Your family's history stays yours
Last updated 9 November 2026.
Who we are
Telling Roots is run by Daniele Quartana, Woking, Surrey, United Kingdom. We decide how the personal data described here is used, which makes us the data controller under UK and EU data protection law. Contact us at [email protected].
What we collect
- Waitlist, gift link and question sheet sign-ups: your email address, the rough size of your family tree if you tell us, where you heard about us, what you asked us to send, and your consent to be emailed.
- Founding families: your name, email and what you bought. Card details go straight to Gumroad and never reach us.
- Inside a family tree, once it opens: the people, dates, places, photos, notes and recordings that you and your relatives add, and the sign-in details of the relatives you invite.
- Interviews: the voice recordings you make, the text written down from them, and any life-story drafts you ask for.
Why we use it
- To email you about Telling Roots, because you asked us to (consent). You can withdraw at any time from any email or by writing to us.
- To provide the service you paid for (contract).
- To keep records for tax and accounting (legal obligation).
Living relatives
Family trees include people who are alive. Each family's tree is private to the people that family invites. Living people can hide their own dates and places, download what they added, delete it, or ask to be removed. If you are in someone's tree and want to be taken out, email us and we will help.
Who else handles it
We use a small number of providers to run the service. They only process data on our instructions, under a written agreement.
- Gumroad: payments, tax and receipts. Card details go straight to Gumroad.
- Supabase: database for the waitlist and founding families, stored in London.
- Vercel: website hosting.
- Anthropic: AI. When you ask for follow-up questions or a life-story draft, the written text of the interview answers is sent to Claude, Anthropic's AI, which writes the draft. Recordings themselves are not sent, and we do not use your recordings or stories to train AI.
- Our email provider, to send you the emails you asked for.
Speech to text: while you record an interview, the words are written down by the speech recognition built into your phone or browser. In Chrome this is provided by Google and in Safari by Apple, under their own privacy terms.
Some of these providers are based in the United States. Where data leaves the UK, we rely on the UK's adequacy regulations or the UK International Data Transfer Addendum to protect it.
We never sell data, show advertising or share trees with anyone outside the family that owns them.
AI and your stories
AI only drafts. Nothing it writes is shown to the rest of the family until the person running the tree has read it and approved it. You can edit or delete any draft, transcript or recording at any time.
How long we keep it
Waitlist details until you unsubscribe or 24 months after our last email, whichever is sooner. Account and tree data for as long as your family uses Telling Roots, then 90 days to let you download it, then deleted. If Telling Roots ever closes, we will give you at least 90 days notice and a full download first. Payment records for six years for tax.
Your rights
You can ask to see, correct, download or delete your data, object to how we use it, or withdraw consent. Write to [email protected] and we will reply within a month. You can also complain to the Information Commissioner's Office at ico.org.uk.