Privacy Policy

Information you provide directly

• Account information — your email address and password when you register.
• Profile information — your full name, preferred first name, and profile photo.
• Voice recordings — audio files you record within the app, which may contain personal stories, names of family members, and other sensitive personal details.
• Photos — images and captions you attach to stories.
• Story titles — titles you assign to your recordings.
• Family group details — family group names and your membership status within a group.

Information we generate from your content

• Transcripts — text transcriptions of your audio recordings, stored encrypted using AES-256-GCM.
• Story summaries — AI-generated 2–3 sentence recaps of your stories, also stored encrypted.
• Extracted entities — names of people, places, and dates/events automatically identified from your transcripts.
• Story embeddings — numerical vector representations of your stories used to group similar memories together (Story Variations feature).
• Discrepancy analysis — notes on how the same event or person is described differently across multiple stories.

Usage and technical information

• Recording duration — total seconds recorded per month, used to enforce subscription tier limits (15 min for Free, 3 hours for Story Teller, 30 hours for Family).
• Overage purchases — when Family plan users exceed 30 hours in a calendar month, one-time payment records (5-hour blocks at $10 each) are stored to track additional recording allowance.
• Listen counts — how many times each story has been played back.
• Notification preferences — your per-type opt-in/opt-out settings for weekly prompts and family activity alerts.
• Subscription and billing status — your subscription tier, status, and expiration date, and whether you subscribed on heirlore.app or through the App Store.
• App Store purchase records — if you subscribe in the iOS app, Apple sends us the transaction ID, the plan you bought, its renewal and expiry dates, and whether it has been refunded. We use these only to unlock your plan. Apple does not share your payment details with us.
• Referral relationships — if you share an invite link and someone upgrades, a referral record is created to attribute account credits.

Website analytics and advertising

On our marketing website (heirlore.app) we use cookies and similar technologies from Google and Meta to measure how our advertising performs. These record which ad or link brought you to the site, which pages you viewed, and whether you created an account, and they may set an identifier in your browser that those companies can associate with you across other websites. This applies to the public website only — your stories, recordings, transcripts, and photos are never shared with advertising platforms.

• To provide the app's core features: recording, transcription, AI analysis, playback, and family sharing.
• To enforce subscription limits, process payments, and verify App Store purchases with Apple.
• To send you optional story prompt and family activity notifications (only if you opt in).
• To send transactional emails such as password resets and billing confirmations.
• To improve the app, diagnose technical problems, and analyze usage patterns internally.
• To manage referral credits.
• To measure which ads and channels bring people to our website, on the public website only.

We never sell or share your stories, recordings, transcripts, photos, or any other content you create. We do use advertising and analytics cookies on our public marketing website, as described in Section 3. Under some state privacy laws — including California's CPRA — that use of advertising cookies may itself be treated as a “sale” or “share” of personal information, even though no money changes hands and none of your story content is involved. Section 7 explains how to opt out.

We use the following third-party services to operate HeirLore.

If you join a family group and enable story sharing, other members of your family group can read your story titles, summaries, and transcripts, and listen to your recordings. Sharing is off by default when you first join a family group. You can turn sharing on or off at any time in Settings.

• Encrypted connections (HTTPS/TLS) for all data in transit.
• AES-256-GCM encryption for story transcripts, titles, and summaries stored in our database.
• Row-level security policies to ensure users can only access their own data and authorized family group data.
• Audio files and photos are stored in access-controlled cloud storage.

No method of transmission over the internet is 100% secure. While we use industry-standard safeguards, we cannot guarantee absolute security.

We retain your data for as long as your account is active. If you delete your account, all of your personal data — including stories, recordings, transcripts, photos, extracted entities, and billing records — is permanently and irreversibly deleted from our systems. This action cannot be undone.

Deleting your HeirLore account does not cancel a subscription bought through the App Store, and Apple keeps its own records of that purchase. Cancel it in your Apple Account settings.

Individual stories and recordings can also be deleted at any time from within the app.

• Access and correction — You can view and update your profile information at any time in Settings.
• Deletion — You can permanently delete your account and all associated data from Settings → Account.
• Notifications — You can disable or customize notifications at any time in Settings.
• Family sharing — You can opt out of sharing your stories with family members at any time in Settings.
• Data portability — You can export your completed stories as a PDF at any time from within a story (Story Teller plan or higher required).
• Advertising and analytics— You can opt out of the cookies described in Section 3 using your browser's cookie controls or tracking protection, an ad blocker, or a Global Privacy Control signal. Opting out has no effect on your account or your stories. You can also email us at HeirLore@kilndigitallabs.com and we will process the request for you.

If you are located in the European Economic Area (EEA), the United Kingdom, or California, you may have additional rights under the GDPR, UK GDPR, or CCPA/CPRA, including the right to access, correct, delete, or port your personal data, and the right to object to or restrict certain processing. To exercise those rights, contact us at HeirLore@kilndigitallabs.com.

HeirLore is intended for users who are 18 years of age or older. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 13. If you believe a child under 13 has provided us with personal information, please contact us at HeirLore@kilndigitallabs.com and we will promptly delete it.

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. When we do, we will update the effective date at the top of this page. For significant changes, we will notify you via in-app notice or email.

If you have questions about this Privacy Policy or how we handle your data, please contact us:

Email: HeirLore@kilndigitallabs.com
Company: Kiln Digital Labs LLC