Privacy Policy

Famoli is operated from the United Kingdom by an individual, not a company. For the purposes of the UK GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018, that individual is the data controller for the personal data described below, and will give their name and postal address to anyone who asks for them.

You can reach me about anything in this policy at privacy@famoli.app.

Your account. If you sign up with an email address and password, we store your email address and a cryptographic hash of your password — never the password itself. If you sign in with Google, we receive your email address, your name, and a link to your Google profile picture. We do not receive your Google password, and we do not request access to your Gmail, Drive, contacts, or calendar.

Family tree content. Whatever you and your collaborators record in a tree: names, dates and places of birth and death, family relationships, biographies, timeline events, photographs of individuals, and free-text notes. This may include data imported from a GEDCOM file you upload.

Voice memories. If you record a spoken memory, we store the audio recording and an automatically generated text transcript of it, together with the languages you indicated and who you identified as the narrator.

Requests to join a tree. If you ask to join a family tree using a group invitation link, we store your email address, the name you give, and the free-text description you write of your relatives, so that the tree’s owner can decide whether to admit you.

What we do not collect. Famoli contains no analytics, no advertising, no tracking pixels, and no third-party marketing cookies. We do not build a profile of you, and we do not sell or share personal data for advertising.

Most of the personal data in Famoli is not about the person who entered it. It is about relatives — living and deceased — who are not users of the service and who have not agreed to anything.

If you record information about a living person, you are responsible for having a proper basis to do so. Please give particular thought before recording health information, religious or ethnic background, or details of someone’s private life, and before uploading a photograph or a recording of someone’s voice.

If you are not a Famoli user and believe a tree holds information about you, write to privacy@famoli.app. You have the same rights as anyone else under this policy, and I will act on your request even though you have no account. Note that UK data protection law applies to living people; it does not give rights over records of people who have died.

• To run your account and keep it secure — necessary to perform our agreement with you.
• To store and display the family history you record — necessary to perform our agreement with you.
• To transcribe and summarise voice memories — necessary to perform our agreement with you; this is the feature you asked for when you pressed record.
• To email a tree owner when someone asks to join — our legitimate interest in letting families control who sees their tree.
• To hold information about third-party relatives — the legitimate interests of families in documenting their own history, balanced against the privacy of the people described. You or the person concerned may object at any time.

Famoli is a small service built on a handful of providers. Each acts as a processor on our instructions and receives only what it needs.

• Supabase — database, sign-in, and file storage. Holds all of the data described above. Photographs and audio are kept in private storage and served only through short-lived links that expire after one hour.
• OpenAI — receives the audio of a voice memory in order to transcribe it, and the resulting transcript text in order to draft biography and timeline suggestions and summaries. Photographs are never sent to OpenAI. Data submitted through OpenAI’s API is not used to train their models.
• Resend — sends the single notification email to a tree owner when someone requests access, containing that request’s details.
• Vercel — hosts the application, served from Frankfurt.
• Google — only if you choose to sign in with Google, and only to authenticate you.

Some of these providers operate in the United States. Where personal data is transferred outside the UK, it is protected by the UK International Data Transfer Agreement or the UK Addendum to the European Commission’s standard contractual clauses.

A tree is private to its members. The owner decides who joins, either by sending a personal invitation link or by approving a request made through a group link. Within a tree, an owner can further restrict individual biographies, stories, and memories so that they are visible only to descendants, only to a spouse, or to all members.

These rules are enforced by the database itself, not only by the screens you see, so a member cannot reach content they have not been granted.

Famoli sets only the cookies required to sign you in and keep you signed in, placed by our authentication provider. There are no analytics, advertising, or tracking cookies, which is why you are not asked to consent to any. Clearing these cookies signs you out.

Family tree content is kept until you or your tree’s owner deletes it, or until the account is closed. Deleting a person removes their biography, relationships, timeline events, and memories with them.

A deleted person can be brought back by the tree’s owner for ten days. Their recordings and photo stay in storage untouched for those ten days so that restoring them returns something to listen to, and are deleted for good once the ten days are up.

Deleting a voice memory on its own erases it straight away: the recording is removed from storage, and its transcript and any unreviewed suggestions drawn from it go with it. This cannot be undone.

Each tree keeps a record of its own changes, so members can see who added or altered what and put mistakes right. That record holds the previous version of anything edited or deleted, which means a deleted person’s details remain in it after the ten days have passed, readable only by members of that tree. Ask at privacy@famoli.app if you want it cleared for someone.

One limit is worth stating plainly: there is no self-service button to close your account and erase everything at once. Email privacy@famoli.app and I will carry that out manually within 30 days.

Under UK data protection law you may ask for a copy of your personal data, ask for it to be corrected or erased, ask us to restrict or stop using it, object to our use of it, and ask to receive it in a portable form. Where we rely on your consent, you may withdraw it at any time.

Email privacy@famoli.app and I will respond within one month. If you are unhappy with the outcome, you can complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office at ico.org.uk.

Famoli is not intended for use by children under 13, and you should not create an account if you are younger than that. Family trees routinely name children, which is normal and expected; the restriction is on who holds an account.

If this policy changes materially, the date at the top will change and account holders will be told by email before the change takes effect.

See also our Terms of Service.