Privacy Policy

FamilyArchiveAI is operated by Empathy Enterprises LLC, 30 N Gould Street, Suite R, Sheridan, WY 82801, USA. You can reach us at dan@dsgeyer.com.

This policy explains what we collect, why we collect it, how long we keep it, and what you can tell us to do with it. We have written it in plain language on purpose.

The rest of this page is the detail behind those five sentences.

1. What we collect

Information you give us

• Your email address, when you buy or when you contact us.
• Payment information. Payments are processed by Stripe. We never see or store your full card number. We receive a record of the transaction, the last four digits, and the card brand.
• Anything you write to us in an email or support message.

Photos and files you upload

The photographs, scans and other files you upload so we can build your archive.

Information we create from your photos

To build your archive, our systems read your photos and produce information about them. This includes:

• The boundaries of individual prints within a photo you took of several prints at once
• Estimated dates and time periods
• Estimated locations
• Text found on the photo, including handwriting on the back of a print
• Groupings of photographs that appear to show the same person

That last item involves biometric information, and it has its own section below because it is treated differently under the law.

Information collected automatically

When you visit our website we collect standard technical information such as IP address, browser type, device type, pages viewed, and the site that referred you. We use cookies and similar technologies for this. Our marketing pages load analytics and advertising tools from Meta (Facebook) and Google, which those companies use to measure and target advertising.

This automatic collection applies to our marketing website. It is separate from your uploaded photographs, which are never used for advertising.

2. Face grouping and biometric information

This section is important. Please read it.

To put every picture of one person in one place, our systems analyze the faces that appear in your photographs and create a mathematical representation of each face, sometimes called a faceprint or a face embedding. Under the laws of some states, including Illinois, Texas and
Washington, that representation is a biometric identifier.

What we do with it.

We use it only to group photographs within your own archive so that you can find all the pictures of one person together. We do not use it to identify anyone outside your archive, we do not compare it to any outside database, and we do not run it against other customers' archives.

What we never do with it.

We do not sell, lease, trade, or otherwise profit from biometric information. We do not disclose it to anyone except as described in the sharing section below, and never without your consent unless we are required to by law.

Consent.

We ask for your specific, affirmative consent before we create any face groupings. Face grouping is off until you turn it on. You can turn it off at any time, and you can ask us to delete the face data we have created without deleting the rest of your archive.

Our written retention and destruction schedule.

We destroy biometric information when the purpose for collecting it has been satisfied, or within three years of your last interaction with us, whichever comes first.
We also destroy it within 30 days of any of the following:

• You turn face grouping off
• You ask us to delete your face data
• You delete your archive or your account
• You receive a refund

Destruction means we delete the face embeddings from our production systems and from our backups on our normal backup rotation, which completes within
90 days.

Where face grouping is available.

Face grouping is not offered to customers who tell us they are in Illinois or Texas. We ask for their US state at signup. Those customers still get the rest of the archive. They do not get a face-sort control. Face grouping stays opt-in everywhere else, including Washington and outside the United States, under the consent and deletion rules in this section.

3. How we use information

We use what we collect to:

• Build, organize, and deliver your archive
• Take payment and send you a receipt
• Provide the optional per-photo repair and colorization service when you buy it
• Answer your questions and provide support
• Keep the service secure and detect abuse
• Meet our legal obligations
• Measure and improve our marketing, using website data only, never your photographs

4. What we do not do

We want to be specific about this, because it is the part people worry about.

• We do not train AI on your photos. Your photographs, and the information we derive from them, are not used to create, train, or improve any machine learning or artificial intelligence model, other than models personalized to you within your own archive.
• We do not sell your personal information and we do not share it for cross-context behavioral advertising, as those terms are defined under
  California law.
• We do not use your photographs for advertising of any kind, ours or anyone else's.
• We do not browse your photos. Our staff do not look through your archive. A person at our company will only view a specific file if you ask us to look at it to solve a problem, if we are required to by law, or if we have a specific and documented security or abuse investigation.

5. Google Drive and Google user data

Your finished archive is delivered into your own Google Drive. To do that you connect your Google account and grant us permission.

FamilyArchiveAI's use and transfer of information received from Google APIs adheres to the Google API Services User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements. https://developers.google.com/terms/api-services-user-data-policy

In practice that means:

• We request drive.file and nothing broader.
• We use Google user data only to provide the archive features you can see in the product.
• We do not transfer Google user data to advertising platforms, data brokers, or resellers.
• We do not use Google user data to serve advertising of any kind.
• We do not use Google user data to train generalized AI or machine learning models.
• Humans do not read your Google user data except with your affirmative agreement for a specific file, for security or legal reasons, or on aggregated and anonymized data for internal operations.

You can disconnect our access at any time from your Google account permissions page at myaccount.google.com/permissions.

6. Who we share information with

We share information only with companies that help us run the service, and only what they need. Each of them is bound by contract to protect it.

We do not currently send your uploaded photographs to a third-party AI company. If we add optional repair or colorization through a named provider, we will add that company to this table before we use it.

We also disclose information if we are legally required to, or to protect someone's safety or our legal rights. If our business is sold or merged, information may transfer to the buyer, and we will tell you before that happens and before any new policy applies to you.

7. How long we keep things

After a refund or a cancellation, we delete your uploaded files from our servers. Anything already written to your own Google Drive stays there, under your control, and we no longer have access to it once you disconnect us.

8. Your rights and choices

Wherever you live, you can:

• Ask what personal information we hold about you
• Get a copy of it
• Correct it
• Delete it
• Withdraw consent to face grouping
• Ask us to stop processing
• Complain to us at dan@dsgeyer.com

We will respond within 30 days, and we will not charge you or treat you differently for asking.

If you are in California

you also have the right to know the categories of personal information we collect and disclose, the right to delete, the right to correct, the right to limit use of sensitive personal information, and the right not to be discriminated against for exercising these rights. We do not sell personal information and we do not share it for cross-context behavioral advertising.

If you are in the European Economic Area or the United Kingdom

our legal bases are: performing our contract with you, for building your archive and taking payment; your consent, for face grouping and for marketing cookies; and our legitimate interests, for security and for improving the service. You have the right to object, the right to portability, and the right to complain to your local data protection authority.

Automated decision-making.

Our systems make automated judgments about your photographs, such as estimating a date or grouping faces. These judgments have no legal or similarly significant effect on you. They are frequently approximate, and you can correct or ignore them.

9. Photos of other people

Most family photographs show people other than the person uploading them.

When you upload photographs, you are telling us that you have the right to do so. If someone in your photographs asks us to delete biometric information we hold about them, we will do it, and we may contact you about it.

If you are in a photograph in someone else's FamilyArchiveAI archive and you want your face data removed, write to dan@dsgeyer.com and we will handle it.

10. Children

This service is for adults. It is not directed at children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from a child under 13. Old family photographs frequently show children, including children who are now adults. Those images are treated like any other photograph you upload.

If you believe a child has given us personal information directly, write to dan@dsgeyer.com and we will delete it.

11. Security

We protect information in transit and at rest using industry standard encryption, we limit internal access to the people who need it, and we review our providers. No system is perfectly secure, and we cannot guarantee that nothing will ever go wrong. If a breach affects your personal information we will notify you as required by law.

12. Where information is processed

We operate in the United States, and our providers may process information in the United States and elsewhere. If you are in the EEA or the UK, we rely on the European Commission's Standard Contractual Clauses for those transfers.

13. Changes

If we change this policy in a way that matters, we will update the date at the top and, for material changes, email you at the address on your order before the change takes effect.

14. Contact

Empathy Enterprises LLC
30 N Gould Street, Suite R
Sheridan, WY 82801, USA dan@dsgeyer.com