Privacy, in plain words
Who can see your family’s stories.
We are asking you for the most private thing a family owns. You should be able to find out exactly what happens to it without reading a policy. This is that page — the policy is here and says the same things in the language lawyers need.
Who can read our archive?
Whoever has your link and your code, and nobody else. There is no public directory, no browsing other families, and no way to find an archive by searching for a surname. Every archive page tells search engines not to index it, so it will not turn up in Google.
Can you read it?
Technically yes — it is stored in our database and we can see it in order to run and repair the service. We do not read archives for any other reason, we do not use your family's stories to train anything, and we never sell or share them. Recordings and photos are stored privately and served only through an authorised route, not from a public URL somebody could guess.
What do you track?
Page counts, by route. We record that /f/[token] was viewed 412 times on a Tuesday — never which family, which person, or which archive. No IP addresses, no cross-site tracking, no advertising pixels, and nothing sold to anyone.
What if somebody gets our code?
Change it. The organiser can rotate the access code at any time from the archive, which locks out anyone who has the old one and asks the family to enter the new one once. Invitation links can also be revoked individually.
What if I stop paying?
Nothing happens, because there is nothing to stop paying. Collecting stories is free and stays free. The keepsake book is a single payment when you want it, not a subscription, and everything you have already written stays exactly where it is whether you buy it or not.
Can I get everything out?
Yes. There is an export in the archive's settings that gives you your family's stories and details in a portable file. It is yours; you should never need our permission or our software to keep reading it.
Can I delete it all?
Yes, and permanently. The organiser can delete an archive from Settings — every entry, every recording, every relative, for everyone who was in it. There is no undo and no backup we can restore from, which is the point. One honest caveat: uploaded photos and voice files can linger in our file storage for a short period after the archive itself is gone, until storage is swept. We are working on making that immediate.
What happens if StoryVault shuts down?
You would get notice and time to export before anything was switched off. That is a promise rather than a mechanism, and you should treat it as one — which is the honest reason the export above exists and is worth using now rather than later.
Nothing public, nothing sold
If anything on this page is ever not true of what the software does, that is a bug and we want to hear about it.
Start your family archive