Privacy Policy

The family data you add or import: people, relationships, dates, places, notes, sources, photos, and stories. If you create an account, we also store your name, email address, and a salted hash of your password (never the password itself). If you use Heirloom without an account, an anonymous identifier cookie links your imported trees to your browser.

Every tree you create or import starts private: visible only to you. Trees become public only if you explicitly make them public. The curated historical archives you can browse are public by design and are built from public sources such as Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons.

When a tree is public, people marked as living are automatically redacted for everyone except the tree's owner — their names, dates, places, photos, and notes are hidden from other viewers and from public statistics.

AI features (portraits, stories, analysis, chat) run only when you invoke them. When you do, the relevant tree data is sent to our AI provider (currently Google's Gemini API) to generate the result, under that provider's data-processing terms. We don't use your family data to train models, and AI never runs over your tree in the background.

Heirloom shows no advertising and never sells or rents your data. Our only planned revenue is subscriptions.

You can export any of your trees as a standard GEDCOM file at any time, and you can delete a tree from your dashboard — deletion removes the tree and all of its people, sources, media records, and stories from our database.

Heirloom runs on Vercel with a managed Postgres database (Neon). Data is encrypted in transit (TLS) and at rest by our hosting providers.

Ask us anything about this policy from the feedback option in the app, and we'll answer plainly. See also our Terms of Service.