Your family’s data
Your family’s stories belong to your family.
A family history holds some of the most personal things people have: voices, faces, names, and the stories that go with them. Here is what we will never do with yours, in plain words.
This is the short version. The privacy policy is the full one, and it is the one that counts.
Read the privacy policyWhat we don’t do
Information about families is valuable, and plenty of companies make money from it.
We don’t sell your family data.
Not to data brokers, not to marketers, not to anyone.
Privacy policy, section 16
Some family history services pass personal information to ad partners for targeted advertising.
We don’t share it with advertisers.
Your tree, photos, recordings and stories never go to ad companies, and we never use them to decide what ads you see.
AI features are everywhere now, and so are questions about where your photos and stories end up.
We don’t train AI on it, and we don’t let anyone else.
We don’t use your family’s data to build or train AI of our own. When a feature uses AI, like turning an interview into text, the company doing the work does it for us alone and is not allowed to learn from it.
Privacy policy, section 10
Some services take a permanent, irrevocable licence to the photos and stories you upload.
We don’t claim your stories.
You keep ownership of everything you add. We only store it, show it, and share it with the people you invite.
Terms of service, section 5
On some family history sites, your tree is public unless you change a setting.
We don’t make your tree public.
It stays private until you invite someone. Living relatives are never shown in anything you share publicly.
Many family history companies also sell DNA tests. In 2025 one of them went bankrupt and its customers’ genetic data was among the assets sold.
We don’t ask for your DNA.
FamYarn is about the people you remember and the stories they tell. There is no DNA test and no genetic data.
Privacy policy, section 2
What we do
- We keep your family’s data safe and use it to run FamYarn: storing it, showing it to the people you invite, and making the features you choose work.
- A few trusted companies help with that, like the one that stores the files or the one that turns a recording into text. They work for us, only on that job.
- We measure our own ads. If you came to FamYarn by clicking one of our ads, we let that ad company know that you arrived, started signing up, and created an account, along with what any website request carries, like your browser and the page you were on. Nothing about your family goes with it, and your browser’s Global Privacy Control setting switches it off.
You stay in charge
- You decide who sees each tree, and you can change it any time.
- You can delete your account. Trees you shared with others stay with them, with your name taken off.
- Features that need extra processing, like finding the same face across your photos, can be switched off.
The full details
The privacy policy covers everything on this page and more: every company that helps us, exactly what each one receives, and how long we keep things.
Read the privacy policyQuestions? Write to us at support@famyarn.com