Privacy Policy

1. What this document is

This Privacy Policy describes what information mygentree (“the app,” “we”) collects, how it's used, and the controls you have over it. As the banner above states, this is a draft pending review by a qualified attorney — it is not yet a finalized or legally certified policy.

2. Information we collect

When you sign in, Google provides your name, email address, and profile photo. Beyond that, the only required field to use the app is your full name. Everything else you may optionally add to your profile — including maiden name, place of birth, home address, phone number, a separate contact email, birth date, education, profession, workplace, a short bio, and a photo — is entirely at your discretion. See Section 6 and the Terms of Service for more on the optional nature of this information.

We also store the family relationships you or your relatives enter (parent/child/spouse/sibling connections) in order to construct and display the tree itself.

3. How we use this information

• To build and display your family tree to permitted relatives.
• To operate account features: signing in, joining or creating a family, and the approval workflow when someone requests to join a tree using a family code.
• To enforce the visibility rules described in Section 4 — your information is never used to determine visibility for people those rules would exclude.

We do not sell your information, and do not use it for advertising.

4. How visibility controls work in this app

mygentree is built around a blood-relationship visibility engine, not an all-or-nothing share setting:

• Each optional profile field (address, phone, birth date, etc.) has its own audience setting — Everyone in your family tree, Immediate family only, or Only me — chosen by the person the field belongs to.
• Beyond per-field settings, the app limits whose branch of the tree you can see at all based on blood relationship: you see your own blood relatives and your spouse's, but not your in-laws' extended families, and not the reverse.
• Joining a family requires the family's six-character code, and every join request is reviewed and approved by the family owner before it grants any access — holding a code lets you ask to join, not enter automatically.

5. Children's information

A family tree inherently includes information about minors — nieces, nephews, children — often entered by a parent or other relative on the child's behalf rather than by the child themselves. This may raise child-specific data privacy obligations (such as COPPA in the United States) depending on how the app is used. This is explicitly flagged as an open question for legal review, not a determination we have made — whether and how those obligations apply, and what additional protections or consent mechanisms may be required, needs an attorney's judgment before this app is shared broadly.

6. Optional information is your choice

Except for your name, all profile information you provide — including but not limited to address, phone number, email, birth date, education, profession, and photos — is entirely optional and provided at your own discretion. You are responsible for deciding what information you are comfortable sharing, and may use the per-field privacy controls described in Section 4 to limit its visibility to other family members. This does not eliminate our responsibilities around data we do store, particularly for information about minors (Section 5) — see also the caveat in the Terms of Service.

7. International users

A family tree may span multiple countries. If members of your family live outside the United States, data protection laws such as the GDPR (EU/UK) may apply to their information. Which laws apply, and what they require, is a legal determination pending attorney review — not something this draft resolves.

8. Third-party services

We use Google for sign-in (Google OAuth) and cloud infrastructure providers to host the app and its database. These providers process data on our behalf under their own security and privacy commitments; we do not share your data with unrelated third parties.

9. Data retention and deletion

We retain your information for as long as your account or your entry in a family tree exists. A process for requesting deletion of your account and associated data is planned but not yet finalized — until it is, contact us using the information in Section 11 to make a request.

10. Security

We take reasonable measures to protect your information, but no method of storage or transmission is completely secure, and we cannot guarantee absolute security.

11. Contact

Questions about this policy, or requests regarding your data, can be sent to privacy@mygentree.com (placeholder contact — to be confirmed).

12. Changes to this policy

Once finalized, we'll note the date of the last update at the top of this page and, for material changes, take reasonable steps to notify users.