Stewardship
Holding a story is a responsibility, not a claim.
People weigh whether to trust us with the most personal material they have. These are the commitments we make, written to be understood rather than to impress.
Commitments
Six principles we operate by
Families own their stories
The people who live a story own it. Our products hold material on their behalf; ownership never transfers to us by using them.
Material can leave
Anyone can take their recordings, transcripts, and documents elsewhere. A story is not a hostage to a product, and portability is a design requirement rather than a courtesy.
We do not train on your stories
Personal and family stories held in our products are not used to train models. They exist to serve the family they came from.
Local storage wherever possible
We keep material on a household's own device or storage wherever the work allows it, and we say so plainly when a step needs to run elsewhere.
Commercial use is chosen, never assumed
If a story is ever used commercially, the customer chooses that and consents to it. Nothing is licensed, published, or sold on their behalf by default.
Compensation is transactional
When a story is used commercially, compensation is a plain transaction on agreed terms — not a favor, and not folded into the price of a subscription.
Ownership
Licensing technology, owning stories
Two different things are easy to confuse, so we separate them clearly. Technology is licensed. The Institute develops software for capturing and organizing stories and licenses it commercially through products such as Reflections. That license covers the tool.
Stories are owned by the people who lived them. Recordings, transcripts, photographs, and documents belong to the family that made them. Using our products does not transfer any part of that ownership to the Institute, and ending a subscription does not end the family's claim to their own material.
The same capability is available for cultural, educational, and community use at free or low cost. Commercial licensing pays for the engineering; the community track is where we think the work matters most.
Where material lives
Local wherever the work allows
We keep material on a household's own device or storage wherever possible, because the fewer places a family's history travels, the fewer ways it can be lost or misused.
Some steps need more computing power than a home device has. We do not claim that everything runs locally. What we commit to is telling people which steps leave their device, and designing so that as much as possible does not.
We describe our practices in plain terms and avoid the language of certification and guarantee. If a specific protection matters to a decision you're making, ask us and we'll answer specifically rather than gesture at a badge.
Consent and compensation
Nothing commercial happens by default
A story is only used commercially when the customer chooses that and consents to it. There is no default in which participation in a product makes someone's history available for a commercial purpose.
When a commercial use does happen, compensation is transactional: agreed terms, a clear transaction, and no expectation that access to the product is payment enough.
Where family members are involved in someone's stories or care, that involvement follows the person's own consent. The person at the center decides who takes part.
What we don't say
Limits we hold ourselves to
We would rather be trusted for what we can prove than admired for what we can't. So we don't publish security certifications we don't hold, describe encryption schemes as marketing, promise permanence beyond any organization's power to deliver, or advertise features before they exist.
Where our organizational arrangements are still being finalized, we say so on our about page rather than round up to a cleaner story.