Privacy

Who looks after your information

Parivarwale is run by Nitin Chauhan, in India. You can reach a person at support@parivarwale.com.

What is stored

Only what the product needs to do its job.

To let you sign in

• Your email address, and your phone number if you give one.
• Your password, never in readable form. It is put through scrypt with a value unique to you; the original cannot be recovered from what is stored, including by us.
• Your language and time zone, so dates read the way you expect.
• A sign-in session — a row in the database and a cookie in your browser. The cookie is marked Secure, HttpOnly and SameSite, so no script can read it and it never leaves this site.

What you and your family write

• Names, including other names a person was known by.
• Dates of birth and death, exact or approximate. “Around 1962” is stored as approximate, not rounded into a false precision.
• Relationships between people, which is how the family graph is worked out.
• Memories, life events, places, special dates, and messages between relatives.
• Photographs, video, voice recordings and documents you upload.
• Who added or changed each thing, and when. This is deliberate: a family record that nobody can trace is a record nobody can trust in fifty years.

What is never collected

• Your location. The app never asks for it, and the page explicitly forbids the browser from offering it.
• Your contacts. No address book is ever read.
• Where a photograph was taken. Cameras write the exact coordinates into photograph files. Every image is re-encoded on upload and that information is removed before it is stored — so a picture of a child outside their school does not carry the school’s address.
• Advertising or tracking identifiers. There are none, and no third-party analytics.

Who can see it

Everything you add carries one of four audiences, which you choose and can change:

• Only me — nobody else, not even your family.
• My family — the people in your family circle.
• A few people — only the relatives you pick by name.
• Anyone — readable by anyone with the link, including people outside the family.

The rule is checked on our server every single time something is read — not once when a page is drawn. Photographs and recordings are never given a public web address: each request for the actual file is permission-checked on its own, and a request from somebody not allowed to see it is answered the same way as a request for something that does not exist.

Paying for anything never grants access to anything. There is no subscription, plan or payment anywhere in the rules that decide who can read what. A researcher, a company or a subscriber cannot buy their way into your family’s private record.

Profiles for people who have not joined

Parivarwale is built so that a person can exist in a family record without having an account — which is the only way a great-grandmother who died in 1974 can be in it at all. This means your relatives may add a profile for you, and write memories about you, before you have ever heard of Parivarwale.

If that happens, you can claim that profile when you join, after your family confirms it is you. From then on your own writing stays separate from what others wrote about you, and the profile is yours to edit. If you would rather a profile about you were removed, write to us at the address above.

Where it is kept

• The family record is in a database on a single server, in Singapore.
• Photographs, video and recordings are in private object storage. The buckets are not public and the files have unguessable names, but none of the protection depends on that — access is always decided by the rules above.
• Backups are continuous, to private storage, so a failed disk cannot lose a family’s history. Backups are kept for 30 days.
• Everything travels over HTTPS. Plain HTTP requests are redirected, never served.

The writing assistant

Parivarwale can help turn facts your family has already recorded into a readable paragraph, and can answer questions like “how am I related to John?”.

Relationships, dates, permissions and identity are always worked out by ordinary code reading your family’s own record. A language model is never allowed to invent a fact about your family, and anything it drafts is labelled as a draft and has to be approved by a person before it becomes part of the record.

Nothing your family writes is sent to another company. The assistant works on our own server, assembling what is already in your family’s record. If that ever changes — if we turn on an outside model provider to improve the drafting — this page will say so before it happens, and we will tell you in the app rather than hoping you re-read this.

Taking your record with you

At any time you can download everything your family has recorded, as one data file and as a printable family book. No account is needed to open either. This exists because a family history that can only be read inside one company’s software is not preserved — it is held hostage.

Closing your account — and what stays

Please read this part. It is the one place Parivarwale behaves differently from most apps, and the difference is on purpose.

When you close your account, these are removed:

• your password, and every signed-in session on every device;
• your email address, which is freed so it can be used again;
• your notifications, pending invitations and requests;
• your rate-limiting history.

Your place in the family record stays, with nobody signed in to it. It returns to exactly the state every person is in before they join: a profile your family looks after. If a public profile had been readable by anyone, it is narrowed to your family.

This is because an account is how one person signs in, while a person is somebody’s parent, child, brother and cousin. Deleting the person would take a parent away from their children, destroy the memories a brother wrote about his own life, and silently change how everyone else in the family is related. One person leaving cannot be allowed to edit everybody else’s history.

If you come back, you can claim your profile again. If you want your profile and the things you personally wrote removed as well, write to us and we will do it by hand — and tell you what cannot be removed without changing other people’s records.

Children

You need to be 13 or older to have a Parivarwale account of your own.

Families add children to their own family record, which is normal and expected. An account of one’s own is a different thing: an account needs an email address and a password, and we ask that you do not create one for a child below the age above. A parent or guardian who believes a child has an account can write to us and we will close it.

Your choices

• Change the audience of anything you have added, at any time.
• Download everything, at any time.
• Close your account, from inside the app, with no email to anyone required.
• Ask us for a copy of what is held about you, ask for a correction, or object to something — write to the address above and a person will answer.

Changes to this page

If what Parivarwale does with your information changes, this page changes with it and the date at the top changes too. If the change is significant, we will tell you in the app rather than hoping you re-read this.