Privacy policy

Family File is a service for storing important personal and household information, and sharing specific parts of it with people you choose, when a situation you’ve configured (like travelling, a hospital stay, or your death) actually happens. This page explains what we collect, why, who else can see it, and what choices you have.

Information we collect

Account information: your email address and, if you choose to provide it, your name. Sign-in itself is handled by our authentication provider (Clerk) - we never see or store your password.

Information you choose to store: whatever you add to your vault - items, notes, and any documents or photos you attach, organized into categories you pick (e.g. Home, Finances, Medical).

Trusted contact details: the name, email, and (optionally) phone number of anyone you add as a trusted contact, so we can identify them and email them an access link when appropriate.

How we use this information

To run the service: storing what you enter, sending the emails the product depends on (an access link when a situation activates, a reminder you’ve scheduled, a Quick Share link), and processing payment for a paid subscription. We don’t use your information for advertising, and we don’t sell it to anyone.

Sharing with your trusted contacts

This is the core of what the product does, so it’s worth explaining plainly. You decide, category by category, what each trusted contact can see, and under what situation. That information only becomes visible to them once the matching situation is triggered - either by you directly (e.g. sending a Heading Out notice before a trip), or, for Hospital and Death specifically, by a “key contact” you’ve designated, since you may not be able to act yourself in those situations.

A trusted contact views what’s been shared with them through a private, unguessable link emailed to them - they don’t need an account or password of their own. That view is read-only: they can never edit, delete, or add anything to your vault.

What happens after you pass away

Information you’ve shared with a trusted contact for your Death situation stays available to them - by design, so they can actually use it to settle your affairs. We don’t automatically delete a vault after an owner’s death. A request from someone other than the account holder (a next of kin or executor, say) to close the account or remove data isn’t yet a self-service option - contact us at support@familyfile.life and we’ll handle it directly.

How long we keep your information

We keep your information for as long as your account exists. You can permanently delete your account and everything in it at any time from your Account page - this removes your vault, every item, every trusted contact, and every access link immediately, and can’t be undone. A copy may briefly persist in routine backups for a limited period afterward, as is normal for any hosted service, before it’s fully purged.

Who else can access your information

We use a small number of service providers to run Family File, each of whom can access information only as needed to provide their part of the service - never to use it for their own purposes:

• Supabase - our database and file storage.
• Vercel - hosting for the application itself.
• Clerk - sign-in and account authentication.
• Resend - sending the emails the product relies on.
• Polar - payment processing for a paid subscription; Polar handles your payment details directly, we never see or store your card information.

Security

Sensitive item notes are encrypted before they’re stored, on top of our hosting provider’s own encryption at rest. Attached documents live in a private storage location and are only ever served through short-lived, one-time links, never a permanent public URL. Every trusted-contact and Quick Share link uses a long, random token rather than anything guessable.

Your choices

You can review and edit most of what you’ve stored at any time from within the app. You can remove a trusted contact’s access, revoke a Quick Share link, or delete your entire account and all its data yourself, whenever you choose. For anything else - a question about what we hold, or a request we haven’t made self-service yet - email support@familyfile.life.

Children

Family File isn’t directed at children, and we don’t knowingly collect information from anyone under 16.

Changes to this policy

If we make a meaningful change to how we handle your information, we’ll update this page and change the date at the top.

Contact us

Questions about this policy or your information? Email support@familyfile.life.