Privacy
A family tree holds other people’s information — including children and living relatives who never signed up for anything. Here is exactly what we do with it.
Your tree is private
Trees are invite-only. There is no public directory, no browsable index, and no way for a stranger to find your family by searching. Only people you invite can see anything.
Living people are shielded
Anyone marked as living has their dates and biography hidden from everyone outside the tree. This is the standard convention in genealogy, and it exists because a full name plus a date of birth is most of what someone needs to impersonate you.
Photographs arrive without their location
A phone records where a photograph was taken inside the file itself. Ours are resized in your browser before they are sent, and that removes the location, the camera details and the timestamps along with it. The picture that reaches us is the picture — nothing else rides along with it.
We don't sell it, and we don't train on it
Your family's information is not sold, rented, or shared with advertisers, and it is not used to train machine-learning models. It is stored so that you can use it, and for no other purpose.
You can take it with you
You can export your whole tree at any time, as GEDCOM — the format Ancestry, MyHeritage and every desktop program reads. If you delete a tree it disappears immediately and is permanently erased 30 days later, photographs included. Within those 30 days we can still put it back for you; email us.
Deleting your account
You can delete your account from your account settings. It removes your sign-in details, your email address, and your access to every tree, and it happens straight away — there is no review period. What it does not do is erase the people, stories and photographs you added to a shared tree. Those belong to the family as much as to you, and deleting them would take your aunt's grandmother off her own tree. Your name comes off them; the records stay. If you owned a tree other people use, you choose who takes over before you go. A tree nobody else is on is deleted with you.
Who else touches it
Running this involves a handful of companies, and you should know who they are: Vercel hosts the application (United States), Neon runs the database (United States), Cloudflare R2 stores the photographs, and Resend sends sign-in and invitation email. None of them are given your tree's contents for their own purposes.
How long we keep it
Deleted trees: 30 days, then permanently erased. Sign-in sessions: 30 days. Invitation links: 7 days, after which they stop working. The counters that stop someone using our sign-in email as a relay expire within a day, and they store a one-way hash rather than the address itself. Everything else we keep for as long as your account exists, because that is the point of it.
What we measure
Nothing, at the moment. There is no analytics service running on this site. If that changes we will count product usage — pages viewed, trees created, invitations sent — and this page will say so before it starts. Either way we will not record your screen, and we will not put the contents of your tree into analytics.
Who can see what
Viewers can read the tree. Editors can add and change people. Only the owner can invite, change roles, or delete the tree. Every change is recorded with the name of whoever made it, so nothing happens anonymously.
Questions about any of this: hello@ourstory.benicehg.com