Privacy Policy

Effective 11 August 2026

The short version: we store what you put in your trees and the little we need to sign you in and bill you. No ads, no selling data, no tracking you around the web. You can see who opened your links, revoke them, export your trees, and delete everything, at any time.

1. Who is responsible

Family Linkage ("we", "us") at familylinkage.com is responsible for the personal data described here. For anything privacy related, write to contact@familylinkage.com.

2. What we store

Your account. Your email address and sign-in identifiers. Sign-in runs on AWS Cognito; we never see your password.
Your trees. The names, dates, places, photos, and relationships you add. This is the heart of the service and it belongs to you.
Billing. Payments run through Stripe. We store your subscription status and plan; your full card details never reach our servers.
Share link activity. For every link you create we count how many times it was opened and when it was last opened, so you can see it on your dashboard and revoke links that should stop working.
Usage and logs. We use Plausible, a privacy-friendly analytics tool that stores aggregate counts only, sets no cookies, and does not follow you across sites. Our servers keep short-lived technical logs (IP address, time, request) for security and debugging.

3. Cookies

We use cookies only to keep you signed in and to keep a tree you started without an account connected to your browser. There are no advertising cookies and no third-party tracking cookies.

4. What we use data for

To run the service: storing and showing your trees to you and to the people you share them with, syncing your subscription, answering your messages, and keeping the service secure. That is the whole list. We do not sell personal data and we do not show ads.

5. Who processes data for us

These providers process data on our behalf, only to run the service:

AWS Cognito for accounts and sign-in.
Supabase hosts our database in Europe (AWS London region).
Stripe for payments and subscriptions.
Plausible for cookie-free, aggregate analytics, hosted in the EU.

Beyond these processors, we disclose data only if the law genuinely requires it, and we tell you when we are allowed to.

6. People who appear in a tree

Trees naturally contain information about relatives added by the tree owner. The owner decides who sees the tree, and owners agree in our terms to be considerate with information about living people. If you appear in someone's tree and want your information corrected or removed, ask the person who invited you, or write to us and we will help.

7. Your control, always

Only people holding one of your links can open your tree.
Your dashboard lists every view link and edit link you made, with open counts. Revoking a link takes one click and works immediately.
Edits from relatives only join your tree after you approve them.
You can export your tree, and delete any tree or your whole account, anytime.

8. Retention and deletion

We keep your content while your account exists. When you delete a tree or your account, the content is removed from the live database right away and leaves our backups within 30 days. Trees started without an account may be removed after long inactivity. Billing records are kept as long as tax law requires.

9. Your rights

You can ask us to access, correct, export, or delete your personal data, or to restrict or object to how we handle it. If you are in the EEA or the UK, these are your GDPR rights, and you can also complain to your local data protection authority. One email to contact@familylinkage.com starts any of it; we answer within a month.

10. Security

All traffic is encrypted in transit. Share links are long random identifiers that cannot be guessed, and revoking one disables it immediately. Access to production data is restricted to the people who operate the service.

11. Children

Accounts require you to be at least 16, or the age of digital consent where you live. Children appear in family trees as family history; the tree owner is responsible for what they add, and we remove a child's information when a parent or guardian asks.

12. Changes to this policy

When this policy changes we update the date at the top, and for meaningful changes we let you know inside the product or by email.