Privacy Policy
Effective Date: September 10, 2026
1. Our Approach to Privacy
FamYarn is a service operated by DSR Media LLC. “FamYarn” is a registered fictitious name (DBA) of DSR Media LLC. In this policy, “FamYarn,” “we,” “us,” and “our” refer to DSR Media LLC.
FamYarn is designed to help families preserve and share their history with care and respect. We prioritize privacy, user control, and transparency.
Your family data is private by default and only shared when you choose.
2. Information We Collect
Account Information
- Name
- Phone number (optional — used to send SMS text notifications if you opt in, and to place a telephone interview call when you or someone you invite chooses that way of recording a story). Telephone interviews are recorded and transcribed; see Section 10.
- Authentication credentials
- Billing info
Tree Data
- Individuals (living/deceased)
- Events, relationships
- Media, notes, citations
Collaboration Data
- Invitations, edits, comments
Usage Data
- Device/browser info
- IP address
- Online identifiers (e.g., cookie IDs and a pseudonymous analytics ID)
- Logs (may include limited contact data)
3. How We Use Information
- Provide service
- Enable collaboration
- Improve product
- Ensure security
- Process billing
We use analytics tools (see Section 9) for product improvement.
We also measure our advertising. If you reached FamYarn by selecting one of our ads, we report to that advertising platform that you arrived, that you began registration, and that you created an account — from our marketing site, from within the application, and from our own servers. Section 9 explains exactly what is disclosed and how to turn it off. We never use your family-tree content, name, email address, or phone number for advertising.
4. Sharing
Within Trees
Shared with authorized members.
Public Sharing
- Deceased persons only
- Expiring links (one year by default)
- Users responsible for content
Service Providers
Used for infrastructure, analytics, advertising measurement, email, billing, and — where you use the features that require them — transcription, artificial-intelligence processing of photographs, documents and imported records, and photo face grouping. Section 10 names these providers and states what each one receives.
Legal Requests
Only via valid legal process.
5. Living vs Deceased
A person is considered deceased based on available data (e.g., a recorded death event, or a birth year more than 120 years ago). Users must correct data if inaccurate. Living individuals are never included in public shares.
6. Contributions
Tree data is collaborative. Users are responsible for:
- Accuracy
- Privacy of living individuals
- Rights to upload content
7. Deletion & Retention
Account Data
Deleted or de-identified.
Tree Data
Remains if shared; attribution removed.
Media
Remains attached to tree.
Timing
45 days (up to 90 if needed)
Logs
Retained up to 60 days.
8. Data Access
Users may request exports (e.g., GEDCOM). Processed within 45–90 days.
9. Cookies, Pixels & Analytics
We and our analytics providers use cookies, similar technologies, and online identifiers (such as a randomly generated, pseudonymous analytics ID) to operate the service (for example, to keep you signed in) and to understand how it is used so we can improve it.
Analytics providers. We use Google Analytics and Matomo to measure and analyze usage. These tools collect information such as pages viewed, actions taken, device and browser information, and IP address, and set or read a pseudonymous analytics identifier for your browser. Google Analytics is provided by Google; see how Google uses this data at policies.google.com/technologies/partners. You can opt out of Google Analytics with Google’s browser add-on at tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout.
Linking analytics to your account. To understand how features are used and how people complete key actions (creating a tree, sending or accepting an invitation, subscribing), we may associate these analytics identifiers and the related usage/visitation information with your account and activity, including events we record on our own servers. We share only pseudonymous identifiers and event information with these providers — never your name, email, phone number, or family-tree content.
Advertising measurement. We advertise FamYarn on third-party advertising platforms. To measure the effectiveness of that advertising, we disclose a limited set of conversion information to the platform that referred you. This disclosure occurs only where you reached a FamYarn site by selecting one of our advertisements. Visitors who arrive by any other means are not included, and no conversion information about them is disclosed to any advertising platform.
Purposes. We use advertising measurement solely to attribute conversions to the advertising that produced them, to evaluate and allocate advertising spend, and to enable the platform to improve delivery of our own advertising. We do not use it to build profiles of you for our own purposes, and we do not acquire audience or targeting lists derived from it.
Categories of information disclosed. The disclosure is limited to:
- an advertising identifier assigned by the platform itself — typically a click identifier appended by that platform to the link you selected, together with identifiers set in your browser by that platform’s pixel;
- conversion events and their timestamps. Today these are the commencement of registration and the creation of an account. We may add subscription and comparable product milestones, which this section already permits;
- a pseudonymous event identifier we generate so that the platform can recognise the same event reported from your browser and from our servers as one event rather than two. It is derived from your account identifier by one-way hashing and cannot be reversed by the recipient;
- technical information inherent in any web request your browser makes to that platform, including your IP address, your browser’s user-agent, the address of the page you were on, and the address of the page that referred you. We restrict the page address as described under Advertising pixels below.
Information we do not disclose. We do not disclose to any advertising platform your name, email address, telephone number, postal address, date of birth, or any Family Data as defined below — whether in identifiable, hashed, or otherwise obfuscated form. Where a platform’s documentation invites such information, we decline to provide it.
Family Data. In this policy, “Family Data” means your family tree and its contents, including the individuals recorded in it, their names, dates, relationships, biographical and event details, photographs, documents, recordings, stories, and any annotations or research you contribute. Family Data is never disclosed to advertising platforms, advertising networks, data brokers, or any party for advertising, measurement, model-training, or resale purposes. This restriction is absolute and is not subject to any setting or election.
Categories of recipients. We disclose this information to the advertising platform that referred you. Today that is Meta or Google. We advertise on, and may disclose the same information to, each of the following:
| Platform | Provider |
|---|---|
| Meta (Facebook, Instagram) | Meta Platforms, Inc. |
| Google Ads | Google LLC |
| Microsoft Advertising (Bing) | Microsoft Corporation |
| Pinterest Ads | Pinterest, Inc. |
| Reddit Ads | Reddit, Inc. |
Advertising pixels. These platforms supply a small piece of code, commonly called a pixel (also referred to as a web beacon or tag), which reports the events described above from your browser. A pixel is loaded only for visitors who reached us from that platform’s advertising, only for a limited period following that referral, and only on our marketing site and within the application. It is not loaded on our blog or help site. We configure these pixels to restrict the information they collect, including by disabling optional features that would derive contact information from form fields or inspect page content, and we suppress reporting from pages whose addresses reference individual records.
Legal characterisation and opt-out. Under certain US state privacy laws, the disclosures described in this section constitute “sharing” of personal information for cross-context behavioral advertising and may constitute “targeted advertising”. You may opt out at any time by the means described below, at no cost and without providing any information to us.
Do Not Track / Global Privacy Control — how to opt out. Where your browser transmits a Do Not Track or Global Privacy Control signal, we give effect to it automatically. No advertising pixel is loaded, no conversion information is disclosed to any advertising platform, no data is transmitted to Google Analytics, our own analytics operate in a cookieless mode that measures usage only in aggregate, and analytics identifiers are not associated with your account. Where we hold no record of a browser’s signal, we treat the visitor as having opted out.
This signal is the opt-out for the advertising measurement described above. You do not need to contact us or fill in a form. Global Privacy Control is built into some browsers and available as an extension for others.
No sale. We do not sell personal information, and we do not sell or disclose Family Data for any advertising, measurement, model-training, or resale purpose. The only advertising-related disclosure we make is the conversion measurement described in this section, which is limited to the categories of information identified above and which you may switch off by the means described above.
10. How We Process Your Content
To provide features you ask for, some of the content you add to FamYarn is processed by automated systems, including artificial-intelligence services operated by the providers named below. These providers act as our service providers, on our instructions, for the purpose described and no other.
Processing is tied to the feature. We do not process your content for these purposes unless you use the feature that requires it. Content in a tree where you use none of these features is stored and shown back to you, and nothing else.
| Provider | What it receives | Why |
|---|---|---|
| OpenAI | Photographs you upload; documents you upload for text extraction; the audio of recorded interviews; interview transcripts; place and event details from a family-tree file you import; memorial-page text you ask us to summarise | Describing and tagging photographs, extracting text from documents, transcribing and summarising interviews, and interpreting imported records |
| AssemblyAI | Recorded interview audio | Transcription and speaker separation |
| Deepgram | Live audio during an in-person interview | Real-time captions |
| Amazon Web Services (Rekognition) | Photographs you upload, where photo face grouping is enabled for that tree | Grouping photographs by the same face — see below |
| Twilio | Telephone numbers, SMS message content, and the audio of telephone interviews | Sending text messages and placing and recording interview calls |
| SendGrid or Amazon Web Services (SES) | Your email address and the content of emails we send you | Delivering email |
| Our gift-card provider | Your email address, your first name, and an amount — nothing else | Delivering a survey reward you have chosen to claim |
| Amazon Web Services (S3), Hetzner | Stored content; the servers the service runs on | Storing your files and operating the service |
| Stripe | Payment details, which we never see in full | Taking payment |
Model training. We do not permit any of these providers to use your content to train or improve their models, and we have taken the specific steps each provider requires to give effect to that — an organisational opt-out with Amazon Web Services, and a per-request exclusion on every Deepgram call. If a provider we use will not commit to this, we will stop using them for your content rather than accept it.
Recorded interviews. Telephone and in-person interviews are recorded and transcribed. Everyone on the call is told the call is being recorded before the interview begins. If you invite someone else to be interviewed, you are responsible for their agreement to be recorded, and recording laws in some states require the consent of everyone taking part.
Photo face grouping
If enabled, this feature detects faces in photographs in a tree and groups photographs showing the same face, so that you can find every picture of one person. To do it, algorithms create face models that numerically represent the images of faces, predict the similarity of different images of faces, and estimate whether different images represent the same face. Depending on your jurisdiction, a face model may be treated as biometric information.
This is off unless a tree’s owner turns it on, and the owner chooses whether it applies to everyone in the tree or only to people recorded as deceased.
Any objection stops it, and cannot be overridden by anyone above. A person in a tree can be excluded by any editor; a photograph can be excluded by any editor; and if you hold an account you can switch off both indexing of your own face across every tree you appear in and analysis of anything you upload. An exclusion set at any of these levels cannot be reversed by a tree owner.
Face models are kept separately for each tree, so a face model created in one tree can never be matched against a photograph in another.
What is destroyed, and when. Turning face grouping off for a tree destroys the face groups and the face models used to create them. A face model is also destroyed when the photograph is deleted, when the person or the photograph is excluded, when your account is deleted, and when you ask us to destroy it.
Our published deadline for destruction is 24 hours from the event that triggers it. In practice it is usually minutes: a background process runs every 15 minutes to carry it out. We do not retain face models for any other purpose, we do not use them to identify anyone outside the tree they belong to, and we do not retain them after the deadline in backups used for anything other than restoring the service.
We never disclose face models or any information derived from them to advertisers, data brokers, or any other third party, and we do not sell them. They are Family Data as defined in Section 9.
⚠️ Illinois, Texas and Washington residents. These states regulate biometric information specifically, and Illinois provides a private right of action. Where a photograph shows someone who is not a FamYarn user, that person has not agreed to anything with us, and the tree owner’s decision cannot supply their consent. If you are in one of these states, or your tree contains photographs of living people in one of these states, consider leaving photo face grouping switched off, or limiting it to people recorded as deceased. To ask us to destroy a face model of yourself, or of someone whose photographs you can identify, contact us at support@famyarn.com and we will do so within our published deadline.
11. Communications
Essential emails required. Other emails are opt-in.
12. SMS & Text Messaging
If you provide a mobile phone number and opt in, FamYarn may send you SMS text messages. Providing a phone number and opting in to texts is always optional and is never a condition of using the service.
Types of messages. Depending on the opt-ins you choose, texts may include account and billing notifications (for example, payment or plan-status alerts, referral activity, and tree-invitation or account-activity notices) and, only if you separately opt in, promotional or marketing messages about new features and offers.
Message frequency varies based on your account activity and the notifications you have enabled.
Message and data rates may apply. These charges come from your mobile carrier and are your responsibility.
How to opt out. You can cancel SMS messages at any time by replying STOP to any message. After you send STOP, we will send one confirmation message and then stop sending you texts. Reply HELP for help, or contact us at support@famyarn.com.
No mobile information will be shared with third parties or affiliates for marketing or promotional purposes. We do not sell, rent, or share your mobile phone number or your SMS opt-in and consent information with any third party for their own marketing. Phone numbers and message content are shared only with the messaging service providers (such as our SMS carrier and messaging aggregator) strictly as needed to deliver the messages you have requested, and text-messaging opt-in data and consent are excluded from all other data-sharing described in this policy.
13. Children
Users must be 13+. Genealogical data may include minors.
14. Security
We use reasonable safeguards including encryption. No system is perfectly secure.
15. Inactive Accounts
Accounts inactive for 3 years may be removed.
16. Do Not Sell or Share
We do not sell personal information.
We do not sell or share Family Data. Family Data — your family tree and its contents, as defined in Section 9 — is not disclosed to advertising platforms, advertising networks, data brokers, model-training providers, or any other party for advertising, measurement, model-training, or resale purposes. This restriction is absolute and is not subject to any setting or election.
We do disclose a limited set of conversion information to advertising platforms for advertising measurement, as described in Section 9. Under certain US state privacy laws this constitutes “sharing” for cross-context behavioral advertising and may constitute “targeted advertising”. The categories of information disclosed, the purposes, and the recipients are set out in that section.
This applies only to visitors who reached a FamYarn site by selecting one of our advertisements. If you arrived by any other means, no conversion information about you is disclosed to any advertising platform.
To opt out, enable Global Privacy Control in your browser. We honor it automatically: no advertising pixel is loaded and no conversion information is disclosed to any platform. A Do Not Track signal is treated the same way. No request to us is necessary, and we do not require an account or any information from you in order to give effect to it.
Your mobile information and SMS consent data are excluded from all advertising-related disclosure. FamYarn does not share your mobile information or SMS consent with third parties or affiliates for marketing or promotional purposes.
17. United States
Service operated in Missouri, USA.
18. Changes
We may update this policy and notify users.
19. Contact
DSR Media LLC (dba FamYarn), 701 Market St Ste 110 PMB 1942, Saint Louis, MO 63101.
Email: support@famyarn.com