Privacy

Conjora Limited, a company registered in Ireland, is the data controller for Hystorie. You can reach us at hello@conjora.ie about anything on this page, including a request to see or delete what we hold.

Conjora runs several other websites, and there is a group-level policy at conjora.ie/privacy covering matters common to all of them. Where this page and that one differ about Hystorie, this page is the one that applies.

• The archive itself — the questions asked and the answers given, exactly as typed. This is the product; there is no version of Hystorie that does not store it.
• Photographs, voice and video, if you add them, along with any captions.
• Names and relationships that the interview picks out of the answers — people, places, dates and events — so it knows what to ask next and does not repeat itself.
• An email address, only if you give one. It is used to send you the link back to your archive, to sign you in, and to send keeper invitations you ask for.
• Payment records — what was bought, when, and the amount. Card details are handled entirely by Stripe and never reach us.
• An IP-derived key, used only to rate-limit abusive traffic. It is deleted automatically about two hours later and is never linked to an archive.

We do not use tracking pixels, advertising cookies, third-party analytics or profiling on Hystorie. There is no advertising on this product and your archive is not marketing data.

This deserves saying plainly rather than burying. A life story will often contain what the GDPR calls special category data — health, religion, politics, ethnicity, sexual orientation — and it will almost always contain information about people other than you: parents, siblings, neighbours, and people who have died.

Where you record that kind of detail, we rely on your explicit consent, given by choosing to type it in. You can withdraw it at any time by deleting the memory or the whole archive.

Please think about the living people in your answers. They have rights over information about them even when you are the one who remembers it, and an archive is easier to share than to un-share. If someone contacts us about what an archive says about them, we will engage with them, and we may need to contact the archive’s owner to resolve it.

Data protection law does not give rights to people who have died, so an archive about a late relative is not restricted in the same way. That is a legal fact, not an invitation — the ordinary decency of the thing still applies.

• To provide what you asked for (contract) — storing the archive, asking the next question, keeping it available at its link, taking payment.
• Your consent — for sensitive detail inside answers, for adding media, and for allowing relatives to buy their own copy, which is off unless you turn it on.
• Our legitimate interests — keeping the service secure and available, preventing abuse, and keeping records of what was bought.
• Legal obligation — retaining transaction records for the period Irish tax law requires.

Archives, photographs, voice and video are stored in the European Union, in Ireland (Amazon Web Services eu-west-1, via Supabase). We use a small number of processors, each under contract and each only for the job named:

• Supabase — the database and file storage holding your archive. Ireland.
• Vercel — hosting and delivery of the website itself.
• Vercel AI Gateway and Anthropic — the interviewer. See the next section.
• Stripe — payments. Stripe receives your email and the amount, and handles card details directly; we never see or store a card number.
• Google Workspace — the mail server that sends links, sign-in codes and keeper invitations.

Some of these are US-headquartered and may process data outside the EU. Where that happens it is covered by the European Commission’s standard contractual clauses or an equivalent transfer mechanism.

The questions are chosen by an AI model — Claude, made by Anthropic, reached through Vercel’s AI Gateway. To ask a question that follows on from what was just said, the relevant part of the archive is sent to that model as part of the request. There is no way to have an interviewer that responds to your answers without the answers being sent to it.

We do not use your archive to train any model, and we do not permit our providers to. The model writes questions only. It does not write, edit, summarise or improve the answers — what is stored is what was typed. The one place it writes prose is the funeral notice, which you ask for explicitly and which is drafted from your own recorded memories.

Nobody, until you decide otherwise. An archive lives at a long random link. Anyone holding that link can read it, so treat it the way you would treat a key: share it with the people you mean to and no one else.

• Keepers — people you name and invite. You can revoke them, and revoking takes effect immediately.
• Purchased copies — only if you switch them on. A copy stays valid even if you later remove that person as a keeper. You are told this before you enable it, because it is the whole point of the thing and it is not reversible for copies already bought.
• Us — staff do not read archives. Access to production data is limited to what is needed to run and repair the service, and would only ever be used to fix a fault or to comply with a legal obligation.

On the free tier, for as long as you want it. On a paid term, for the term you bought, after which the archive is sealed: nothing more can be added, and it stays readable at the same link. Sealing is a limit on writing, never on reading.

If you delete an archive, the records and the stored files are removed. Backups roll off on their own cycle, so a deleted archive may persist in a backup for a short period before it is gone entirely. Payment records are kept for as long as Irish tax law requires, separately from the archive itself.

You can ask for a copy of what we hold, ask us to correct it, ask us to delete it, object to how we use it, or ask for it in a portable form. Write to hello@conjora.ie and we will respond within one month.

Portability is built in rather than something you have to request: every archive can be printed or saved as a PDF at any time, on any plan, free, from the archive’s own page. We would rather you always had your own copy.

If you are unhappy with how we have handled your information you can complain to the Irish Data Protection Commission at dataprotection.ie.

Hystorie is not designed for children to use on their own, and we do not knowingly create accounts for under-16s. Children very often appear in family memories, which is ordinary and expected. If you believe a child has recorded an archive themselves, tell us and we will deal with it.

The date at the top changes with it. If a change materially affects archives already created, we will email the owners we have an address for rather than relying on you to re-read this page.