Privacy

Recordings of your parent, used to make your parent’s book.

We record five telephone conversations, we turn them into the four files you bought, and that is the entire purpose. The recordings are never sold, never shared outside your family, and never used to train any artificial intelligence. Either of you can have any of it deleted, at any time, without giving a reason.

Everything below is the same three sentences with the detail filled in. If something here contradicts what the pitch page told you, this page is the one that binds us, and we would like to know about the contradiction so we can fix it.

The person paying and the person talking are not the same person.

Almost every privacy policy is written to whoever holds the credit card. Here the credit card and the life story belong to two different people, and the one who did not pay is the one with more at stake.

Three things, and one of them is the whole product.

• From the family member. Your name, your email address, a telephone number to reach you on, and the storyteller’s first name and number so we can call them. That is what the service needs in order to happen at all.
• From the storyteller. The recordings of the five calls, and the written transcripts made from them. This is not metadata. It is a person’s account of their own life, given aloud, and we treat it as the most sensitive thing we hold — because it is.
• Photographs, if you send any. These are optional. The book is complete without them and a family who sends none loses nothing they paid for. If you do send them, we hold them with the rest of the season’s files, use them for the book and nothing else, and destroy them on the same schedule. Anyone who appears in a photograph has the same rights over it as the storyteller has over the recordings, whether or not they ever sat for a call.
• The signed consent forms. One page each from you and from the storyteller. We keep them because they are the record of permission being given, and they are destroyed on the same schedule as everything else.
• Payment details. Handled by our payment processor. Your card number never reaches us and we could not store it if we wanted to; what we see is that a payment succeeded, and the last four digits, so we can find your order when you write to us.

This website itself collects nothing. There is no analytics script, no advertising pixel, no tracking of any kind, and no cookie. The single thing stored in your browser is whether you last read the page in the dark or the light theme, which never leaves your device and which you can clear by clearing your browser data.

Making the four files, and nothing else.

The recordings and transcripts are used to produce the keepsakes you bought — the self-contained edition, the print-ready PDF of the book, the short reel, and the full call recordings — and to carry names and details from one call to the next so the conversations join up instead of starting over.

Carrying those details forward means building a working picture of what your parent has told us — the people, the places and the dates in their account, drawn out of their own transcripts and held together so that a story mentioned in the first call can be returned to in the fourth, and so the finished book can be ordered into chapters rather than five loose conversations. It is assembled from their words and used for nothing else. It is not a profile, it is never sold or shared, and it is destroyed on the same schedule as the recordings it came from.

Your contact details are used to arrange the calls, to send the finished files, and to answer you when you write to us. We do not send marketing, because there is nothing to market to you afterwards: the season begins, it ends, and then you have it.

The four hard limits.

• We never train on your recordings. Not our own systems, and not anybody else’s. The conversations are not training data and will not become training data.
• We never sell or rent any of it. Not the recordings, not the transcripts, not your email address, not to anyone, under any circumstances, including if the business is sold — see below.
• We never share the recordings outside your family. No publication, no promotional use, no sample reels, no case studies. The illustrative passages on the pitch page are invented composites for exactly this reason.
• We never make a synthetic copy of your parent. No voice clone, no double, no avatar, no continuation of their speech after they are gone. We preserve the voice; we do not imitate it, and we will not build the ability to.

Both of you agree in writing, and she is told on the call.

Before the first call, both the family member and the storyteller sign a one-page consent. It says the calls are recorded, what the recordings are for, and that either of them can stop or delete at any time.

The interviewer, June, is an artificial intelligence, and she says so plainly at the start of the first call and again whenever she is asked. She also states that the call is being recorded. Consent on paper and disclosure aloud are two different safeguards and we do both, because a signature collected from an adult child is not the same as the storyteller being told, in the moment, by the voice on the line.

Recording law differs from state to state — some require only one party to agree, others require everyone on the call. We take written consent from both parties everywhere, rather than working out the minimum each state allows, because the stricter rule is the one we would want applied to our own families.

The storyteller may decline any question, end any call, or stop the season entirely, and nothing about that is made awkward. “Let’s leave that one” is a complete answer and June moves on.

A short list of companies, and what each one sees.

Producing this service means the audio passes through other companies. Pretending otherwise would be the easiest lie on this page, so here is who they are and what each one sees.

• Vapi runs June. It carries the conversation and wires the companies below together, rather than doing any of it alone — which is why naming only Vapi here would hide the rest of them.
• Twilio, underneath Vapi, is the telephone company: it routes the actual call to your parent’s handset.
• Deepgram does two jobs: it turns what your parent says into text — the transcript the book is set from — and it produces the synthetic voice June speaks in.
• Anthropic provides Claude, the language model behind June: the part that works out what she asks next during the call, and that organises the transcripts afterwards.
• ElevenLabs is the second voice provider, used when the first is unavailable.
• No storage company at all. Recordings, transcripts, photographs and finished keepsakes are held on a machine we control physically, as ordinary files, one folder per storyteller — not uploaded to a cloud storage account, and not in a database anyone could query across families.
• Stripe takes the payment. Your card details go from your own browser to Stripe without passing through us — we never hold them, and could not if we wanted to.

Each is used only to deliver this service, and none is permitted to use your recordings for its own purposes. That has to be a contractual limit rather than an assumption: the no-training promise above is worth exactly what our agreement with each of these companies says, and it is written into all of them before any family is called.

Vapi keeps its own copy of the call audio for fourteen days, and then deletes it. That is shorter than the twelve months we keep ours, and it is not a copy we hold — so we tell you it exists rather than let you assume the recording only ever lived with us. Everywhere else on this page that we say “we delete it,” this is the kind of thing we mean it to cover.

One thing worth saying plainly, because the machinery above can do it and we do not. The voice June speaks in is synthetic and belongs to no one — chosen so that she never sounds as though she is impersonating a person. One of the two companies that can produce it, ElevenLabs, is also the best-known tool in the world for copying a real person’s voice from a recording. That capability is part of their product, not of ours. Your parent’s voice is never sent to be copied, no voice model of them is ever made, and of the four limits above this is the one we would most want to be held to.

We tell you this because you could reasonably have worked it out and wondered why we had not mentioned it. A promise not to clone your parent’s voice means more, not less, when we say out loud that the tool sitting next to it could.

Beyond that list, we disclose recordings to no one — with the single exception of a valid court order, which we would resist to the extent the law allows and tell you about unless we were forbidden to.

Delete anything, ever, and it is gone.

Either the storyteller or the family member can ask us to delete a passage, a whole call, or everything, at any point — during the season or years afterwards. We do it, we confirm it in writing, and we do not ask why.

Deletion reaches what we derived from a recording as well as the recording itself: the transcript, and the working picture described above. A promise to destroy the tape while quietly keeping everything we had extracted from it would not be a promise worth making.

We keep the recordings and transcripts while we are making your keepsakes, and for twelve months after we deliver them, so that we can send the files again if you lose them. Twelve months is set to cover the year in which people actually discover something is gone — a laptop that dies, a phone replaced, a parent’s death and nobody able to find the folder. When it expires they are permanently destroyed as a matter of course, without you having to ask and without us writing first to check.

That is a ceiling, not a plan to hold anything for a year. If either of you asks us to delete sooner, we delete sooner, and the twelve months stops applying. Destruction is permanent and covers our backups on their own cycle, which completes shortly after the live copies go — no archive, no cold storage, and no copy kept just in case.

The one thing we cannot delete is the copy you already have. The files are yours, they arrive on your own device, and that is deliberate — the keepsake does not live behind our login and does not stop working if we do. It also means that once we have sent them, taking them back is out of our hands.

If this business ever closes or is sold, the recordings are not an asset that transfers. They would be deleted, and you would be told before that happened.

Ask, and we answer within thirty days.

Depending on where you live you may have formal rights over this data. We extend all of them to both the family member and the storyteller regardless of where either of you lives, because sorting families into tiers by state would be a strange way to run this.

• Know what we hold about you, and why.
• Get a copy of it, in a form you can actually open.
• Correct anything wrong in it.
• Delete any of it, as described above.
• Complain, to us and to your state regulator, without us treating you any differently for it.

Write to support@sbkinship.com and we will answer within thirty days. There is no charge, and there is no form to fill in — a sentence in an email is enough.

Security, children, and changes to this page.

Security. Everything that passes between us and the companies named above travels over an encrypted connection. The machine your parent’s files live on is encrypted at rest, so a lost or stolen laptop is a lost laptop and not a disclosure. The backups are encrypted separately with AES-256, and verified by being read back in full before we are willing to call them a backup at all — an archive we have not proved we can open is not a safeguard, it is a hope.

While the work is in progress the files are not held in a cloud account but on a machine we control physically, which is why there is no storage company on the list above. That means physical control of that machine is itself one of the safeguards, and we treat it that way. Access is limited to what is needed to produce your files. No system is perfect and we will not claim ours is; if there were ever a breach affecting your recordings we would tell you promptly and directly, not through a notice posted quietly on a website.

Children. This service is bought by adults and recorded with adults. It is not directed at anyone under eighteen and we do not knowingly collect anything from them. If a child’s voice ends up on a call — a grandchild in the room — tell us and we will cut it.

Changes. If this page changes, the date at the top changes with it. If a change would weaken any of the four hard limits above, we will email every family we hold recordings for, before it takes effect, rather than relying on you to re-read a page you read once.

Contact. Heirloom is a service of S&B Kinship, LLC. Write to support@sbkinship.com about anything on this page, including the parts you think are wrong.