Last updated: July 4, 2026
Famtale is a private, family-only space: one gentle question a day, answered in each person’s own language, that slowly becomes your family’s memory book. The questions and answers you share here are some of the most personal things an app can hold — so this page tries to explain, in plain words and without spin, exactly what happens to them.
We would rather tell you an uncomfortable truth than a comfortable half-truth. Where Famtale can’t promise something, we say so on this page instead of leaving it vague.
In plain words:
Famtale (“we”, “us”) provides the Famtale mobile app and the website at famtale.app. We are the data controller for the information described here. You can reach us any time at hello@famtale.app — including for any privacy question or request.
To run the app, we collect and store:
We do not collect your date of birth, your contacts, your location, or any advertising identifiers. There is no profile photo upload in the app today.
The heart of Famtale is that everyone answers in their own language and reads in theirs. To make that work, when you post an answer our server sends it to an AI service to translate it, and — for a voice note — to transcribe the recording into words first. The same happens when we write your weekly memory-book chapter and when we craft a follow-up question from your family’s recent answers.
We process your answers with Google Cloud Vertex AI — Google’s enterprise AI platform. We send it the words of your answer and, for voice notes, the recording itself. We never send it your email or your full name — only a first name is attached, and only when we write your weekly chapter.
On Vertex AI your family’s content is not used to train Google’s AI models, and it is handled under Google Cloud’s data-processing terms — the same business terms Google gives its enterprise customers. We chose this deliberately over the consumer AI APIs, which can retain and learn from what you send. For anything you would still rather no AI ever see, use Keep private.
Keep private. On any answer you can turn on Keep private. That answer is then never sent to any AI service — no translation, no transcription — and it is never added to your memory book or used to shape follow-up questions. Your family still sees it in your own words (a private voice note keeps its play button, just untranscribed). “Private” means kept out of AI, not hidden from your relatives.
The reveal gate. You can’t read anyone else’s answer to a day’s question until you’ve answered it yourself. This is enforced on our servers, not just in the app, and it covers voice notes too — so no one in your family can peek at the others without adding their own answer first.
Honesty about what we can see. Because we translate, transcribe and summarise your answers, they are stored in a form our systems can read. Famtale is not end-to-end encrypted and we do not claim to be a “zero-knowledge” service. That means our operators (and Google, as the company hosting the data) are technically able to access answer content, moods and voice notes. We access this data only to run and support the service, to keep it safe, and when the law requires — never to sell it and never for advertising.
Answering the daily question also quietly means “I’m OK.” If someone hasn’t answered, Famtale sends them a few gentle reminders, and after a while it may let the rest of the family know — a notification such as “{name} hasn’t checked in today — maybe reach out?” The optional mood you attach to an answer is also visible to your family. This is on purpose: it’s how Famtale helps a scattered family notice when someone might need a call. But it does mean your participation and mood are shared within your family group, and that a relative’s name can appear in a notification delivered through Apple’s or Google’s push services.
These same signals also gently steer which question your family gets next: after someone marks a rough day (including on a “Keep private” answer — the mood chip is family-visible either way), or when the family has gone quiet, the next day’s question is deliberately a lighter, warmer one from our hand-written bank rather than a deeper one. This works from the mood chips and participation alone — no AI reads anyone’s words to decide it, and it only ever makes the next question gentler.
We keep the list of third parties short and name them plainly. Each of these is a “processor” acting for us:
Google Firebase (Google Cloud)
What it receives: Your account email; all family profiles, questions, answers, moods, voice recordings, transcriptions, translations, chapters, notification tokens; and usage/crash diagnostics tied to an anonymous account id.
Why: It is our entire backend — sign-in, database, file storage, the servers that do the work, and push delivery. Essentially all of your data lives here.
Google Cloud Vertex AI
What it receives: The words of your non-private answers and voice recordings, plus first names when writing chapters. Not your email or full name.
Why: Translating answers, transcribing voice notes, writing memory chapters, and generating follow-up questions. On Vertex AI this content is not used to train Google’s models.
Apple Push Notification service & Google FCM
What it receives: Notification text and device tokens. Most notifications are generic, but a wellbeing alert can include a relative’s first/display name. Answer content is never in a notification.
Why: To deliver the daily question, reminders, and the wellbeing alerts to your devices.
Vercel (website hosting)
What it receives: Ordinary web traffic to famtale.app (including the invite code in a shared join link) and standard server logs. No family answers, no sign-in, no app data.
Why: It hosts this marketing and legal website and the invite page — nothing from inside the app touches it.
Your data is stored on Google’s cloud infrastructure in the United States, and our AI providers are also US-based — so if you’re outside the US, your answers are processed there.
Your family’s content — answers, voice notes, moods and chapters — is kept for as long as your family exists, so your memory book can keep growing. We don’t delete it on a timer. A few technical items are short-lived: translations we cache to avoid re-processing are removed after 30 days, and internal service logs after about 90 days. When a family is deleted (below), its content and cached translations are removed.
Voice notes get their own shorter life: once a recording has been transcribed, the raw audio is automatically deleted after 30 days — the words are kept in your book, but the recording itself doesn’t linger.
The app uses Google Firebase Analytics and Crashlytics to understand which screens are used and to catch crashes. This is built to be free of personal content: it records things like screen names, event counts, the mood category you picked, and whether an answer was kept private — tied to an anonymous account id, never to your email or name, and never the text of your answers. Firebase also collects standard technical data (approximate region from IP address, device model, app version) as part of providing these services.
You’re in control: Settings has a “Share anonymous diagnostics” switch. It’s on by default, and turning it off stops this usage and crash reporting entirely.
The famtale.app website you’re reading sets no tracking cookies and runs no analytics. If you email us for early access, we use your address only to reply and to invite you. The fonts are served from our own site, not fetched from a third party as you browse.
You have real, working controls today:
Depending on where you live, you also have rights to access, correct, or object to how your data is used, and to complain to a data-protection authority. Write to hello@famtale.app and we’ll help.
What we don’t offer yet, honestly: export and delete work at the level of the whole family. A single member can’t yet delete only their own answers, leave a family on their own, or delete just their sign-in account — deleting is done by a family organiser and removes everyone’s data together. If you want your data removed and you’re not the organiser, email us and we will handle it for you. We’re building proper per-person controls.
When you create or join a family, you confirm that you are 16 or older, or that a parent or guardian agrees. This is a statement you make — we don’t collect a birth date and we can’t verify age. Famtale is meant to be set up by an adult in the family. If you believe a child has used Famtale without the right consent, contact us and we’ll remove their data.
Data is encrypted while travelling between your device, our servers, and our providers, and it is encrypted at rest by Google on their infrastructure. Access is limited to your family through sign-in, the server-enforced reveal gate, and per-family isolation, so one family can never reach another’s data. As explained above, these are strong access controls — but they are not end-to-end encryption, so they do not hide content from Famtale’s operators or from Google as our host.
As Famtale grows — and especially before it opens to the public — we will update this page and change the “Last updated” date at the top. For meaningful changes we’ll ask you to review and agree again in the app.
Questions, concerns, or a request about your data? Write to hello@famtale.app and a real person will reply.