Privacy policy

The short version

• Your family's research lives in your own browser unless you sign in, and with your account if you do.
• Nothing about your family is public unless you release it yourself: a film, a card, a line, a letter.
• Living people are not researched in people-search directories, and nothing you release names a living person other than whoever you choose to credit.
• Yore does not sell data, show advertising, or use advertising or analytics trackers.
• You can ask to see, correct or delete what Yore holds about you from the contact page.

What Yore collects

What you give it. The names, dates and places you type in to start a search, and anything you add to help it (parents' names, a family story, a correction). Memories you write or record, photographs and documents you add, a tree you bring in as a file, letters you write to relatives and what they write back.

Your account, if you sign in. Yore uses Google sign-in. It receives your name, your email address and an identifier for your Google account. It never sees your Google password.

What you send it. If you ask to be introduced or write through the contact page: your name, your email address and what you wrote. If you ask after coming by a card or film someone shared, your name, email address and who you are looking for are shown to that person as well as to Yore, because they are the one who can introduce you.

Who introduced whom. Yore is open by introduction, so it keeps who let each account in: an introduction, an invitation, stamps someone sent, or a request someone answered.

What it counts. For each account or invitation, how many searches, places, voices and pictures were made, so that the cost of running them can be measured and limited. For each released film, how many times it was opened, and anonymous reports of how far a sitting got; a report says which film and nothing about who watched it.

Your stamps, if you have an account. How many you were given, bought, sent on and used, and for each one used, who or where its search was for. If you came by something another person sent you and began a family of your own, they are told that someone did, never who.

If you buy stamps. You pay on a page run by Stripe. Yore never sees or keeps your card. It keeps what you bought and when, and the identifier Stripe gives you as a customer.

What every website receives. The company that hosts Yore keeps ordinary server logs: internet address, browser, and the pages asked for. Yore uses an internet address, in scrambled form, only to limit how many requests one visitor can make in a day.

Where it is kept

In your browser. A family you research without signing in is kept in your browser's own storage on your device. So are your sound settings, an invitation or access code you have entered, and any AI key of your own that you choose to use; such a key is sent only with the requests it pays for and is not stored on Yore's servers.

With your account. If you sign in, your families, memories, films and pictures are also kept in Google Cloud (a database and file storage) in the United States, so that they follow you to another device. Photographs and recordings are kept in private storage at addresses that cannot be guessed.

Yore is hosted by Vercel.

Who else sees it

The AI services that do the work. To research a family, write its story, read it aloud, paint a place or compose a film's theme, Yore sends the details needed for that task (for a search: the names, dates, places and hints you gave) to the AI providers it uses: Anthropic, OpenAI and Google. They process it to return a result to Yore.

Reference services. Place names are looked up with Open-Meteo, and pictures from the time are found on Wikimedia Commons. These requests are made by Yore's servers and carry a place or a subject, not your identity.

The payment service. If you buy stamps, Stripe takes the payment and receives your name, email address and card details from you directly. Payments for Yore are received by Nightcap Inc. (formerly Tango), and that name appears on your card statement with YORE beside it.

Nobody else. Yore does not sell or rent personal data, and does not share it for advertising.

What becomes public, and what never does

What you release. A film, a card of a surname's line, a set of "My story" cards, a letter to a relative or an invitation gets an address of its own that cannot be guessed, and anyone who has that address can open it. You choose to make each one, and you can take it down. A film is listed in the picture house only if you ask for that.

The shared archive. What Yore's researcher finds in published sources about people born before 1930 is kept so that the same search need not be paid for twice; anyone marked as possibly living is removed first. Corrections, hints and anything else you typed stay private to you.

Places in their time. The studies at yorehistory.com/places are about a place and a decade, written from cited sources. They are never about a person and contain nothing from anyone's family research.

Living people. Yore researches the dead. It does not look living people up in people-search directories. Living relatives in your own tree are kept with your tree; in anything you release they are counted, or shown as a generation without a name.

The Yore Courier browser extension

If you install it and ask it to, the Courier reads your own tree from your own Ancestry account, in your own browser, and brings it into Yore. It asks before it reads, changes nothing on Ancestry, and never sees your Ancestry password. What it reads goes to the Yore page you have open and is treated like any other family you add.

The connector for AI assistants

Yore offers its place studies to AI assistants through a read-only connector (yorehistory.com/mcp) and as plain text. When an assistant uses it, Yore receives only the request the assistant makes (for example a place name and a decade), not your conversation. Yore does not store those requests beyond the ordinary server logs described above, and the connector cannot reach anyone's family research or account.

How long it is kept, and deleting it

A family kept only in your browser is deleted when you remove it there or clear the browser's storage. With an account, you can remove a family, and take down any film, card, letter or set of cards you released, at any time.

To have your account and everything kept with it deleted, or to see or correct what Yore holds about you, write through the contact page from the email address of your account. It will be done within 30 days. Requests for an invitation and notes sent through the contact page are kept until they have been answered and for up to a year after.

If a released film, a card or a place study says something about a relative of yours that you want corrected or removed, write through the contact page and say which page.

Children

Yore is not directed to children under 13 and does not knowingly collect personal data from them.

Changes to this policy

When Yore changes what it does with personal data, this page is changed first and its date is updated.