Privacy Policy

This policy explains what personal information unsTree keeps, why, and what you can do about it. It is written to meet South Africa's Protection of Personal Information Act (POPIA). See also our Terms of Use.

1. Who is responsible

unsTree is a trading name of Britt Boerdery (Pty) Ltd
Registration number: 1966/012354/07
VAT number: 4290110370
Registered address: 36 Charl Road, Lichtenburg, 2740, South Africa
Information Officer: Ian Britt (director)
Privacy and legal requests: privacy@unstree.com
Help with payments and the site: support@unstree.com

2. What we keep

• Your account: email address, display name, language, country (if you give it), when you agreed to these terms, and who invited you (if you joined through an invite link).
• Signing in with Google (if you choose it): Google sends us your email address, name and profile picture link. We use the email address to find or create your account, and the name as your display name on a new account. We never see your Google password, and Google learns that you signed in to unsTree.
• Your family tree: the people, names, dates, places, stories, notes, photos and scans you add. This can include information about living relatives.
• Problem reports: what you write, plus the page you were on, your browser and screen size.
• Technical records: short-lived server logs (such as addresses visited and errors) to keep the site working and secure.
• Payments (when available): handled by Paddle. We receive only what we need, such as what you bought - never your card details.

3. Why we keep it

• To run your account and show your tree to you and the people you invite.
• To send sign-in emails and important notices, such as a storage plan ending.
• To fix problems, keep the site secure, and keep backups.
• To meet legal duties, such as tax records for payments.

We do not sell personal information, and we do not use it for advertising profiles. We never share one user's tree with another user.

Shared library of public records: when the AI research helper finds a record on a public website and you add it to a person who has died, we keep the record's web address and what the record itself shows (its type, the names in it, the year and the place) in a shared library, so the AI can find it again for other members. The library does not say who found the record or which tree it is in, and nothing else from your tree is copied. To protect living people, a record is only kept when it is at least 100 years old, or when it is a death, burial or gravestone record, which is kept with only the name of the person who died.

4. Information about other people

When you add relatives, you are deciding to keep information about them. Keep it to what your family tree needs, be especially careful with living people, and remove information if a living relative asks you to. Trees are private, so only you and the people you invite can see it.

5. Who helps us run unsTree

These companies process information for us, under contracts that require them to protect it:

• Supabase - database and sign-in (servers in London, United Kingdom).
• Cloudflare - website hosting, file storage, and the automatic "are you human" check (Turnstile) on the sign-in page, which looks at basic browser signals to stop bots (servers in Western Europe and worldwide). Cloudflare Web Analytics also counts page visits for us (which pages are visited, roughly from which country, on which kind of device and from which website). It uses no cookies and does not follow you across sites.
• Paddle - payments: your name, email, country and payment details are handled by Paddle, not by us.
• Resend - sending emails (servers in Ireland).
• Anthropic (Claude) - only when you use the AI research helper: your question, earlier questions in the same conversation, and what your tree says about that person and their close family. Under Anthropic's commercial terms this is not used to train its AI (servers in the United States and other countries).

This means your information is stored outside South Africa, in countries with data-protection laws similar to POPIA, or under contracts that give the same protection.

6. Cookies

We use only cookies the site needs to work:

• sign-in cookies, to keep you signed in;
• a language cookie, to remember your language;
• an invite cookie, to remember whose invite link you followed until you sign up (up to 30 days).

We do not use advertising or tracking cookies. Our visitor counting (Cloudflare Web Analytics) uses no cookies at all. When you buy credits, Paddle's checkout may set its own cookies, which are needed to take the payment.

7. How long we keep it

• Your account and tree: until you delete them.
• Files above 250 MB after a storage plan ends: deleted 90 days after the end date (see the Terms).
• Backups: nightly copies are kept for 35 days, and monthly copies for 12 months. Deleted information disappears from backups when they expire.
• Problem reports: until the problem is dealt with, and at most 2 years.
• Payment records: as long as tax law requires.

8. Keeping it safe

Information is sent encrypted, files and trees are private by default, and the database itself refuses access to anyone not invited to a tree. If a security breach affects your information, we will tell you and the Information Regulator as the law requires.

9. Children

You must be 18 or older to open an account. Family trees may include children; take extra care with their information and keep the tree private to close family.

10. Your rights

• See the information we hold about you, and correct it.
• Have your tree, your files, or your whole account deleted.
• Object to how we use your information.
• Complain to the Information Regulator of South Africa (inforegulator.org.za) if you are not happy with how we handle your information.

You can correct and delete people, records and photos in your tree yourself. For anything else, contact our Information Officer using the details in section 1.

11. Changes

If we change this policy, we will ask you to agree to the new version the next time you visit. The date of this version is shown at the top.