Governance & Trust
Privacy & Data Ownership
Family memories are personal. Root & Bower is designed so that preserving them does not require giving up ownership of them.
The Core Principle
Your memories remain yours.
Root & Bower does not take ownership of stories, photographs, recordings, videos, documents, or other material merely because you preserve them here. We need limited permission to process that content in order to store, display, protect, and deliver the service, but that operational permission is not a transfer of ownership.
What We Do
Use your content to provide the sanctuary.
Root & Bower may store, resize, transcode, back up, transmit, and display preserved content as reasonably necessary to operate the service.
Access is governed by the visibility and stewardship settings associated with the sanctuary and individual content.
What We Don't Do
Turn private family history into an advertising product.
Root & Bower does not currently sell personal information or use personal information for targeted advertising.
We also do not use private sanctuary content to train generative artificial intelligence models.
Visibility
Private and public are meaningful choices.
Restricted sanctuary content
Content intended for sanctuary members is protected by application access controls and role-based permissions. Authorized stewards may still have access according to the role they have been given.
Public sanctuary content
Anything intentionally made public should be treated as public information. It can be viewed, indexed, cached, copied, or retained by people and services outside Root & Bower's control.
Shared Stewardship
Access can belong to more than one person.
A family sanctuary may have owners, administrators, stewards, editors, viewers, or other roles. The person who creates a sanctuary is responsible for choosing appropriate access and deciding who should be trusted with stewardship.
Invited stewards may be able to view, add, edit, organize, or manage content depending on the permissions assigned to them.
Root & Bower does not decide inheritance, next-of-kin rights, family authority, or ownership disputes among relatives. Those issues may require documentation or resolution outside the service.
Your Choices
Control visibility
Choose whether eligible sanctuary content is public or restricted to the people who have access.
Request privacy help
If information about you appears on Root & Bower and you have a privacy concern, you can contact our privacy address for review.
Future portability
Root & Bower intends to provide increasingly complete export tools so families can take copies of their sanctuary data and preserved items with them.
This page explains our approach in plain English. The Privacy Policy contains the formal disclosure of how personal information is collected, used, shared, and retained.
privacy@rootandbower.com