Privacy Policy

TalkLore (“TalkLore,” “we,” “us”) provides a service that gathers family stories through friendly phone conversations and turns them into an edited, printed book. TalkLore is the controller of the personal information described in this policy.

For any privacy question or request, email support@talklore.app. A person reads that inbox.

• Account details. Your name, email address, and password. If you sign in with a third-party provider, we receive the account identifier and email address that provider shares with us.
• Book setup details. The title of the book, your relationship to the person being interviewed, and their name, email address, phone number, and time zone. If you add a short biography, preferred topics, notes on how to pronounce a name, or a list of family names and places, we store those too, because they help the interviewer ask better questions and transcribe names correctly.
• Story content. The questions you add or accept, answers written on the answer page, answers sent back by email, edits and polishing instructions, cover and chapter images you upload, dedications, epilogues, and the order you arrange your chapters in.
• Orders and delivery. The plans and copies you purchase, your color printing choices, and the mailing address and contact details needed to print and ship your book.
• Messages to us. Anything you send to our support inbox, including the contents of a note and any attachments.

When you set up a book, we call the person being interviewed at the number you provide. Automated calls of this kind are the core of the service, and they are the reason this section exists.

• Call records. The phone number called, the scheduled time, your time zone, when the call connected and ended, how long it lasted, and whether it was answered, missed, or rescheduled.
• Transcripts. A written transcript of what was said, which becomes the raw material for a chapter. Transcripts are generated automatically and can contain errors, especially with uncommon names and places.
• No audio recording. We do not record or store call audio. There is no audio file of your family’s conversation for us to keep.
• Voicemail. We use automated voicemail detection to notice when a call reaches a voicemail greeting. When it does, we end the call, keep no transcript, and do not count the question as answered.
• Text reminders. If a mobile number is provided, we may send a short text before a scheduled call. Reply STOP to opt out at any time, or tell the interviewer and we will stop.

If the person being interviewed chooses a collaborator account, they also get a sign-in and their own settings, described in the section below titled “The person telling the story.”

Payments are handled by Stripe. Card and bank details are entered on Stripe’s systems and are never stored on our servers. We receive a transaction record that includes the amount, the outcome, the card brand and last four digits, and billing details such as a name, email address, and billing address. We use that record to confirm your order, issue receipts, handle refunds, and meet our accounting obligations.

• Cookies and local storage. Used to keep you signed in, remember interface state, and keep an in-progress book from being lost if you navigate away.
• Analytics. We use Google Tag Manager with Google Analytics to understand which pages are visited, where visitors come from, what device and browser they use, and roughly where they are located based on IP address. We use this to see what is working and what is confusing.
• Server logs. Our hosting provider records standard request information for security, debugging, and reliability.

You can limit cookies through your browser settings, and you can install the Google Analytics opt-out browser add-on. Blocking some cookies may sign you out or prevent parts of the service from working.

We do not sell this information, and we do not use it for targeted advertising on other sites.

• To create and maintain your account and give you access to your books.
• To schedule and place calls to the person being interviewed.
• To generate questions, chapter titles, and suggested edits for your book.
• To assemble, format, print, and ship your books.
• To take payment, issue receipts, and handle refunds and order issues.
• To send you email and text updates about your book, calls, and orders.
• To answer your questions and provide support.
• To keep the service secure, detect abuse and fraud, and prevent unwanted calls, for example by suppressing numbers that have asked us to stop.
• To comply with legal, tax, and accounting obligations.
• To improve the service, including understanding which features families use.

The service includes tools that suggest questions, generate a chapter title, and polish a draft. To do that work, the relevant text (an answer or a transcript excerpt) is sent to third-party artificial intelligence services we use as service providers, currently Google (Gemini) and Groq. These providers process the text on our behalf under their API terms, and the result is stored with your book.

We send only the text needed for the task at hand, and we do not send your account password, payment details, or mailing address to those services. You remain in control of what is kept: edits are yours to accept, reject, or rewrite, and you can remove a story from the book before it is printed.

We do not sell your personal information. We share it only with service providers who help us run TalkLore, and only as much as they need to do their part.

• Supabase for our database, authentication, and file storage.
• Vercel for website hosting.
• LiveKit for real-time voice calls.
• Twilio for telephone network connectivity and text messages.
• Resend for sending and receiving email.
• Stripe for payment processing.
• Google for analytics and for the Gemini text processing described above.
• Groq for the other text processing described above.
• Print and fulfillment partners to produce and ship your physical books. They receive the shipping details and the finished book files, meaning your stories reach them as part of printing.

We may also disclose information when we are legally required to, including:

• To comply with a law, regulation, subpoena, or court order, or to respond to a lawful request from public authorities.
• To protect the rights, safety, or property of TalkLore, our customers, or the public, including investigating fraud or abuse.
• As part of a merger, acquisition, financing, or sale of assets, in which case we will tell you before your information becomes subject to a different privacy policy.
• With your direction or consent.

The person being interviewed is often not our customer. Their name, phone number, email address, and the questions they are asked come to us from the account holder. We handle their information under this same policy, with a few points worth stating plainly.

• What we hold about them. Contact details, the scheduled call times, the questions asked, the answers they gave, the transcripts of those answers, and the finished book.
• Making it stop. They can ask us to stop calling at any time by telling the interviewer, by emailing support@talklore.app, or by replying STOP to a reminder text. The account holder can also pause calls or change the schedule from the book page.
• Their own requests. They can email us to ask what we hold about them, to correct it, or to ask us to delete it. We will honor those requests in the same way we honor the account holder’s, and we may need to verify who is asking.
• What happens to stories already gathered. If someone asks us to stop calling but does not ask us to delete their stories, we stop calling and keep what has already been gathered for the account holder’s book. If they ask us to delete their information, we remove the transcripts and answers we hold, and we will tell the account holder that those chapters can no longer be included.

• Account and book content. Kept while your account is open. If you delete your account, we remove the book, its stories, transcripts, and images from active systems, and they clear from backups as those cycles roll over, normally within 90 days.
• Call records. Kept alongside the book so the story keeps its context, and deleted with it.
• Orders, receipts, and payment records. Kept as long as tax and accounting rules require, which is typically seven years, even after an account closes.
• Support correspondence. Kept for up to three years so we can follow up on a problem.
• Analytics. Retained on Google Analytics retention settings, which run up to 14 months.
• Suppression lists. If someone asks us not to call them again, we keep the minimum needed (a phone number and the request) to make sure we honor it.

Information is encrypted in transit, stored on reputable infrastructure providers, and reachable only by the small number of people who need it to run the service. We use access controls and keep our dependency surface as small as we can.

No method of transmission or storage is perfectly secure, so we cannot promise absolute security. If we ever become aware of a breach affecting your information, we will notify you and the relevant authorities as required by law.

• Access and correction. You can see and edit most of your information in your account, including book details, questions, answers, and contact information.
• Deletion. You can delete stories, images, and entire books, or ask us to close your account and delete everything we hold, subject to the retention rules above.
• Portability. Your book is already yours to download as a PDF and eBook. Ask us if you want a machine-readable copy of your account data.
• Marketing email. Every marketing email includes an unsubscribe link. We will still send transactional messages about a book you ordered or a call you scheduled.
• Text messages. Reply STOP to any reminder to stop receiving texts.
• Cookies. Managed through your browser settings. See “Information collected automatically” above.

To make a request, email support@talklore.app. We may ask you to verify your identity before we act, and we will respond within the timeframe the applicable law requires.

United States. Depending on where you live, you may have the right to know what personal information we collect, to access and receive a copy of it, to correct inaccuracies, to delete it, to obtain a portable copy, and to opt out of the sale or sharing of personal information. We do not sell personal information and we do not share it for cross-context behavioral advertising. If you are an authorized agent making a request, we may ask for proof of your authority. We will not discriminate against you for exercising a privacy right.

EEA, United Kingdom, and Switzerland. Where these laws apply, we process personal information to perform our contract with you, to pursue legitimate interests such as securing and improving the service, with your consent where required, and to comply with legal obligations. We rely on standard contractual clauses or another approved mechanism for transfers outside those regions. You have the right to access, correct, delete, restrict, or object to processing, to receive your data in a portable format, to withdraw consent, and to lodge a complaint with your local supervisory authority.

TalkLore accounts are for adults. You must be at least 18 to create an account and to order a book. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 13, or under the minimum age in your region, and we will delete it if we learn we have.

A family book may of course contain stories about children and grandchildren. The adult account holder is the person who provides that information, and it is stored as part of the book.

We may update this policy as the service changes or the law requires. When we do, we change the date at the top of this page. If a change materially affects how we handle your information, we will also notify account holders by email before it takes effect.

Email support@talklore.app for any question about this policy, for a copy of the information we hold about you, or to ask us to delete it.