Privacy Policy

Ancestale is a service for writing family stories, building family trees and sharing them. Every tree and story has a visibility that you choose: private, family, invited, link, PIN or public. Only public and listed pages are indexed by search engines.

We collect only what is needed for the service to work:

• Account data: name, e-mail and a password hash (never the password itself) if you sign in with e-mail and password. If you sign in with Google, Facebook or Apple: the provider account ID, name, e-mail and profile picture URL.
• Content you create: trees, the people in them (which may include living relatives: names, dates, places, bio and photos), stories and cover images.
• Technical data: session cookies (httpOnly, strictly necessary to sign in), access-unlock cookies for PIN-protected content, and your IP address, used for rate limiting and security logs.

We do not show ads and we do not sell your data. Analytics cookies are used only if you accept them (see "Cookies and analytics").

Dates, places, bio and photo of living people in trees are hidden from anyone outside the family.

Anyone with an account can choose, in Settings, not to appear in other people's trees and not to appear in site search.

Content is visible only to those the chosen visibility allows. Private content answers as non-existent to everyone else. Only public and listed content can be indexed by search engines, and you can change the visibility at any time.

We use providers that process data on our behalf:

• Railway: hosting of the site and the database (United States).
• Resend: transactional e-mail (e-mail confirmation, password reset).
• The sign-in provider you choose (Google, Facebook or Apple), when you sign in with it.
• Anthropic (Claude): writes and translates family stories when an editor or a reader asks for it (United States). Anthropic does not use this data to train its models.
• Google (Google Analytics and Google Ads): visit statistics and ad measurement, only if you accept the cookies (United States).

As a result, your data may be transferred outside Canada, Québec, Brazil and the European Economic Area, including to the United States, with the safeguards required by PIPEDA, Québec's Law 25, the LGPD and the GDPR. Before personal information leaves Québec, we assess the protection it will receive.

A tree's editors can ask an AI writer (Claude, by Anthropic) to write the family's story, and readers can read a story in another language through an AI translation. Only what is needed is sent: deceased people with the facts recorded in the tree; living people only by first name, gender and kinship; people who chose not to appear in other trees only by their relation (for example "his wife"); and the biographies and stories the family can read. Private stories are never sent.

Generated stories and translations are saved in Ancestale with the visibility the family chooses. The Ancestale team only reads a generated story, or a comment about it, when the person rating it chooses to share it with us.

We use essential cookies to keep you signed in and remember your choices. With your consent, we also use Google Analytics and Google Ads conversion cookies to count visits, see which pages and campaigns bring people here, and measure sign-ups. Google receives your IP address, browser and device information and the type of page you visit (for example "a tree page"), never its address or title, and never your trees, stories or the names in them.

You can accept or decline in the banner and change your mind at any time with "Cookie settings" at the bottom of every page; declining removes these cookies and stops Google from loading. We do not use your data for ads personalisation or remarketing.

Ancestale is operated by a Canadian company. Its founder is the person in charge of the protection of personal information (Québec's Law 25) and accountable for privacy under PIPEDA. They answer privacy requests, keep a register of confidentiality incidents, and notify the Commission d'accès à l'information du Québec, the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada and the people affected when an incident presents a risk of serious harm. Contact: privacy@ancestale.com.

Under PIPEDA and Québec's Law 25 (Canada), the LGPD (Brazil) and the GDPR (European Union) you have the right to access, correction, deletion, portability and to withdraw your consent. We process data to provide the service you asked for, and we answer requests within 30 days.

To exercise any right, write to privacy@ancestale.com. To delete your account, see the data deletion page.

If you are not satisfied with our answer, you may complain to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, to the Commission d'accès à l'information du Québec, or to the data protection authority where you live.

We keep data while your account exists. Deleted content is removed from the database; backups rotate and expire over time.

The service is not directed to children under 13 (under 14 in Québec, under 16 in the European Union where applicable). Parents may add minors to trees; living minors are protected by the living-person redaction.

If this policy changes, we will update the date at the top of the page.

Questions or requests about privacy: privacy@ancestale.com.