Privacy Policy

Who is responsible for your data

FamilyConnect is built and operated by Sankarapandian, an individual based in Tamil Nadu, India. For anything in this policy — questions, corrections, or a request to delete your account — write to success.pandian@gmail.com. This policy is written with India's Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 in mind.

FamilyConnect is in beta

The service is currently a free public beta. Anyone can sign up and there is no charge. In return, please understand that features may change or be removed, the service may be interrupted, and data may need to be migrated as the design settles. If a change would delete or materially alter data you entered, you will be notified beforehand at the mobile number on your account.

What we collect

• Your mobile number, stored in international (E.164) format. This is your login identity.
• Login security data: a one-way hash of your password (never the password itself), one-time password (OTP) challenge records, active session records, and failed login counters used to lock an account after repeated wrong attempts.
• Your profile: name, gender, date or year of birth, current place, native place (oor), kula deivam and temple, community and kilai — all of it optional except your name.
• Family relationships: the parent, child, sibling and marriage links you create, and the connection, invite and link-proposal records that go with them.
• Activity records: notifications sent to you, and an audit log of changes made to family records, so a disputed edit can be traced back.
• Device tokens, if you enable push notifications.
• Ordinary server logs kept by our hosting provider — IP address, time, and the request made — used for security and debugging.

We do not collect your location, your contacts list, or your photos, and we do not read anything from your WhatsApp account.

Information about other people

This is the part that deserves your attention. FamilyConnect lets you add relatives who have not signed up — your grandfather, your athai, a cousin's child. When you do, you are entering information about a real person who has not agreed to anything.

• Only enter what you would be comfortable with that relative seeing, because they may see it. Enter what you reasonably know to be true.
• When that relative joins FamilyConnect with their own mobile number, they can claim the profile you created — through an invite you send, or by matching on their number — and from then on they control it, including its visibility and whether it can be discovered by others.
• Until it is claimed, the profile is visible according to the visibility you set, within your confirmed family circle.
• If someone finds a profile about them that they did not create and do not want, they can write to success.pandian@gmail.com and we will remove or restrict it.

Who else sees your data

• WhatsApp (Meta) receives your mobile number so we can deliver your login code. Nothing else about you is sent.
• Vercel hosts the application and Neon hosts the database. Both run in the Singapore region, so your data is stored and processed in Singapore.
• Other members see what your visibility settings allow — normally your confirmed family circle.

We do not sell your data, we show no advertising, and the app carries no third-party analytics, advertising or tracking scripts of any kind.

Your controls

Every person record has a visibility setting, and your own profile has a discoverable flag that governs whether long-distance relatives can find you through native place, kula deivam, kilai or mutual relatives. Both are changeable at any time from the profile page, and discovery always requires the consent of both sides before details are shared. Community and kilai are optional fields — leave them blank if you prefer.

Deleting your account

Write to success.pandian@gmail.com from — or naming — the mobile number on the account. We will delete your login credentials, sessions, device tokens, notifications, and the profile that represents you, normally within 30 days.

One honest limit: family relationships are shared facts. Records you created about otherpeople, and the links joining them to their own relatives, may remain in those relatives' trees, because deleting them would erase other families' history along with yours. Say so in your request if you want specific records you created removed as well, and we will do that. Backups and audit logs may retain data for a short further period before they age out.

How long we keep things

Account and family data is kept until you delete your account. OTP challenges expire within minutes, sessions expire on their own, and notifications and audit events are retained on a rolling basis for operational purposes.

Age

You must be 18 or older to create a FamilyConnect account. Children may appear in a family tree as records entered by an adult relative; they cannot sign in, and a parent or guardian may ask us to remove such a record at any time.

Security

Passwords are stored only as hashes. The database enforces row-level security so a session can only read the records it is entitled to, sessions expire, and repeated wrong passwords lock an account temporarily. No system is perfectly secure, and during the beta the service is provided without warranty — please do not store anything here that would harm you if it became public.

Changes to this policy

When this policy changes materially, the version recorded against your account becomes outdated and you will be asked to review and accept the new one the next time you sign in. The date at the top of this page always reflects the current version. See also our Terms of Service.