anywhere else.
• Support and printing: Stripe holds your card details and we never see them. We keep which kind of support you chose and whether it is active. For a book order we keep the shipping name, address and phone number, and pass them to the printer.
• If you ask to start a family, we keep the name, email address and note you send.
• If you answer a story invite without an account, we keep what you record or type as part of the story you were asked for.

Why we use it

For people in the EU and the UK, the law asks us to name the legal basis for each use:

• To provide the service you signed up for (our contract with you): keeping and showing your archive, transcribing recordings, building and printing books, and sending sign-in links and the emails you asked for.
• Our legitimate interest in keeping a family archive whole and trustworthy: holding what relatives add about each other, keeping the record of consent decisions and disputes, and keeping the service secure. We weigh this against the interests of the people concerned, which is why the veto, taking a story down and flagging exist.
• Your consent, for what is optional: a gender for wording, a voice capsule, and emailed story questions. You can withdraw it at any time; that doesn't undo what was done before.
• Legal obligations, such as payment and tax records.

Stories can mention health, religion or other sensitive matters. We process them only to keep and show them as their author chose, and never for anything else.

What we never do

• Sell or rent personal information, or share it for advertising.
• Show ads, or let anyone track you across other sites.
• Use your content to train AI models, ours or anyone else's.
• Read your archive for our own purposes. The people who run Handed Down can technically read what is stored (the promise explains why), and do so only to fix a problem you report, to answer a request the law requires us to answer, or to deal with abuse.

Who else handles it

We use a few companies to run the service. Each one receives only what its job needs.

• Amazon Web Services: our servers (in Oregon), backups (in Ohio), email delivery, and the machines that transcribe recordings and lay out books. Transcription runs in our own AWS account, not at an outside AI company.
• Stripe: payments for support and printing.
• Lulu: prints and ships books. Lulu receives the book files and the shipping address, and only when you order a book.

Inside Handed Down, a story is shown to the people its author allows. Members of a family can see the names, relationships and dates of the people in it.

We disclose information to authorities only when the law requires it, and tell the people concerned first unless we are forbidden to.

Where it is kept

Everything is stored in the United States. If you live in the EU or the UK, your information comes to us in the US when you use the service. Amazon Web Services and Stripe are certified under the EU–US Data Privacy Framework. Lulu receives a shipping address only because shipping your book needs one.

How long we keep it

• Your account and archive: until you or your family delete them.
• Something you delete disappears from the service at once. It stays in our database, out of sight, so that a mistake can be recovered. Ask us and we will erase it completely.
• Backups: database backups are kept for 90 days, and earlier versions of photographs and recordings for 365 days. Something erased leaves the backups as they expire.
• Recordings: as described above.
• Consent decisions (a veto, a story taken down, a death record) and the activity record: for as long as the archive exists, because they are what keeps a refused story out of print.
• Payment and tax records: for as long as tax law requires.

Your rights

Wherever you live, you can ask us to:

• give you a copy of what we hold about you (the archive download gives you most of it at once);
• correct what is wrong;
• erase your account and what you wrote;
• stop or limit a use you object to;
• let you take your information elsewhere (the archive uses open formats).

Write to privacy@handed-down.org. We answer within 30 days, and may ask you to confirm it is you, usually by writing from the email address on your account.

Erasure has one limit: a story somebody else wrote about you is their writing too. You can have it taken down so that it appears nowhere and prints in no book, and we keep the record of that refusal so that it stays down.

If you live in the EU or the UK and think we have got something wrong, you can complain to your data protection authority. In Spain that is the Agencia Española de Protección de Datos (aepd.es).

Some US states give their residents similar rights. We give them to everyone.

People who aren't on Handed Down

If you find yourself in a family's archive and have no account, write to privacy@handed-down.org and tell us where you saw it. We can correct it, take it down, or tell you what is held about you. We don't tell you who wrote it without their agreement.

People who have died

Data protection law mostly covers the living, but we treat the information of people who have died with the same care. In Spain, the relatives and heirs of someone who has died can ask to see, correct or delete that person's information, unless the person forbade it. Write to privacy@handed-down.org.

Children

Accounts are for people aged 13 and over, or 14 and over in Spain. Children appear in family archives when their relatives write about them, and a parent or guardian can ask us to correct or remove anything about their child.

Cookies and storage

We set only the cookies the site needs to work: one keeps you signed in and remembers the language you picked, and one protects forms from forgery. Your browser keeps writing you haven't sent yet on your own device, so that a closed tab doesn't lose it. There are no analytics or advertising cookies, so there is nothing to opt out of.

Security

HTTPS everywhere, encryption on disk and in backups, and sign-in by emailed link instead of a password. The promise explains what that does and doesn't protect. If a breach puts your information at risk, we will tell you, and the authorities the law requires us to tell, without delay.

Changes

If we change this page in a way that matters, we will email everyone with an account before the change takes effect. The date at the top says when it last changed.

BWA Tech LLC, Oregon, USA · privacy@handed-down.org