Privacy Policy

Effective August 22, 2026 · Yaad Inc. · hello@yaad.ai

1. What this policy covers

Yaad is a private family-memory service. It interviews people about their lives, preserves what they say, and helps a family turn those conversations into written chapters and books with help from artificial intelligence.

This policy explains what Yaad does with personal information when you visit our site, create an account, sit for an interview, contribute to or view a family book, contact us, or appear in material that someone else gives to Yaad.

Yaad books are private by default. A book becomes visible to another person only when someone with authority over it deliberately shares it. Yaad is not a confidential adviser, and a person who can see something can make their own copy.

2. The people in a family book

Family memory can involve several people with distinct rights:

• Book owner: creates or controls a book and manages invitations.
• Storyteller or subject: the person whose life and voice are recorded.
• Contributor: someone invited to add a memory, photograph, or document.
• Viewer: someone given permission to see shared material.
• Mentioned or depicted person: anyone appearing in a story, image, recording, or generated draft.

These roles can overlap. Controlling the account does not extinguish anyone else's privacy rights. Storytellers, contributors, and people who appear in material can contact us directly under section 10.

3. What we collect

Sensitive information. Family stories can reveal health, religion, ethnicity, sexuality, bereavement, conflict, finances, or politics. Please provide only what is needed for the story you want to preserve. We do not use sensitive story categories for advertising or general-purpose model training.

Voice. We record and store voice to conduct and preserve interviews. We do not use voiceprints to identify or authenticate anyone and do not offer voice matching. We would give notice and obtain any legally required consent before that changed.

4. Where information comes from

We receive information from account holders, storytellers, contributors, and viewers; from family members who invite someone or provide material about them; from devices, browsers, and providers that deliver and secure Yaad; from a book's existing contents when Yaad is asked to recall or transform them; and from support, security, and operational records.

If you provide information about another person, you must have a proper basis to do so and respect that person's wishes—especially before recording or uploading their voice, image, or private story.

5. What we use information for

1. Creating and securing accounts and managing access.
2. Conducting, transcribing, recovering, and preserving interviews.
3. Organising, searching, recalling, summarising, and drafting family-memory material.
4. Producing requested books, chapters, images, audio, citations, and provenance.
5. Letting authorised family members contribute, view, and manage access.
6. Sending invitations, access notices, and transactional messages.
7. Providing support and handling correction, export, restriction, and deletion requests.
8. Detecting abuse, protecting users, debugging failures, and securing the service.
9. Measuring provider usage and cost and preventing runaway spend.
10. Complying with law and enforcing our Terms.
11. Producing aggregate or de-identified statistics that do not reasonably identify anyone.

6. How we use artificial intelligence

Yaad uses AI throughout the service:

Spoken playback

Yaad can read text aloud in a generic, pre-built synthetic voice attributed to a storyteller, including someone who has died. It is not a clone or recreation of that person's voice, and Yaad does not build per-person voice models from recordings. It can be wrong and is not an authentic recording of that person speaking. Do not present it as one.

Accuracy

AI can mishear speech, merge events, omit context, or state something confidently and wrongly. Treat generated memories, chapters, citations, images, and spoken passages as drafts. Review and correct them before relying on or sharing them. They are not verified historical records and should not support medical, legal, financial, genealogical, identity, or emergency decisions.

Training and Google Gemini

We do not use private family content to train a general-purpose Yaad model and do not authorise providers to use it for general model improvement. Any future research or training programme would require a separate, optional choice.

Yaad's AI features run primarily on the paid Google Gemini API. Google states that paid prompts and responses are not used to improve its products. Google may retain prompts, context, and responses for up to 55 days for abuse monitoring. We do not claim zero data retention for our production project.

Human access

Authorised support and security staff may access content when needed to resolve a reported problem, investigate abuse or a security incident, or comply with law. Access is limited, purposeful, and audited. Providers may access data under their own security and abuse-monitoring processes.

Diagnostic recording during beta

During beta, Yaad captures restricted diagnostic traces of live interviews to investigate audio mishearing and dead-air faults. These traces include the full text of what the storyteller and AI said and technical instructions and decisions for the turn.

• Administrators can access traces only through a restricted internal route.
• Collection stops automatically on September 30, 2026 unless this policy and the underlying configuration are deliberately updated.
• Approved subject deletion removes these traces with the rest of the session data.
• While tracing operates, a complete self-service export is unavailable; contact us and we will assemble a copy.

7. When we disclose information

People an authorised owner chooses

Owners and authorised users may invite family members, accept contributions, or share material. Recipients can make copies. Removing access stops future access through Yaad but cannot retrieve screenshots, downloads, or forwarded copies outside Yaad.

Service providers

Specialist providers support hosting and storage, authentication, AI processing, transactional email, error monitoring, security, and cost operations. They may process information only as our contracts and applicable law allow. Their independent billing, platform-security, or abuse-prevention activities follow their own notices.

Legal, safety, and business reasons

We may preserve or disclose information where reasonably necessary to comply with law or valid legal process; protect someone from serious harm; investigate fraud, abuse, or a security incident; enforce our Terms; or establish or defend legal claims.

Information may transfer in a merger, financing, reorganisation, sale, or insolvency. The commitments in this policy—especially those concerning training, advertising, and sale of personal information—travel with the data. We will give notice before a transfer changes how private family content is used.

8. What we do not do

• We do not sell personal information.
• We do not share it for cross-context behavioural advertising.
• We do not target advertising using family content or sensitive story categories.
• We do not make private books public.
• We do not claim ownership of a family's stories, recordings, or photographs.
• We do not train general-purpose models on private family content.

9. Retention and deletion

We keep information only as reasonably needed to run the book, honour access choices, secure and operate Yaad, meet legal obligations, and resolve disputes.

• Book and account content: while active or until an authorised deletion completes.
• Access records: while needed to administer access and document meaningful permission changes.
• Operational records: for bounded reliability, fraud-prevention, compliance, and accounting periods.
• Provider records: according to provider contracts and settings; some expire on the provider's schedule.
• Restore windows: our primary database supports point-in-time recovery for up to 30 days. Stored media has no equivalent operator-restorable window. Platform recovery history rolls off automatically and cannot be purged for one person.

What happens when you ask us to delete

1. We verify who is asking and their authority or connection.
2. We remove access first.
3. We run deletion across interviews, media, generated files, search indexes, and live-session state.
4. The account deletion page shows whether a self-service request is pending or complete. For a request made through support, we reply by email.

Minimal audit or security records, legal holds, provider logs awaiting expiry, rolling restore windows, and copies a recipient already made outside Yaad may remain. When a family disagrees, we may restrict disputed material while verifying identities, authority, and competing interests.

10. Your choices and rights

Depending on applicable law and your relationship to a book, you may ask us to:

• explain whether and how we process your information;
• provide access or an available copy;
• correct inaccurate information;
• delete information, subject to section 9;
• restrict or object to processing while a dispute is reviewed;
• record withdrawal of consent;
• review or appeal a decision, or direct you to a regulator; and
• work with an authorised agent where the law permits.

How to make a request

To delete your Yaad account and its associated data, use our account deletion page in the app or a web browser. You do not need to reinstall the app. The page shows whether your request is pending or complete; deleting the app alone does not delete your account.

Email hello@yaad.ai. Tell us what you want, which book or person is involved, and how you are connected. We may request proportionate proof of identity or authority. We respond within the periods required by applicable law and will explain any permitted extension. Ordinary requests are free unless law permits us to decline or charge for excessive, repetitive, or manifestly unfounded requests.

Copies of your data

A printable book export is available, but a book is not a complete copy of everything Yaad holds. Ask us for a fuller copy. Some information may need to be omitted to protect another person's rights, security, privilege, or legal obligations.

If you appear in someone else's book

You do not need a Yaad account or the book owner's permission to contact us. Tell us what concerns you and whether you seek correction, restriction, or removal. We will verify your identity and connection, notify the owner where lawful and appropriate, and decide the request on its merits. We may restrict contested material during review and will not reveal unrelated private family content.

11. Security

We use administrative, technical, and organisational measures suited to private family content, including access controls, least-privilege service access, encryption in transit, protected storage, redaction of error-reporting data, release controls, audit logging, and tested deletion workflows. No service can promise perfect security. Protect your account, share deliberately, and contact us promptly if access appears wrong.

12. International processing

Yaad and its providers process information in the United States and other countries where they operate. Those countries can have different data-protection rules. We use contractual, organisational, and technical safeguards where applicable law requires them.

13. Adults only

Yaad is for adults aged 18 or older and is not directed to children. Do not create an account for a child or ask a child to use the service. Family stories may mention children; the adult providing that material is responsible for having authority and handling it sensitively. Contact us if you believe a child has created an account or submitted information.

14. Changes to this policy

We may update this policy as features, providers, and legal obligations change. We will post a new effective date and give additional prominent notice of material changes. A policy update will never turn private family content into training or advertising data; that would require a separate, optional choice from the person concerned.

15. Contact

For privacy, support, safety, correction, export, restriction, or deletion requests, email hello@yaad.ai. You may also complain to the privacy or consumer-protection authority in your jurisdiction.

Effective and last updated August 22, 2026.