Privacy Policy

You record a family member’s life stories; we turn them into keepsakes. The recordings, transcripts, photos, and everything made from them belong to you. We don’t sell data, we don’t run ads, we never use your family’s stories to train AI models, and we never clone anyone’s voice.

Account: your email, name, and password (stored as a salted hash).

Story content you create: audio recordings of interview conversations, their transcripts, photos you upload, notes and documents you attach, and guest-book contributions (notes, photos, voice or video messages) from people you invite.

Derived content: AI-generated summaries, suggested questions, captions, narration, and illustrative images, all produced from your content to build your keepsakes.

Product usage: basic events (e.g. that a recording was uploaded) used to operate and improve the service. No third-party analytics or advertising trackers.

To organize photos and place them in your story, we detect faces in the photos you upload and group similar faces together within your project only. You label who is who; we never identify people across different customers’ projects, and we don’t sell or share face data. Deleting a photo deletes its face data. If you don’t want face grouping, don’t upload photos — every other feature works without them.

The recorded voice of your family member is the heart of what we make — and we treat it accordingly. We never clone or synthesize your family member’s voice. Films and audio features use their real recordings only. Narration, where used, is a clearly distinct narrator voice.

Most AI processing — transcription, photo analysis, image generation — runs on servers we operate ourselves, not in third-party AI clouds. Limited text processing may use vetted cloud AI providers under contracts that prohibit training on your data.

Service providers we share the minimum necessary data with:

• Stripe — payments (we never see your card number)
• Lulu — book printing (receives your book’s content when you order a printed copy)
• Zoho / ZeptoMail — sending transactional email

Data is stored in the United States.

Your project is private by default. Sharing happens only through links you create — a private Album link for family, contributor invitations for the guest book, and QR codes in printed books that play specific audio clips. You can revoke shared links at any time (revoking a printed book’s QR codes will stop them working in every printed copy).

You’re recording a real person — usually someone you love. You’re responsible for having their permission to record and to share what they say, and contributors to your guest book choose what they submit. Consent laws for recording vary by state; when in doubt, ask first. It’s also just the right way to treat someone’s stories.

Your content stays until you delete it. Deleting a recording or photo removes the file from our servers; deleted projects sit in a trash you can restore from before permanent removal. To delete your entire account and everything in it, email hello@toldfirst.com and we’ll complete it within 30 days (self-serve account deletion is being built). Encrypted backups age out on a rolling schedule after deletion.

Email us to access, correct, export, or delete your data — whatever your jurisdiction, we honor these requests for everyone. We’ll respond within 30 days. We don’t sell personal information, so there’s nothing to opt out of.

Account holders must be 18 or older. The subjects of projects are often elders — and their stories get the same protection as the account holder’s data.

If this policy changes materially, we’ll email account holders before the change takes effect. Questions: hello@toldfirst.com.