Your family’s stories are not our product

Longtold is a product of Wood Candle Co, Verona, WI · Effective August 2026

What we collect

Account basics (name, email, a hashed password, an optional birth year, and an optional cell number if you turn on texts); your family’s content (questions, stories, photos, weekly check-ins, reactions); the recipient list your family builds (names and emails); and the minimum technical record needed to run a website (session cookies and server logs).

What it’s for

Running Longtold — sending questions, delivering stories to the people your family chose, showing your book as it grows, and printing it. That’s the whole list. No advertising, no selling data, no sharing addresses. Recipient emails are used for story emails only, never marketing, unless a person explicitly opts into something more.

AI-assisted questions

One thing in Longtold is written by a machine: the next question. To write one that has not been asked before, we send Anthropic your family tree, short excerpts of recent stories, and the list of questions already used. Never anyone’s email address or phone number. Anthropic’s terms say what we send is never used to train their models, and that they keep it only briefly for safety checks.

You can turn this off completely, and then nothing is sent at all — the check happens before anything is gathered. Individual stories can be held back one at a time, and subjects your family puts off-limits are kept out. Stories themselves are never published or shared beyond your family’s chosen recipients.

How stories are protected

Stories, photographs, recordings, letters and the notes your family writes back are all encrypted at rest on our servers. If someone stole the disk or a backup, they would get nothing readable.

Reading them takes an account, or the private link your family sends a reader — which they control and can replace at any time, and which stops being able to write anything sixty days after it was last sent. Sign-in attempts are rate-limited.

Texts and phone numbers

If you opt into SMS notifications, your number is used to send them and for nothing else. No mobile information is shared with third parties or affiliates for marketing or promotional purposes; text messaging originator opt-in data and consent are never shared with any third party. Reply STOP anytime. The full program policy is at longtold.life/sms.

Who touches your data

A short list of service providers, each doing one job: Railway (hosting), Resend (sending email), Anthropic (question curation, as above), Stripe (plans and tips — we never see card numbers), Twilio (text delivery, if you opt in), Cloudflare (an encrypted offsite copy of uploaded files, so a failure here cannot lose your family’s photographs), and Microsoft (the mailbox that receives replies to story emails). We share only what each needs to do its job.

Cookies

Two, both boring: your sign-in session and your light/dark preference. No analytics trackers, no ad pixels.

One honest exception inside the family: story emails include a tiny image that records the first time each recipient opens the story, so the storyteller and the family member running the book can see the stories are reaching people. If you turn on notifications, we record the same thing when one is delivered or tapped. Both note only that it happened — no location, no device details, nothing shared outside your family, never used for advertising.

Your choices

Every story email has one-click unsubscribe. SMS stops with STOP or a Settings toggle. And your family can take everything with it: write hey@longtold.life to export or permanently delete your data. Longtold accounts are for adults; stories may mention family members of any age, and they stay within the family.

Deleting your family’s book

A storyteller can delete their family’s book from Settings. Everything stops that day: no more questions, no more story emails, and nobody outside the family can reach it. For thirty days it can be brought back with one click, and nothing is destroyed until then. During that time Longtold is closed to the family — they can still download a copy of everything, which we would urge anyone to do, but not read it here. After thirty days it is destroyed for good, their sign-ins stop working, and nobody can bring it back, including us.

Two things outlive that, and we would rather say so than let you find out. Stories we have already emailed are in your family’s inboxes and nothing we do reaches those. And we keep backups of the whole service in case something goes wrong — fourteen days on our own disk, ninety days offsite. Your family’s stories sit in those until they expire. A backup restores everything at once and never a single family, so it cannot be used to get your book back; it only decides when the very last copy is gone.

If this policy changes in a way that matters, account holders get an email first. See also the Terms of Service.