Told records a person's life story and turns it into something their family keeps. That means we hold some of the most personal material there is: a person's voice, their memories and the names of the people in their life. This page says what we collect, why, who else touches it, how long we keep it, and what you and the storyteller can do about it. It applies to told.media, the Told app and the family story page, wherever in the world you are. Where the law where you live gives you more than this page does, the law wins.
Two kinds of people use Told. The storyteller is the person whose story is recorded. The family is whoever sets up the record, pays, checks the names and reads the story: usually a son, daughter or grandchild, sometimes the storyteller themselves. Both have rights under this page, and where they differ, the storyteller's control over their own recordings comes first.
From the family: a name, an email address, and, if you pay, the payment details our payment provider handles (we never see or store your card number). The storyteller's name, what the family calls them, and the phone number or email the app link is sent to. Optionally, names of people and places you expect to come up, the storyteller's country and region, decade of birth, and languages spoken at home, which we use only to spell names correctly. Any photos you add, with their captions.
From the storyteller: the recordings of every conversation, in full; the transcripts we make from them; the names and places mentioned; the storyteller's spoken consent, recorded in their own voice; their choices about who may hear the story and what should happen to it after their death; and technical details about the recording (when it started and stopped, interruptions, audio levels) that we use to make sure nothing was lost.
From everyone: the ordinary technical records any service keeps, such as when you signed in and from what kind of device. The public website sets no cookies, runs no analytics and loads nothing from advertising networks.
To do the thing you paid for: run the conversations, transcribe them, build the story, let the family check it, print the book, and keep the archive. To spell names and places correctly, using the names you gave us, the storyteller's own corrections, and, for places and institutions only, a shared list of spellings other families have confirmed. To send the emails the service needs: one after each conversation, the consent request, the request to approve the story for printing, and a notice when a download is ready. We do not send marketing email to storytellers, and we send it to the family only if they ask for it.
To improve how Told asks questions. With consent given at setup, we keep a record of how each question performed (how long the answer was, whether it contained a scene, whether the person declined) with no names, no words and no link back to the storyteller that we can read in ordinary operation. The storyteller can withdraw this consent at any time and the records are removed. What the storyteller said is never used to train a model that anyone else uses.
We never sell or share personal information for advertising. We never make a synthetic version of the storyteller's voice, and we never generate words in their name; every sentence in the story that is theirs points to the recording it came from. We never add a person's name to any shared list. We never give a browser or app a direct link to stored audio; every recording is delivered by us, to someone the storyteller has allowed, at the moment they ask for it, and we keep a record of each delivery.
We use other companies to do parts of the work, under contracts that limit them to doing that work for us: a cloud hosting provider for storage and computing, a speech-to-text provider for transcripts, a language-model provider for extracting names and assembling the story from the transcript, a payment provider, an email provider, and a printer for the book. The transcription and language-model providers receive the audio or text they need to process and are contractually barred from using it to train their models or for any other purpose. The printer receives the print file and the delivery address. We will name our current providers on request.
Told is sold worldwide and hosted with a major cloud provider. Your data may be stored and processed in a country other than the one you live in. Where the law requires safeguards for that, we use the standard contractual protections that law recognises. If you need your data held in a particular region, ask us before you start and we will tell you honestly whether we can.
For as long as the record is active, and for as long afterwards as the storyteller's instructions say. The storyteller chooses, at consent, what happens to the recordings after their death: passed to a named person, kept for the people they allowed, or deleted. The family story page is hosted for five years from delivery by default, with the option to continue. If we ever stopped hosting, you would be told in advance and given the full download. Technical records are kept for as long as they are useful for security and no longer.
The storyteller can delete everything from their phone at any time. The family can request deletion, which needs the storyteller's confirmation while they are able to give it, and otherwise follows the storyteller's instructions. For thirty days after a deletion request the record is hidden and can be restored, in case it was a mistake. After that it is permanently erased from our systems, including backups as they cycle, and we keep only a note that it existed and was deleted, so that no old backup can ever bring it back.
Whoever you are and wherever you live, you can ask us what we hold about you, get a copy, correct it, have it deleted, or withdraw consent you gave us. The family has all of this built in: the archive download contains every recording, every transcript and the story, in ordinary formats that work without us. Write to hello@told.media and a person will answer. If you think we have handled your information badly you can complain to the privacy regulator where you live, and we would rather you told us first.
Recordings and transcripts are encrypted in transit and at rest. Access is limited to the people the storyteller has allowed and to the few of us who need it to run the service, and every access to a recording is logged. We practise restoring from backups. No system is perfectly secure; if a breach ever affected your information we would tell you promptly and plainly, and tell the regulator where the law requires it.
Told is for adults. A storyteller under eighteen needs a parent or guardian to set up the record and give consent on their behalf, and the recordings belong to that family in the same way.
If this page changes in a way that matters, we will email the family accounts before the change takes effect. The date at the top is the date of the current version.