Privacy Policy

1. Overview

FamilyBranch is a collaborative family-tree service for building, sharing, and exporting family trees with relatives you invite. This Privacy Policy explains what we collect, how we use it, and the choices you have.

Family trees can include information about living people, children, and relatives who are not users of FamilyBranch. Please add and share that information thoughtfully.

2. Information we collect

We collect account information such as your name, email address, encrypted password, preferred language, time zone, authentication settings, and support communications.

We collect family-tree content you and invited relatives provide, including names, relationships, dates, places, biographies, living or deceased status, photos, profile claims, invitations, roles, share-link settings, export requests, and generated export files.

When you subscribe, Stripe processes payment details for us. We receive subscription status, billing identifiers, receipts, and limited payment metadata, but we do not store full card numbers.

We also collect basic technical information such as IP address, browser and device details, log entries, cookies, session data, and feature usage needed to secure, operate, and improve the service.

3. How we use information

• Provide, secure, maintain, and improve FamilyBranch.
• Render family trees, photos, invitations, claims, public share pages, and JPEG or PDF exports.
• Manage accounts, permissions, subscriptions, billing notices, support requests, and service emails.
• Detect, investigate, and prevent abuse, fraud, security incidents, and violations of our terms.
• Comply with legal, tax, accounting, and regulatory obligations.

4. Family data, living people, and minors

You control the family information you add. If you add information about another living person, including a minor, you are responsible for having an appropriate basis to do so and for respecting that person's privacy and family expectations.

Do not add sensitive information such as health, financial, legal, or identity-document details unless you have consent and a clear family purpose. FamilyBranch is not intended for storing records that require special legal or medical protections.

5. Collaboration, invitations, public links, and exports

Family trees are private to the account by default. Account admins can invite relatives and assign roles. Invited relatives may see tree information that existed before they joined and information added later.

Admins can create public share links. Anyone with a valid share link can view the shared tree until the link is revoked. Revoking a link stops future access through that URL, but it cannot remove copies, screenshots, downloads, or exports already made.

Exports may include photos and living-person data. Signed export links are temporary, but downloaded JPEG and PDF files are outside FamilyBranch's control.

6. How we share information

We do not sell personal information. We share information only as needed to operate the service, at your direction, or when legally required.

• Service providers, including application hosting, Amazon S3 file storage, Resend email delivery, Stripe payment processing, and security, analytics, or error-monitoring tools we configure.
• Other users in your account according to their role, invited relatives you or an admin add, and people who receive a public share link or exported file.
• Authorities, courts, or other parties when required by law or when necessary to protect rights, safety, security, or the integrity of the service.
• Successors in connection with a merger, financing, acquisition, reorganization, or sale of assets, subject to this policy or comparable protections.

7. Security

We use technical and organizational safeguards such as encrypted transport, authenticated sessions, role-based access, revocable share tokens, limited export tokens, access logging, and managed service providers. No internet service can be guaranteed to be perfectly secure.

8. Retention and deletion

We keep account, tree, photo, invitation, share-link, export, billing, and log information for as long as needed to provide the service, meet legal obligations, resolve disputes, enforce agreements, and maintain backups.

You can edit or delete family-tree content in the app, revoke public share links, cancel subscriptions, and request account or data deletion by contacting info@brightitsolutions.biz. Deleted data may remain for a limited time in backups, logs, billing records, security records, or files already exported or shared by users.

9. Your choices and rights

Depending on where you live, you may have rights to access, correct, export, delete, object to, or restrict certain processing of your personal information. Contact info@brightitsolutions.biz to make a request.

You can manage account details, language preferences, photos, tree content, invitations, public links, and subscription cancellation from the product where those controls are available.

10. Cookies, email, and children's privacy

We use cookies and similar technologies for sign-in, security, preferences, and billing flows. Browser settings may let you block cookies, but some features may stop working.

We send transactional emails such as invitations, account notices, billing notices, export notifications, and security messages. You cannot opt out of messages needed to provide or secure the service.

FamilyBranch is not directed to children under 13. A parent, guardian, or authorized family member should manage any information about children in a family tree. Contact info@brightitsolutions.biz if you believe a child created an account or provided personal information without appropriate consent.

11. Changes and contact

We may update this Privacy Policy as the service changes. If the change is material, we may ask signed-in users to accept the updated policy before continuing.

Questions or requests can be sent to info@brightitsolutions.biz. The service is operated for Bright IT Solutions, obrt, vl. Yevheniia Lysenko (OIB 35307545070) at familybranch.live.

12. Controller and European privacy rights

The data controller is Bright IT Solutions, obrt, vl. Yevheniia Lysenko (OIB 35307545070), Rizzijeva ulica 28, 52100 Pula, Croatia. Contact: info@brightitsolutions.biz.

We process account and subscription data to perform our contract with you, billing records to meet legal obligations, and security and operational data for our legitimate interests in running a reliable service. Information about relatives may come from other family members. Our interest in enabling private family collaboration must be balanced against those relatives' rights; contact us to object or request removal, even if you do not have an account. Where processing relies on consent, you may withdraw it without affecting earlier lawful processing.

You may request access, correction, erasure, restriction, portability where applicable, or object to processing. We normally respond within one month; if a lawful extension is needed, we explain it within that month. You may complain to Croatia's supervisory authority, AZOP (https://azop.hr), or your local supervisory authority. We do not make solely automated decisions producing legal or similarly significant effects about you.

13. Providers, transfers, and retention

Our hosting uses DigitalOcean through Hatchbox, files use Amazon S3, service emails use Resend, and payments use Stripe. External font and JavaScript providers receive connection information when your browser requests their resources. Providers may process data outside the European Economic Area; where required, transfers must be covered by an adequacy decision or appropriate safeguards such as standard contractual clauses. Contact us for information about applicable safeguards.

Retention depends on whether your account or shared tree remains in use, a deletion request, outstanding disputes, security needs, and mandatory accounting retention. Removing your user account does not necessarily remove information relatives independently contributed to their shared tree. You can request review of that information separately. Copies in backups are removed through the backup rotation cycle; contact us for the applicable retention period.

Temporary tokens used to render exports are different from photo and download URLs. A copied signed file URL may remain usable while its file exists, even after a tree share link is revoked. Contact us to request removal of a file.

14. AI assistants

A member can connect an AI assistant, such as ChatGPT by OpenAI or Claude by Anthropic, to FamilyBranch. It connects only after the member signs in and presses Allow on a screen listing what it may do: read the member's family trees, add and change people in them, and stay connected. It then acts for that member, in every family the member belongs to and with the member's role in each, until the member disconnects it. Assistants are allowed in a family unless its admin turns them off. How to connect, and what an assistant can and cannot do, is described at familybranch.live/assistants.

When the assistant asks, we send it: family-tree and branch names; people's names, maiden names and nicknames, gender, dates of birth and death and how precisely they are known, places of birth and death, whether they are living, notes, and relationships; whether a profile has been claimed by a member and whether it has a photo; the titles, addresses and sources of links and documents kept on profiles; upcoming birthdays with ages; the member's role and whether the family's plan is paid; and download links to documents and posters, which stop working after one hour. People hidden from a tree are never sent, and neither are other members' email addresses or account details. We do not send the files themselves, but an assistant can open a download link while it works.

We send this to the assistant's provider at the member's direction: OpenAI when the member uses ChatGPT, Anthropic when the member uses Claude, or the provider of any other assistant the member connects. Each provider handles what it receives under its own terms and privacy policy, which we do not control, and may keep it in the member's conversation history. It includes information about relatives who are not users of FamilyBranch, among them children and people who have died. We send it to perform our contract with the member who connected the assistant, and in the family's legitimate interest in managing its tree with tools its members choose; relatives can object as described in section 12. Members should connect an assistant only where sharing their family's information with its provider is appropriate.

When a member asks an assistant to keep a document or a photo, the assistant gives us either the web address of a file it found or a file from the AI service's own file storage, and we download that one file. We fetch only public addresses, only on request, and keep only PDFs and images. We keep PDFs as received and redraw images, which removes camera, device and location metadata, and we record the address the assistant gave as the document's source. Through an assistant, documents can be added only for people recorded as deceased.

We store an assistant's access and refresh tokens only in hashed form. Access tokens expire after one hour; refresh tokens keep the assistant connected until the member disconnects it. The record of which assistants a member connected, when, and with which permissions is kept while the member's user account exists and is deleted with it. Our server logs record the time of each assistant request, the network address it came from, the assistant's name and the tool it called, but not what was asked or answered; logs are kept for a limited time for security and troubleshooting.

A member can see and disconnect assistants under Connected assistants in their account settings; access stops at once. A family's admin can turn assistants off for the family on the profile page, which stops every member's assistant for that family at once. Members who can edit can remove documents and links, and information can be deleted as described in section 8. To remove information an assistant's provider already holds, use that provider's controls or contact it.

15. Links and documents on profiles

Members can keep links to web pages about a person, up to ten per person, and documents such as records, certificates and letters, up to three per person, on that person's profile, each with a title, a kind, where it came from and who added it. They are visible only to members of the family, never on share links or posters, and a document opens through a link that works for a few minutes.

Documents can contain sensitive details, such as identity numbers, addresses or health information. Add one only if you are entitled to keep it and the family purpose justifies it. Images added as documents are redrawn without their metadata; PDFs are kept as received. Removing a document deletes its file.