ARC exists to keep a family's memories for that family. Your stories, recordings, photographs and family tree are private to your archive. We do not sell data, we do not show advertising, and we do not make any part of your archive public or searchable.
ARC is operated by Jeff Schrik. Questions, requests or complaints: Jeff@schrik.ca.
ARC only ever requests access it needs for a feature you have asked for, and each one is requested separately at the moment you enable it — never all at once at sign-up.
| Access | Used for |
|---|---|
| Name, email, profile picture | Signing you in and showing who is who in a shared archive. |
| Calendar events, read-only | Placing dated moments from your life onto your timeline. |
| Contacts, read-only | Suggesting family members and their birthdays when you build your tree. |
| Your date of birth | Anchoring your life timeline without asking you to type it. |
| Google Drive — only files you pick | Bringing a document or photograph you choose into your archive. ARC cannot see anything in your Drive that you have not explicitly selected. |
| Google Photos — only items you pick | The same, for photographs. ARC cannot browse or read your photo library. |
ARC's use and transfer of information received from Google APIs adheres to the Google API Services User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements.
Data obtained from Google is used only to provide the features described above. It is never sold, never used for advertising, and never used to train artificial-intelligence models.
You can disconnect Google access at any time from within ARC, which revokes our access at Google as well as deleting the stored authorisation. You can also revoke it yourself at myaccount.google.com/permissions.
ARC uses a small number of specialist services to do things it cannot do alone. Each receives only what that specific task requires, and each is bound by its own terms as a processor acting on our instructions. We do not sell or share your data with anyone else.
| Service | Receives | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Mistral AI | Conversation text; photo descriptions | The archivist's questions and replies, and recall across your stories |
| ElevenLabs | Voice recordings; text to be spoken | Transcribing what you say, and giving the archivist a voice |
| Leonardo.ai | Text descriptions only | Imagined portraits of ancestors for whom no photograph survives |
| Open Archieven, Alle Friezen | Names, dates and places you search for | Looking up public birth, marriage and death records |
| See the section above | Sign-in, and the features you connect |
Your archive is stored on a dedicated server we operate in Falkenstein, Germany, inside the European Union. It is kept for as long as you want the archive — that is rather the point of it.
If you ask us to delete your archive, we delete your stories, recordings, photographs, face data, tree and stored Google authorisation, and we revoke our access at Google. Backups are overwritten within 30 days. Write to Jeff@schrik.ca and we will confirm when it is done.
Under the GDPR you may request a copy of your data, correction of anything wrong, deletion, or restriction of how it is used. The same address reaches us for all of it.
An archive can be shared with family members by invitation. Anyone you invite can see what is in that archive, so invite only people you would want to have it.
Families record stories about children, and often about people who have died. If you add information about someone else, you are responsible for having a reasonable basis to do so. ARC is not intended for use by children under 16 without a parent.
If this policy changes in a way that affects how your data is handled, we will update the date at the top of this page and tell you inside the app before the change takes effect.