Privacy Policy | Tell Me Your Story

1. Who we are

Tell Me Your Story is operated by Mark Griffiths, 38 Botley Gardens, Southampton SO19 0SW, United Kingdom. I am the data controller for the personal information described in this policy.

For anything to do with your personal information, including the requests described in section 13, email hello@tellmeyourstory.uk or write to the address above.

2. What this policy covers

This policy explains what personal information we collect when you use tellmeyourstory.uk, why we collect it, who else sees it, how long we keep it, and what you can ask us to do about it.

It is written in plain English on purpose. If anything here is unclear, ask and we will explain it.

3. The information we collect

Account information. Your name, email address, password (stored only as a cryptographic hash, never in a readable form), and the date you signed up.

Story content. This is the heart of the service, and it includes:

Voice recordings of the person telling their stories
Written transcripts of those recordings
Written answers typed directly into the service
Photographs you upload
The questions answered, and when each story was added

Purchase information. What you bought, when, how much you paid, and a reference to the payment. Card details are handled entirely by Stripe and never reach our systems.

Delivery information. For printed books: the recipient's name and postal address.

Information about other people. Stories are usually told by someone other than the account holder — a parent, a grandparent, another relative. Their voice, their name, their photographs and the details of their life are personal information about them, not about you. Sections 6 and 7 explain how we treat that.

Technical information. Our servers keep standard request logs, including IP addresses, for security and troubleshooting. We use IP addresses temporarily to block abuse and automated attacks.

4. Why we use it, and our legal basis

Under UK data protection law we have to have a specific lawful reason for each thing we do with your information. Here they are:

Creating and running your account — performance of a contract with you
Storing your stories, recordings and photographs, and showing them back to you — performance of a contract with you
Turning recordings into readable text — performance of a contract with you
Printing and delivering your book — performance of a contract with you
Taking payment — performance of a contract with you
Keeping accounting and tax records — legal obligation
Sending you service emails about your account, your order or your stories — performance of a contract with you
Sending you marketing emails about the product — your consent, which you can withdraw at any time
Keeping the service secure and preventing abuse — our legitimate interests in protecting the service and our users
Understanding how the site is used so we can improve it — your consent, given through the cookie banner

Sensitive details inside stories are treated separately — see section 7.

Where we rely on legitimate interests, we have considered whether it is fair to you. We use the minimum information needed, we do not use it to build profiles of you, and you can object — see section 13.

5. Voice recordings

Recordings deserve their own section, because they are the reason the service exists and because a voice is more personal than most data.

Recordings are stored so that you can listen to them, so that they can be transcribed, and so that the QR codes printed in your book will play them.
Each QR code links to a recording. Anyone who can scan that code in your book can hear that recording. That is the point of the book, but it means you should think about who you give the book to, in the same way you would with any family photograph album.
Recordings are sent to Groq, in the United States, where they are transcribed using the Whisper speech recognition model. Groq also processes the resulting text to help prepare your stories for printing.
We do not use your recordings, transcripts, photographs or stories to train artificial intelligence models. Our data processing agreement with Groq allows them to process this material only in order to provide their service to us, which does not extend to training their own models.
We do not use voice recordings to identify anyone. We do not carry out voice recognition, voice matching or any similar analysis.
You can delete a recording from within the service at any time.

6. When the stories are someone else's

Most people use Tell Me Your Story to record a relative. If that is you, then that relative's personal information is in our systems because you put it there.

You must have that person's agreement before you record them, upload their photographs or write down their stories. The terms of service say the same thing, and it is a condition of using the service.
If the person telling the stories cannot give that agreement themselves, only proceed if you are legally entitled to act for them.
That person has the same rights over their information as you have over yours. If they contact us directly, we will help them — including deleting their recordings — and we may need to contact you about it.
If you are recording a child, you must be their parent or guardian, or have the agreement of their parent or guardian.

If you are the person whose stories have been recorded and you want them removed, email hello@tellmeyourstory.uk and we will deal with it.

7. Sensitive details inside stories

A life story is not neutral data. People talk about illness and operations, about their faith, about where their family came from, about politics, about the union they joined, about losses that still hurt. Data protection law calls some of this special category data and holds it to a higher standard.

We do not ask for any of it. We do not analyse stories to pull it out, we do not tag or categorise it, and we do not use it to make any decision about anybody. It is in our systems only because someone chose to tell that part of their story.

Where stories contain this kind of detail, we rely on the explicit consent of the person telling them, given when they choose to record a story and keep it. That consent can be withdrawn by deleting the story, or by asking us to delete it.

If you are recording someone else, this is the part to be thoughtful about. Make sure they understand that what they say is being kept, transcribed and potentially printed, and that they are happy for it to be. If at any point they would rather something was not kept, delete it, or ask us and we will.

8. Who else sees your information

We do not sell your information, and we never will. We share it only with the providers we need to run the service:

Supabase — database and file storage, including recordings and photographs. Ireland (EU).
Render — hosts our application server. Oregon, United States.
Vercel — hosts the website. Global edge network, including the United States.
Groq — transcribes recordings and processes the resulting text. United States.
Stripe — takes payment. United Kingdom, European Union and United States.
Lulu — prints and delivers your book. Receives the book contents and the delivery name and address. United States and European Union.
Resend — sends our emails. United States.
PostHog — counts visits and page views, if you have agreed to analytics cookies. European Union.

Each of these acts on our instructions under a written contract and may only use your information to provide their service to us. Some of them use their own suppliers in turn, under the same restrictions.

We may also share information where the law requires it, or to establish or defend legal claims.

9. Information leaving the UK

Your stories, recordings and photographs are stored in Ireland, and our analytics are processed in the European Union. Transfers from the UK to Ireland and the rest of the European Economic Area are covered by the UK's adequacy regulations, so no additional safeguard is needed.

Some processing happens in the United States — our application server, transcription, email delivery and book printing. For those transfers we rely on the UK International Data Transfer Addendum to the European Commission's standard contractual clauses, together with the UK extension to the EU–US Data Privacy Framework where a provider is certified under it.

You can ask us for a copy of the safeguards that apply to a particular provider by emailing us.

10. How long we keep it

Account information and story content, including recordings — while your account is open. Deleted within 30 days of you deleting your account or asking us to close it.
Copies held in our encrypted backups — up to 90 days after deletion, then overwritten.
Printed book files — 12 months after the order, so we can reprint if something goes wrong.
Purchase and accounting records — 6 years from the end of the tax year, because HMRC requires it.
Delivery addresses — 12 months after delivery.
Support emails — 2 years from your last message.
Records of marketing consent — while you are subscribed, and 2 years afterwards, so we can show that you consented.
Server and security logs — 90 days.

Deleting your account does not remove the accounting records we are legally required to keep. Those contain purchase details, not your stories.

11. Keeping it safe

We use encrypted connections throughout, store passwords only as hashes, keep recordings and photographs in access-controlled storage, take encrypted backups, and limit who can reach production systems.

No service can promise it will never suffer a breach. If one happens and it puts your rights at risk, we will tell you and the Information Commissioner's Office within the timescales the law sets.

Please keep your own copies of anything irreplaceable. The service lets you download your recordings and your book. We take backups and we take them seriously, but no online service should be the only place a family's recordings exist.

12. Cookies and similar technologies

We use a small number of cookies and similar storage:

Essential, to keep you signed in and to make the site work. These do not need your consent and cannot be turned off.
Analytics, through PostHog, to count visits and understand which pages are useful. These are only set if you agree through the cookie banner, and you can change your mind at any time.

We do not use advertising cookies and we do not allow third parties to track you across other websites. See our Cookies Policy for more detail.

13. Your rights

You have the right to:

Be told what we do with your information — this policy
Get a copy of the information we hold about you
Have mistakes corrected
Have your information deleted, where we do not have an overriding reason to keep it
Restrict what we do with it while a question about it is resolved
Receive it in a portable form, so you can take it elsewhere
Object to processing we carry out on the basis of legitimate interests
Withdraw consent at any time, where consent is our basis. Withdrawing it does not undo anything lawful we did beforehand

To use any of these, email hello@tellmeyourstory.uk. We will reply within one month. If a request is particularly complicated we may need longer, and we will tell you if so and why. You will not be charged for making a request.

You can also complain to the regulator. If you think we have handled your information badly, please tell us first so we can put it right. You are also entitled to complain directly to the Information Commissioner's Office, Wycliffe House, Water Lane, Wilmslow, Cheshire SK9 5AF, telephone 0303 123 1113, ico.org.uk.

If you live or work outside the UK, you may complain to your own country's supervisory authority instead.

14. Automated decisions

We do not make any decision about you by automated means that has a legal effect on you or that significantly affects you in a similar way.

15. Children

You must be 18 or over to hold an account. Children's stories may of course appear in a book, but the account and the contract are with an adult.

16. Changes to this policy

If we change this policy we will update the date at the top. If the change materially affects your rights, we will email you about it rather than relying on you to notice.

17. Contact

Mark Griffiths, 38 Botley Gardens, Southampton SO19 0SW
hello@tellmeyourstory.uk