The privacy of your data (and it is your data, not ours!) is a big deal to us. In this policy, we lay out: what data we collect and why; how your data is handled; and your rights with respect to your data. We promise we never sell your data: never have, never will.
This policy applies to all products built and maintained by Kindred Tales.
What we collect and why
Our guiding principle is to collect only what we need. Here’s what that means in practice:
Identity & access
When you sign up for a Kindred Tales product, we ask for identifying information such as your name and email address. That’s so you can personalize your new account, and we can send you product updates and other essential information. We may also send you optional surveys from time to time to help us understand how you use our products and to make improvements. With your consent, we will also send you our newsletter and other updates. We sometimes also give you the option to add a profile picture or elect to share one of your stories to display in our product, newsletter, social media, or marketing.
We’ll never sell your personal information to third parties, and we won’t use your name or company in marketing statements without your permission either.
Billing information
If you sign up for a paid Kindred Tales product, you will be asked to provide your payment information and billing address. Credit card information is submitted directly to our payment processor and doesn’t hit Kindred Tales servers. We store a record of the payment transaction, including the last 4 digits of the credit card number, for purposes of account history, invoicing, and billing support. We store your billing address so we can charge you for service, calculate any sales tax due, send you invoices, ship you our products, and detect fraudulent credit card transactions. We occasionally use aggregate billing information to guide our marketing efforts.
Product interactions
We store on our servers the content that you upload or receive or maintain in your Kindred Tales accounts. This is so you can use our products as intended, for example, to create a new chapter in your book. We keep this content as long as your account is active and in good standing. If you request we delete your account, we’ll delete the content within 60 days. In addition to using the content to provide our services, we may also use excerpts or quotes from your stories, with your consent, in our marketing materials, social media posts, and similar content to promote Kindred Tales and showcase the impact of our platform.
Information about other people
Kindred Tales is often a group effort. A book might be set up by one person as a gift, written by another, and be about a third. Some of the people involved may never create an account at all. So when you use our products, you may give us personal information about other people: the name and birth and death dates of the person a book is about, the email address of a gift recipient, or the name and email of someone you invite to contribute a story. Sometimes the person a book honors has passed away.
When you share someone else’s information with us, you’re confirming that you have the authority or consent to do so, and that you have the right to use any name, likeness, photo, or story you provide about them. We rely on you for that, because you know these relationships and we don’t. We only use this information to create the book and provide the service you asked for. We don’t use it to market to those people, and we never sell it.
If you’re someone a Kindred Tales book mentions or is about (or a story was contributed about you) and you’d like to know what we hold or ask us to remove it, please reach us through our contact form at kindredtales.net/contact and we’ll help. When a book is about someone who has passed away, we treat their information with extra care, and we’ll work with the family on any request.
AI features and voice recordings
Some of our products include an optional AI biographer (we call her “Ali”) that can suggest interview questions and help draft chapters. Ali is off until you turn her on: she’s disabled by default, and we record your consent before any of your story content is processed this way. If you’d rather write entirely on your own, you never have to enable her.
When you do enable Ali, the story content you type or speak is sent to a third-party AI provider that generates the questions and drafts. These providers work under commercial agreements that do not use your content to train their AI models. We share only what’s needed to produce the result for you, and nothing about this changes our promise: your stories are yours, and we never sell your personal information.
AI-generated text is a starting point, not a finished page. It can be incomplete or inaccurate. You always review and approve anything Ali suggests before it becomes part of your book. Separately, if you record or upload audio, we send that audio to a third-party speech-to-text provider to transcribe it into text you can edit.
Customer Feedback and Reviews
We may use customer feedback, reviews, and responses from campaigns, surveys, or other interactions with Kindred Tales in our marketing materials, social media posts, and similar content. This may include quotes, stories, or other information provided by customers, always with their explicit consent. We will never use your full name or other identifying information without your permission. Use of first name and last initial is deemed permissible.
Geolocation data
For most of our products, we log the full IP address used to sign up for an account and retain that for use in mitigating future spammy signups. We also log all account access by full IP address for security and fraud prevention purposes, and we keep this login data for as long as your product account is active. Additionally, we may also track geolocation to ensure sales are limited to only the countries & regions we or our vendors presently support.
Website interactions
We collect information about your browsing activity for analytics and statistical purposes such as conversion rate testing and experimenting with new product designs. This includes, for example, your browser and operating system versions, your IP address, which web pages you visited and how long they took to load, and which website referred you to us. If you have an account and are signed in, these web analytics data are potentially tied to your IP address and user account until your account is no longer active.
Session recording on our website
To find out where our website is confusing, we use Microsoft Clarity, a tool that records how visitors use kindredtales.net: which pages they open, where they click and scroll, and how the pointer moves. We can play a visit back, much like watching a recording of the screen. What you type into a form field is hidden from these recordings, so we do not see it. Microsoft provides this tool to us and receives the recorded information; the Microsoft Privacy Statement explains how Microsoft handles it.
Session recording runs on our public website only. It does not run inside the app where you write and read your stories, and it does not run on the pages where you pay or where your order is confirmed. In places where the law requires your permission first, including the European Union, the United Kingdom and Switzerland, it runs only after you agree. Anywhere, you can switch it off: choose “Your Privacy Choices” at the bottom of any page on kindredtales.net, then “Turn off all cookies.” If your browser sends a Global Privacy Control signal, we do not record your visit.
Anti-bot assessments
We use third-party CAPTCHA services across our applications to mitigate brute force logins and as a means of spam protection. We have a legitimate interest in protecting our apps and the broader Internet community from credential-stuffing attacks and spam. When you log into your Kindred accounts or when you fill in certain forms, the CAPTCHA service evaluates various information (e.g., IP address, how long the visitor has been on the app, mouse movements) to try to detect if the activity is from an automated program instead of a human. We retain these data via our subprocessor indefinitely for use in spam mitigation.
Advertising and Cookies
Kindred Tales runs contextual ads on various third-party platforms such as Google, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter. Users who click on one of our ads will be sent to the related Kindred Tales marketing site or our general home page. Where permissible under law, we may load an ad-company script on a browser that sets a third-party cookie and sends information to the ad network to enable evaluation of the effectiveness of our ads, e.g., which ad they clicked and which keyword triggered the ad, and whether they performed certain actions such as clicking a button or submitting a form.
We also use persistent first-party cookies and some third-party cookies to store certain preferences, make it easier for you to use our applications, perform A/B testing as well as support some analytics.
A cookie is a piece of text stored by your browser. It may help remember login information and site preferences. It might also collect information such as your browser type, operating system, web pages visited, duration of visit, content viewed, and other click-stream data. You can adjust cookie retention settings and accept or block individual cookies in your browser settings, although our apps won’t work and other aspects of our service may not function properly if you turn cookies off.
Advertising and measurement
When you make a purchase, we measure which ads led to it so we don’t waste money on advertising that doesn’t work. To do this, we may share a limited set of information with advertising and measurement partners (including platforms such as Meta, Google, Microsoft, and TikTok, as well as affiliate networks): a one-way, irreversible hash (SHA-256) of the buyer’s email address, any advertising click identifiers associated with the visit, and the purchase amount. This sharing can happen in two ways: directly between our servers and theirs, and through small pieces of their code (often called tags or pixels) that may load in your browser on our website and on the page that confirms your order. Their code does not load on the page where you enter your payment details. We don’t share the contents of your stories for advertising, and we never sell your personal information.
We honor browser privacy signals, including Global Privacy Control (GPC) and Do-Not-Track. If we detect one of these signals, we treat it as a request to opt out of this kind of sharing. You can also opt out at any time, for any reason: choose “Your Privacy Choices” at the bottom of any page on kindredtales.net, then “Do not sell or share.” That choice is remembered for about a year in the browser you make it in. If you use more than one browser or device, or you clear your cookies, make it again, or turn on Global Privacy Control, which never lapses. One exception, so you aren’t surprised: if you reached us through an affiliate’s link, we still confirm the sale to that affiliate network so the affiliate can be paid. We send your opt-out choice along with it, and we send nothing about you beyond the affiliate’s own click reference, our order reference, and the amount.
For California residents: this conversion measurement may be considered a “sale” or “share” of personal information under California law. You can exercise your right to opt out of the sale or sharing of your personal information by enabling Global Privacy Control in your browser or by choosing “Your Privacy Choices” at the bottom of any page on kindredtales.net. Either one will opt you out.
Voluntary correspondence
When you email Kindred Tales with a question or to ask for help, we keep that correspondence, including your email address, so that we have a history of past correspondence to reference if you reach out in the future.
We also store the information you may volunteer, for example, written responses to surveys. If you agree to a customer interview, we may ask for your permission to record the conversation for future reference or use. We will only do so with your express consent.
How we approach mobile app permissions
We offer no native mobile applications at this time.
When we access or share your information
To provide products or services you’ve requested. We use some third-party subprocessors to help run our applications and provide the Services to you. We also use third-party processors for other business functions such as managing newsletter subscriptions, weekly questions for our life story subscribers, book publication, and sending customer surveys.
We may share your information at your direction if you integrate a third-party service into your use of our products. For example, we may allow you, at your option, to connect your Gmail account to your Kindred account so that you can more seamlessly log in.
No human looks at your content except for limited purposes, for example, if an error occurs that stops an automated process from working and requires manual intervention to fix. These are rare cases, and when they happen, we look for root-cause solutions as much as possible to avoid them recurring. We may also access your data if required in order to respond to legal processes (see “When required under applicable law” below).
To exclude you from seeing our ads. Where permissible by law and if you have a Kindred Tales account, we may share a one-way hash of your email address with ad companies to exclude you from seeing our ads.
To help you troubleshoot or squash a software bug, with your permission. If at any point we need to access your content to help you with a support case, we will ask for your consent before proceeding.
To investigate, prevent, or take action regarding restricted uses. Accessing a customer’s account when investigating potential abuse is a measure of last resort. We want to protect the privacy and safety of both our customers and the people reporting issues to us, and we do our best to balance those responsibilities throughout the process. If we discover you are using our products for a restricted purpose, we will take action as necessary, including notifying appropriate authorities where warranted.
Print publication: By nature of our service, manual assembly of PDF proofs by our staff for print publication and print vendor quality control of a final print book are required.
When required under applicable law.
Kindred Tales LLC is a U.S. company and all data infrastructure is located in the U.S.
Requests for user data. Our policy is to not respond to government requests for user data unless we are compelled by legal process or in limited circumstances in the event of an emergency request. However, if U.S. law enforcement authorities have the necessary warrant, criminal subpoena, or court order requiring us to share data, we must comply. Likewise, we will only respond to requests from government authorities outside the U.S. if compelled by the U.S. government through procedures outlined in a mutual legal assistance treaty or agreement. It is Kindred Tales’ policy to notify affected users before we share data unless we are legally prohibited from doing so, and except in some emergency cases.
Preservation requests. Similarly, Kindred Tales’ policy is to comply with requests to preserve data only if compelled by the U.S. Federal Stored Communications Act, 18 U.S.C. Section 2703(f), or by a properly served U.S. subpoena for civil matters. We do not share preserved data unless required by law or compelled by a court order that we choose not to appeal. Furthermore, unless we receive a proper warrant, court order, or subpoena before the required preservation period expires, we will destroy any preserved copies of customer data at the end of the preservation period.
If we are audited by a tax authority, we may be required to share billing-related information. If that happens, we will share only the minimum needed, such as billing addresses and tax exemption information.
Finally, if Kindred Tales LLC is acquired by or merges with another company, we’ll notify you well before any of your personal information is transferred or becomes subject to a different privacy policy. We don’t plan on that, but you should know where you stand if it happens.
Your rights with respect to your information
At Kindred Tales, we strive to apply the same data rights to all customers, regardless of their location. Some of these rights include:
Right to Know. You have the right to know what personal information is collected, used, shared, or sold. We outline both the categories and specific bits of data we collect, as well as how they are used, in this privacy policy.
Right of Access. This includes your right to access the personal information we gather about you, and your right to obtain information about the sharing, storage, security, and processing of that information.
Right to Correction. You have the right to request the correction of your personal information.
Right to Erasure / “To Be Forgotten”. This is your right to request, subject to certain limitations under applicable law, that your personal information be erased from our possession and, by extension, from all of our service providers. Fulfilling some data deletion requests may prevent you from using Kindred Tales’ services because our applications may then no longer work. In such cases, a data deletion request may result in closing your account.
Right to Complain. You have the right to make a complaint regarding our handling of your personal information with the appropriate supervisory authority.
Right to Restrict Processing. This is your right to request restrictions on how and why your personal information is used or processed, including opting out of the sale of personal information. (Again: we never have and never will sell your personal data.)
Right to Object. You have the right, in certain situations, to object to how or why your personal information is processed.
Right to Portability. You have the right to receive the personal information we have about you and the right to transmit it to another party. If you want to export data from your accounts, you can begin that process through our contact form at kindredtales.net/contact (choose “A privacy request”).
Right to not Be Subject to Automated Decision-Making. You have the right to object to and prevent any decision that could have a legal or similarly significant effect on you from being made solely based on automated processes. This right is limited if the decision is necessary for the performance of any contract between you and us, is allowed by applicable law, or is based on your explicit consent.
Right to Non-Discrimination. We do not and will not charge you a different amount to use our products, offer you different discounts, or give you a lower level of customer service because you have exercised your data privacy rights. However, the exercise of certain rights may, by virtue of your exercising those rights, prevent you from using our Services.
Many of these rights can be exercised by signing in and updating your account information.
If you have questions about exercising these rights or need assistance, please contact us through our contact form at kindredtales.net/contact or at Kindred Tales LLC, PO Box 781, Wyoming, MN 55092, USA. If an authorized agent is corresponding on your behalf, we will need written consent with a signature from the account holder before proceeding.
If you are in the EU or UK, you can contact your data protection authority to file a complaint or learn more about local privacy laws.
If you are in Canada
Kindred Tales is available to families in Canada, and Canada’s federal privacy law (PIPEDA) and provincial laws such as Quebec’s Law 25 give you rights we are glad to honor. This section gathers the Canada-specific points in one place; it adds to, and does not replace, the rights described above.
Consent. We collect, use, and share your personal information only for the purposes described in this policy. For most of what we do we rely on your consent; in a few cases, such as security and fraud prevention and records the law requires us to keep, we rely on another basis the law allows. You may withdraw your consent at any time, subject to legal or contractual limits and reasonable notice; withdrawing consent for information we need to provide the service may mean we can no longer provide it. Where a book involves other people, the person who shares their information with us confirms they have the consent needed to do so, as described in “Information about other people”.
Where your information lives. Your personal information is stored and processed in the United States by us and by the categories of service providers described in this policy. While it is there, it is subject to United States law, and government authorities there may in some circumstances have access to it under that law. We protect it with the same safeguards wherever it is processed.
Access, correction, and questions. You may ask what personal information we hold about you, who can see it and how long we keep it, ask us to correct it, or ask us to delete it, using our contact form at kindredtales.net/contact (choose “A privacy request”). We respond within 30 days. If the law permits us more time, we will tell you within those 30 days why we need it, how long we need, and that you may complain to the regulator. Our Privacy Officer is the person responsible for protecting personal information at Kindred Tales: they oversee who on our team may access it, how long we keep it and how we destroy it, and every complaint we receive; when you complain, we investigate, explain our decision, and tell you what we changed. The Privacy Officer can be reached through that form or by mail at Kindred Tales LLC, PO Box 781, Wyoming, MN 55092, USA.
Complaints. If you are not satisfied with how we have handled your personal information, you may complain to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, or, if you live in Quebec, to the Commission d’accès à l’information du Québec. We would welcome the chance to put things right first.
Your U.S. state privacy rights
This section sums things up for people in U.S. states with their own privacy laws: California, Virginia, Colorado, Connecticut, and a growing list of others. It doesn’t replace anything above; it just gathers the state-specific points in one place.
What we collect, in categories: information that identifies or can contact you (like your name and email); billing and payment information (remember, card numbers never touch our servers); the content you create (your stories, photos, and audio); usage and device information (like your IP address and how you use our apps); and the advertising identifiers described in “Advertising and measurement” above (a hashed email, ad click identifiers, and a purchase amount). We disclose information to the service providers who help us run Kindred Tales, and, for advertising measurement only, we “share” that limited advertising set with ad partners. We do not sell your personal information for money.
If you’re in California, you have the right to opt out of that “sale” or “sharing.” You can do it two ways, and either one works: turn on Global Privacy Control in your browser, or choose “Your Privacy Choices” at the bottom of any page on kindredtales.net. You also have the right to limit how we use sensitive personal information. Life stories can naturally include sensitive details about health, religion, and more, and we want to be clear: we use that content only to build your book and provide the service. We don’t use it to figure out characteristics about you for advertising.
Wherever you live, if your state grants them, you have rights to access, correct, and delete your personal information, and to appeal if we turn a request down. The simplest way to use any of these rights, or to appeal, is our contact form at kindredtales.net/contact (choose “A privacy request”). We’ll confirm we received your request and respond within the timeframe your state’s law requires, generally within 45 days. We won’t treat you differently for asking.
What happens when you delete content in your product accounts
In many of our applications, we give you the option to trash content or update it in real time. These trashing events take effect immediately and after that time, the trashed content cannot be accessed via the application and we are not able to retrieve it for you.
In the event your content is on a server with a backup policy, the trashed content or references to the trashed content may remain on our active servers for another 30 days, and copies of the content may be held in backups of our application databases for up to another 30 days after that. Altogether, any content trashed in your product accounts should be purged from all of our systems and logs within 90 days.
If you choose to close your account, your content becomes inaccessible right away. We delete it from our active systems within 60 days, and backup copies age out within 30 days after that. We may keep purchase, fraud-prevention, security, dispute, and legal-compliance records for as long as the law permits or requires. We cannot recall printed books, or copies that were already downloaded or shared with others.
Please refer to our cancellation policy for more details.
Books shared with other people
Many books are written by more than one person, and a Celebration or memorial book may hold stories from a whole family. So it helps to be clear about what deleting means when a book is shared. When you ask us to delete your account or your information, we remove your account and your personal information, and we delete anything you contributed that is not yet part of someone else’s book. Stories, photos, and recordings you already contributed to a book that belongs to someone else stay in that book, because it is theirs; we will remove your name from it where we can, but we do not delete other people’s memories to honor your request. We keep the emptied account record permanently, with no personal details in it, so that deleting your account does not take pieces of someone else’s book with it. A book that has already been printed cannot be recalled. We keep the purchase and printing records the law requires us to keep, for as long as it requires. If you are the owner of a shared book and you delete it, the people who contributed to it lose access to it, so please let them know first.
How long we keep your data, and what happens to inactive accounts
Your stories are meant to last, and our default is to keep them. We hold the content in your account for as long as your account is active, and we don’t make you do anything to keep it. The rest of this section is about a narrow, opposite situation: accounts that have been abandoned for a very long time.
We reserve the right (but do not promise) to delete data from accounts that have been inactive for a prolonged period, generally around 18 months. We think of this as housekeeping for genuinely abandoned material, not a deadline on your memories. By “inactive” we mean an account where no one has signed in for that period and that has no completed order and no book that has gone to print. We do not apply this to finished, ordered, or printed books, and we do not apply it to Celebration or Memorial books. We know a family may treasure a completed book for years without ever logging in again, and nothing here puts those at risk. This is a safety valve for old, empty accounts, and it is permissive: we may never use it at all, and to date we never have.
If we ever do plan to delete an inactive account this way, we won’t do it silently. We will first email the account holder at the address on file to let them know, and give a grace period of at least 30 days before anything is removed. Signing in during that window resets the clock and keeps the account, and you’ll also have the chance to export your content first. This is separate from deletion you request yourself: if you ask us to delete your account, we still aim to purge your content within 60 days, as described above.
Location of site and data
Our products and other web properties are operated in the United States. If you are located in the European Union, UK, or elsewhere outside of the United States, please be aware that any information you provide to us will be transferred to and stored in the United States. By using our websites or Services and/or providing us with your personal information, you consent to this transfer.
When transferring personal data from the EU
There are also a few ad hoc cases where EU personal data may be transferred to the U.S. in connection with Kindred Tales LLC operations, for instance, if an EU user signs up for our newsletter or participates in one of our surveys or buys swag from our company online store. Such transfers are only occasional and data is transferred under the Article 49(1)(b) derogation under GDPR and the UK version of GDPR.
International data transfers
We host and process personal data in the United States, using cloud providers and categories of service providers (hosting, payments, email, AI, analytics, and advertising partners) located there. If you are in the EU or UK, this means your personal data is transferred to and processed in the United States; where such transfers require additional protection, we rely on appropriate safeguards such as the EU Standard Contractual Clauses and the UK International Data Transfer Addendum.
If something goes wrong
We work to keep your stories, photos, and recordings safe. Your information is encrypted while it travels between you and us and while it is stored, access to it is limited to the people and systems that need it to provide the service, and we watch for unusual activity. No method of storage or transmission is completely secure, so we also plan for the possibility that something goes wrong anyway.
If a security incident puts your personal information at real risk, we will tell you what happened, what it means for you, and what we are doing about it. We will notify you and any regulator as the law requires, without undue delay.
Changes & questions
We may update this policy as needed to comply with relevant regulations and reflect any new practices. Whenever we make a significant change to our policies, we will refresh the date at the top of this page and take any other appropriate steps to notify users.
Have any questions, comments, or concerns about this privacy policy, your data, or your rights with respect to your information? Please get in touch through our contact form at kindredtales.net/contact and we’ll be happy to try to answer them!