Privacy

Legacy holds family history — birth dates, addresses, the names of children. That is among the most sensitive data anyone will ever type into software. This page says plainly what happens to it.

What we store

• Your account. Your name, email address and profile picture, mirrored from Clerk, our authentication provider. We never see or store your password.
• What you enter. The people, relationships, dates, places, notes and photographs you add to a tree.
• Activity. A record of which member made which change, and when.
• Place lookups. When you search for a place, the query is sent to OpenStreetMap's Nominatim service and the result is cached so we ask it less often. Place names are not linked to your account in that cache.

Who can see it

Only members of a tree. There is no public directory, no discovery, and no way to join by guessing an identifier — the only way in is an invite link created by an admin, which can be revoked, expired or capped. Each request is checked against your role on the server.

If a tree has protected mode turned on, the dates, places, occupations and notes of living people are withheld from view-only members. That filtering happens on the server, before the data reaches the browser.

What we do not do

• We do not sell or rent your data.
• We do not run advertising, and there are no third-party ad or tracking scripts.
• We do not use your family data to train anything.

Taking it with you

Any member can export a whole tree as GEDCOM, JSON or CSV at any time, from the tree's settings. GEDCOM is the standard format read by Ancestry, MyHeritage, Gramps and most other genealogy software, so the export is a real exit and not a gesture.

Deleting it

The creator of a tree can delete it. That removes the people, relationships, invites and activity history from the database. Members can leave a tree at any time, which removes their access and unlinks their account from the person record they had claimed.

Getting in touch

Questions about any of this, or a request to see or remove your data, can go to the person running this instance of Legacy.