Legal

Gathertell Privacy Policy

Last updated: September 3, 2026

Gathertell is operated by BuzDigital LLC, doing business as Gathertell ("Gathertell," "we," "us"). Gathertell helps families collect photos and videos, record the voices and stories behind them, and share those memories with the people they choose.

This policy explains what information we collect, how we use it, who can see it, and the choices you have. It applies to the Gathertell apps, gathertell.com, and app.gathertell.com.

The short version: your memories belong to you and your family. We do not sell your personal information. We do not show ads. We do not use advertising trackers. Your content is private by default and visible only to the people you or your family invite, or to people who receive a share link you create.

1. What We Collect

Account information

When you create an account we collect:

• Your email address and a password. We store your password in protected (hashed) form and never see it in plain text.
• If you sign in with Google, we receive your name, email address, and basic profile information from Google. See the "Google User Data" section below.
• A display name, and optionally a handle and profile photo, that you choose.
• Basic account records such as when you signed up, when you last signed in, your subscription tier, and how much storage and processing you have used.

Your memories

The heart of Gathertell is the content you and your family add:

• Photos and videos you upload from your device or import from Google Photos.
• Voice and video recordings, made when someone tells the story behind a photo or answers a question card.
• Transcripts of those recordings, created by an automated speech-to-text service. Transcripts include the full text, word timing, and which speaker said what.
• Films (slideshows) that Gathertell renders from your photos and recordings.
• Music files you upload to use as background music in your films.
• Captions, comments, album titles, and the order you arrange things in.

We also store technical details about your media, such as file size, dimensions, duration, and a fingerprint used to detect duplicate files. We do not read or use location data embedded in your photos or videos, and the mobile app does not request access to photo location data.

People, tags, and family relationships

Gathertell lets your family describe who is who. This information is written by you and your family members, not guessed by software:

• A roster of people (we call them speakers): names, relationship to the family, an optional photo, and whether the person is a minor.
• Tags saying who appears in a photo, applied by a person, not by facial recognition.
• Family tree information your family chooses to enter: parent, child, and partner relationships, dates, pronouns, gender identity, birth year, and notes. Some of this can be sensitive, such as adoption or estrangement. A relationship can be marked sensitive, and each person in the tree has controls to hide how they are labeled, hide themselves from exports, or override the wording used about them.

Because this information is authored by family members about each other, please only enter details the person would be comfortable with. The person who enters information about someone else is responsible for having that person's permission.

Consent records

Before a recording of someone can be published in Gathertell, the app records their consent. A consent record includes what they agreed to (for example recording, storage, sharing within an album, use in films, or export), how they agreed (for example a short recorded verbal "yes," a tap, or a written release), who captured it, and when. If consent is given verbally, we store that short audio clip. Consent can be revoked, and revoked recordings stop being shown.

Waitlist and contact information

If you join our waitlist we collect your email address and whether you agreed to be contacted. To prevent abuse of the signup form we keep a scrambled (salted and hashed) version of the submitting network address, which cannot be turned back into the address itself. We do not store the raw address from that form.

Device data and diagnostics

We keep this deliberately minimal:

• The apps contain no advertising trackers and no third-party analytics. They do include a crash reporter (Sentry) that, when the app fails, freezes or is shut down by the system, sends a technical report: the error, where in the code it happened, the device model and operating system version, the app version, an anonymous installation id, and other technical facts about the device's state at that moment, such as free memory and storage, battery level, locale and time zone, the screens just visited, and the list of software libraries in the app. Crash reports never include your photos, recordings, names, email address, network address or the content of what you typed.
• Our websites do not use analytics cookies or tracking pixels.
• We do not collect advertising identifiers or device fingerprints.
• We do not collect your device's location.
• Like nearly all internet services, the infrastructure that runs Gathertell keeps standard server logs, which can include network addresses and request information, used for security and to keep the service running.

The mobile app asks for microphone access (to make recordings), camera access (to record video), and photo library access (to upload photos and save finished films). These permissions are used only for those features.

2. How We Use Your Information

We use your information to:

• Operate the service: store your media, show it to the right people, and keep your account working.
• Transcribe recordings, so spoken stories become searchable text and captions.
• Organize with AI assistance: we analyze photos to group similar ones into suggested "Memories" albums, and we detect where faces are in a photo (a count and a framing box only) so films can pan and zoom to the right spot. We do not use facial recognition. We never identify who is in a photo by their face, and we never create face templates.
• Render films: our own servers turn your photos, recordings, and music into finished video files.
• Send emails: invitations, sign-in and account emails, and, if you opted in, waitlist updates. These go through our email delivery provider.
• Enforce limits and prevent abuse: storage quotas, processing quotas, and rate limits.
• Provide support: a small number of our staff can view account records (such as email and sign-in status) to help you.

We do not use your information for advertising. We do not sell it. We do not use your photos, recordings, or transcripts to train AI models of our own, and we only send them to the service providers described below to provide features you use.

3. Who Can See Your Content: The Family Sharing Model

This is the most important section of this policy.

Private by default

Everything you upload starts private to you. Your photos, recordings, and films are stored in private storage and served only through short-lived signed links to people who are allowed to see them.

Albums and members

When you add content to a shared album, the members of that album can see it. Album members can have different roles (viewer, contributor, editor, owner). Members of a shared album can also see each other's basic profile: display name, handle, and profile photo. Recordings appear with the speaker's display name, so members know whose voice they are hearing.

Invitations and access requests

You can invite someone to an album by email or by an invite link. Invitation emails include the album title, the inviter's name, and a join link, and invitations expire after 14 days by default. A signed-in user can also request access to an album; while that request is pending, the album owner can see the requester's display name and profile photo, and the requester's short message.

Share links

You can create a public share link for a film or an album. Understand clearly what this means:

• Anyone who has the link can view the shared photos, watch the film, hear the voice recordings in it, and see speakers' display names. No account is needed.
• Share links use long random tokens and reveal nothing about your account, email, or other content. A shared album shows at most 60 items.
• You can revoke a share link at any time, and the link stops working right away. Revoking a link cannot undo views that already happened or take back copies someone already downloaded. You can create more than one link for the same item and revoke them separately.
• We count how many times a shared page has been viewed and show you that count. We do not tell you who viewed it.

Only share links with people you trust to have them. A link can be forwarded.

What other members cannot see

Whether you personally have looked at a recording, photo, or film is private to you. Gathertell keeps a private "first seen" record for your own experience of the app, and no other user can ever see it. There are no read receipts between family members.

4. Service Providers

We use a small number of companies to run Gathertell. They process data on our behalf to provide the service, and only for that purpose. In the language of app store privacy forms, this is collection by us, not sharing with third parties.

Google is different from the providers above. Google does not process data for us; instead, when you choose Google Sign-In or Google Photos import, Google sends data to us. Section 5 explains exactly what we receive and how we handle it.

We do not use advertising networks, analytics providers, data brokers, or payment processors today. If we add a payment provider when paid plans launch, we will update this policy first.

5. Google User Data

This section describes exactly how we handle data received from Google, for both Google Sign-In and Google Photos import.

Google Sign-In

If you choose to sign in with Google, Google sends us a signed token containing your name, email address, and basic profile information. We use it only to create and sign in to your Gathertell account. We do not request access to your Google contacts, calendar, or any other Google data for sign-in.

Google Photos import

If you choose to import from Google Photos, you grant a limited, read-only photo picker permission, and you pick the specific items in Google's own picker screen. Gathertell receives only the items you explicitly picked, downloads them, and adds them to your Gathertell library like any other upload. The temporary Google access token is held in memory only, is never stored, and expires within the hour. We keep an identifier for each imported item so we can avoid importing the same photo twice. We never see or touch photos you did not pick.

Limited Use commitment

Gathertell's use and transfer to any other app of information received from Google APIs will adhere to the Google API Services User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements.

In plain words: we use Google user data only to provide the features you asked for (signing in, importing the photos you picked). We do not sell Google user data. We do not use it for advertising. We do not let humans read it except with your permission, for security, to comply with law, or as part of aggregated internal operations. We do not transfer it to anyone else except the service providers above acting on our behalf.

6. Retention and Deletion

While you use Gathertell

We keep your content as long as your account is active, because Gathertell's purpose is preserving memories long term. Some things are cleaned up automatically:

• Temporary upload files are removed within about 48 hours.
• Unused invitations expire after 14 days.
• Rendered films older than 30 days may be removed to save space, unless the film is the latest version or has a live share link. Films can be re-rendered from your originals at any time, so nothing is lost.

Deleting individual items

You can delete photos, videos, recordings, albums, films, and uploaded music inside the app. Deleted items are removed from your account and your albums right away, stop being visible to anyone, and free up your storage quota. Copies of the underlying files may remain in our storage systems and backups for a time before they are removed as part of ongoing maintenance. If you need the underlying files for a specific item removed promptly, email support@gathertell.com and we will handle it as a deletion request under section 8.

Deleting your account

You can delete your account yourself in the app or at app.gathertell.com, or follow the instructions at gathertell.com/delete-account, or email support@gathertell.com. Deletion begins with a 7 day grace window: sign back in and choose Restore during that week and nothing is lost. After the window closes, we delete your account and your photos, videos, recordings, transcripts, films, and albums, completing within 30 days of your request, with removal from backups on their normal rotation. We may keep a minimal record where the law requires it, for example evidence that a deletion request was completed.

Content in other people's albums

Content you contributed to someone else's shared album stays in that album unless you remove it, because the album belongs to its owner and your family may be relying on it. When you request account deletion you can choose whether your contributions to others' albums should also be removed.

Revoked consent

If a person revokes their recording consent, recordings that depended on it stop being shown. This is enforced in our systems, not just in the app's screens.

7. Children

Gathertell accounts are for people 13 and older. We do not knowingly let children under 13 create accounts, and we do not direct the service to children. If we learn that a child under 13 has created an account, we will delete it. If you believe a child under 13 has an account, contact us at support@gathertell.com.

Family memories often include children. Photos, videos, and recordings of children in Gathertell are added by adult family members about their own families. The adult who uploads content about a child, or records a child's voice, is responsible for having the authority and the family's permission to do so, and Gathertell's consent tools exist to record that permission. A parent or guardian can ask us to remove content depicting their child by contacting support@gathertell.com, and we will work with the album owner to address it.

8. Your Rights and Choices

You can do most of this yourself in the app: view and edit your profile, see your content, delete items, revoke share links, and revoke consent records. For anything else, email support@gathertell.com. You can ask us to:

• Tell you what personal information we have about you (access).
• Fix inaccurate information (correction).
• Delete your information (deletion), as described in section 6.
• Give you a copy of your content and information in a usable format (portability).

We will confirm your identity before acting on a request, respond within a reasonable time, and never treat you differently for exercising your rights.

California residents

• We do not sell personal information, and we have not sold personal information. We also do not share personal information for cross-context behavioral advertising.
• California law gives you the rights listed above, including the right to know, delete, and correct. Use support@gathertell.com or the in-app tools.
• Do Not Track: because we do not track our users across other sites or services, and use no advertising trackers at all, we do not respond to browser Do Not Track signals; there is nothing for such a signal to turn off.

Users outside the United States

If you live in a region such as the European Union or the United Kingdom that grants additional rights (including objection, restriction of processing, and the right to complain to a data protection authority), you may exercise those rights by contacting support@gathertell.com. Our legal basis for processing is performing our contract with you (running the service you signed up for), your consent where we ask for it (for example recording consent), and our legitimate interest in keeping the service secure. Gathertell is operated from the United States and your information is processed in the United States and in the regions where our service providers operate.

9. Security

• All connections to Gathertell use HTTPS encryption.
• Your media is stored in private storage that is never publicly listable. Every view of a photo, recording, or film goes through a short-lived signed link issued only after we check that the viewer is allowed to see that exact item.
• Our database enforces access rules on every row, so a request from one family's account is checked against those rules before any other family's data can be returned. This is a second layer of protection that stands independently of our application code.
• Invite and share tokens are long and random, and we store only a scrambled (hashed) version, so a copy of our database would not reveal working links.
• Our storage and database providers encrypt data at rest.

No service can promise perfect security, and we do not. What we can promise is that private-by-default is our design rule, and we will notify you as required by law if a breach affects your information.

10. Changes to This Policy

If we change this policy, we will update the date at the top and post the new version at gathertell.com. If a change meaningfully reduces your privacy, we will notify you by email or in the app before it takes effect. Using Gathertell after a change takes effect means the new policy applies.

11. Contact Us

BuzDigital LLC, doing business as Gathertell
Email: support@gathertell.com

We answer privacy questions from account holders, family members who appear in content, and parents or guardians.

This policy is effective as of September 3, 2026. The previous version was effective July 28, 2026.

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