Privacy policy

Kinstory — the Android and iPhone apps and the website at kinstory.in — is run by Surjith Chandran R (Surjith Chandran Ramesh Babu in full, the name the App Store shows), in India, who is responsible for the personal data it holds. "We" and "us" on this page mean Kinstory. For any question about this policy or your data, write to support@kinstory.in.

About you: your email address and password (the password is stored only as a one-way hash by our sign-in provider), your name, username and gender, and whatever else you choose to add to your own profile — dates, places, a photo, a few words about yourself.

About your relatives: the cards you create for them — names, dates, places, photos, notes — and how they are related. These people may not use Kinstory. You are responsible for having the right to record what you record about them.

What you post and send: memories (text, photos, who is in them and, where you said so, where in a photo each of them is), comments, likes, and chat messages and attachments. In a chat between two people, messages disappear after the time chosen for that chat — a year after they are read unless either of you has chosen a shorter time, and a year at the most. A message nobody has read waits as long as that time, and never less than 30 days, and then goes. Two people can agree to turn disappearing off for a chat between them, and then its messages are kept until one of you deletes them or an account is deleted; that takes both of you, and either of you can turn it back on. In a group chat each message goes a set time after it is sent, read or not — the shortest time anyone in the group has chosen, a year unless somebody chose shorter, and a year at the most — and disappearing is off only when everyone in the group has turned it off.

When you read, and when you were here: when each message reached you and when you read it, and the last time you had Kinstory open — one time, brought up to date every couple of minutes while the app is on your screen. With read receipts turned off we keep no last-active time, and your reads are kept for you alone (see "Chats" below).

What makes the app work: your settings, who you have blocked, connection requests, notifications, the group chats you are in, how you have arranged your chats (pinned, muted, archived), and a short-lived count of certain actions (searches, requests) kept for two days to stop abuse. We do not use advertising or tracking cookies.

How fast pages open: each time a page of Kinstory opens, the app reports how long it took to appear and to respond — which kind of page it was (never its address) and the timings. The report carries nothing about who you are, and goes only to our own server's log.

If you add a delivery address so that relatives can send you a gift, we keep the name, phone number and address you give. It is shown to nobody but you. When somebody you are connected with buys you a gift, we keep a record of the order — who sent it, what it was, what they paid and where it is — and the people who pack it see the address for that one delivery.

What you agreed to: which version of the Terms and this policy you agreed to, and when — at sign-up, and each time we ask you to agree again.

Your tree and your family posts are visible to you and to the accounts you are connected to — a connection exists only when one of you sent a request and the other accepted it. You can stop sharing your tree with any one connection, from their profile or from Connected accounts on yours, and share it again there or from Settings → Privacy; they keep your posts and messages. You can hide any card you keep from all your connections. A post marked private is visible to you alone. Nobody else can browse your tree, and it is not indexed by search engines.

Other people on Kinstory can find your account by your name, username, or exact email address in order to send you a request, unless you turn off "Let people find me" in Settings → Privacy — then only your connections and anyone you send an invitation link to can. They see your name, username and photo — nothing of your tree. You can also ask not to be suggested to relatives beyond a number of steps in a connected family's tree, or not at all.

Blocking someone removes their access to your tree and posts and yours to theirs, stops messages and requests in both directions, and hides you from their search. They are not told. If you are both in a group chat, you both stay in it, but neither of you sees what the other writes there.

When two families record the same person, Kinstory can link the two cards so each family sees what the other recorded and can choose to copy it. Linking never merges the cards: each family keeps and controls its own. A family that links a card of theirs to yours, or adds a copy of you to their tree, is a copy in their tree: it is not removed when you stop sharing or disconnect, and we cannot remove it for you; you are told when it happens.

Read receipts and last seen. When you read a message, whoever sent it can see that you have: blue ticks in a chat between two people, and in a group chat the time it reached you and the time you read it. Your connections can see when you were last active — "Active now", or "Last seen today at 09:40", to the minute — in a chat with you and on your profile, and only while they are using Kinstory themselves. Nobody else sees it: not people you share only a group chat with, and not anyone you have blocked or who has blocked you.

Both are on unless you turn them off. One switch covers the two — "Read receipts and last seen" in Settings → Privacy — and it works both ways: with it off, nobody sees when you have read their messages or when you were last active, and you do not see theirs either. People still see that a message reached you. We stop keeping the time you were last active and delete the one we had. Which messages you have read is still kept, for you alone, to clear your unread count and to time messages that disappear after they are read — so such a message still disappears, and whoever sent it can tell that it was read.

Typing. While you write a message, the others in that chat see that you are typing. The words are sent only when you send them, and the signal that you are typing is not kept. The read receipts switch does not cover it.

Group chats. A group chat has up to 32 people, and can include people you are not connected to. Everyone in it sees the group's name and picture, who is in it — each member's name and profile photo — and what is said there from the day they joined. A member you are not connected to who has turned off "Let people find me", or limited being suggested to relatives, is shown to you as "A relative", with no photo — and so are you to them, if you have done the same. Being in a group shows nobody your tree.

Only an admin of the group can add people to it, and only their own connections. You are told when somebody adds you (unless you have turned message notifications off), and you can leave at any time; somebody who leaves a group cannot be added back to it for 30 days. An admin can also remove members — never the person who made the group — rename the group, change its picture and make others admins. When you leave or are removed, the group and everything said in it go from your account at once. The others keep it, your messages included, unless you choose "Delete my messages too" as you leave; they then see only that each one was deleted.

Archive, pin and mute are yours alone, and nobody is told. An archived chat comes back to your list when a new message arrives, unless you have muted it.

Data is stored with Supabase (database, sign-in and file storage) in its Mumbai region, in India, except the photos and videos posted to memories, which are stored with Cloudflare (its R2 storage) in its Asia-Pacific region, and the website is served by Vercel. All three act only on our instructions. Payments for gifts are taken by Razorpay, which receives the amount, the product's name, the buyer's name and email address and an order number — never your card or UPI details, which do not pass through Kinstory. A gift is delivered by the courier that carries it, which receives the recipient's name, phone number and address for that delivery and nothing else.

When something fails on our server, a report of the failure is sent to Sentry, the error tracker we use, which also acts only on our instructions. A report holds the error and where in the app it happened — a page is named by its pattern, such as /join/[token], never by its address — when it happened and on which version of the app, and sometimes the reference number of the order or request it concerned. It never includes the words of your messages, the address of the page you were on, or your cookies, and nothing is sent to Sentry from your browser.

In the Android and iPhone apps, a message's notification is delivered by Google's Firebase Cloud Messaging, which on an iPhone hands it to Apple's Push Notification service to ring the phone. For each message that would ring your phone, Firebase receives the name of who sent it (and the group's name), up to the first 150 characters of the message or the kind of file it carries, and a code that tells it which phone to ring; on an iPhone, Apple's service receives the same, only to deliver it. Google acts only on our instructions for this. Turning off Messages in Settings → Notifications, or muting the chat, stops these notifications. Nothing goes through Firebase when you use Kinstory in a browser.

We do not sell personal data, and we share it with nobody else, except where the law requires it.

Everything between your phone or browser and Kinstory travels encrypted (HTTPS), and browsers are told never to reach Kinstory without it. Your password is kept only as a one-way hash, so nobody can read it — not us either. Supabase and Cloudflare keep the database and stored files encrypted where they are stored.

Who may see what is enforced by the database itself, not only by the app: it checks who is asking before it hands over a tree, a post or a message, and hands it only to the people this policy says can see it. Photos in memories and files in chats open through private links that stop working after about an hour.

Until you delete it. Deleting a card, a post or a comment removes it. Deleting your account (Settings → Account → Delete account) removes your tree, posts, comments, likes, chats, photos and your sign-in in one step, and cannot be undone. Your messages in group chats go with it; the groups stay for the others. Cards that other families keep for you stay in their trees, no longer linked to any account. Notifications are removed after 180 days and declined requests after 90. The time you were last active is replaced each time it is brought up to date, and deleted when you turn read receipts off. A record of a paid order is kept for as long as the law requires even if the buyer or the recipient deletes their account; it holds no address.

When a post is reported to us, we keep a copy of it as it was then — its words and photos — that only the Kinstory team can see. The copy stays even if its author deletes the post or their account, until 180 days after the report is answered or the post is deleted, whichever is later, as India's IT Rules ask; then it is deleted.

See it: Settings → Export gives you a file with everything your account holds, your delivery address and gift orders included.
Correct it: you can edit every card and post you own at any time.
Remove it: delete any card, post or comment, your delivery address (or, while the gift store is closed, ask us to), or the whole account — the steps are on Delete your account, which works without the app.

If you are not a user and a relative has recorded details about you or your child that you want corrected or removed, write to us at the address below. We will ask the person who keeps that card to act, and remove it ourselves where the law requires.

Accounts are for people aged 18 and over. Children can appear on a family's tree as cards kept by their relatives; please record only what you would be comfortable with every connected relative seeing, and leave out exact birth dates for the young. You can hide a child's card from your connections in its Edit profile sheet. Our child safety standards say what is never allowed and how to report it.

Kinstory is built with open-source software. Some of it works on your device before anything is uploaded: it opens photos in an iPhone's HEIC format where your browser cannot, makes videos smaller, and finds where the faces are in a photo you are posting, so you can say who each person is. It cannot tell who anybody is, and nothing about a face is kept but where it is in the photo and who you said it was. The libraries and their licences are listed in our open-source notices.

When this policy changes in a way that matters, we tell you in the app and ask you to agree again before you carry on.