Privacy Policy

CarsonLore is a private website for our family - the descendants of our great-grandmother - to share stories, voice recordings, and pictures of letters and documents with each other. It is not a public website, it is not a business, and nothing you share here is sold, advertised against, or shared outside the family. Only family members approved by the site administrator can sign in. Everything below explains, in plain language, what information the site keeps and why.

CarsonLore is a personal, non-commercial family project run by Jean-Paul Cozzatti ("the administrator"). Questions about this policy or about your information: contact the administrator through the family Facebook group (Carson Family Connection), or by email at jeanpaul.cozzatti@gmail.com.

Access is by invitation and approval only. There is no public sign-up. The administrator approves each account individually. If you can sign in, it is because a family member vouched for you or the administrator knows you belong here.

1. Account information. When you sign in, we receive your name and email address from Google sign-in, or your phone number if you sign in by phone. We keep this only to run your account, show who contributed each story, and know who has access.
2. What you contribute. Stories you write, voice recordings you make or upload, and photos or scans you upload - together with the title, the name of the person the story is about, an approximate date or era, and a short description. Your name is shown as the contributor.
3. Basic technical information. Like any website, our hosting provider (Google Cloud) keeps standard server logs - for example, the time a page was visited and the type of device or browser used - for security and to keep the site running. We do not build profiles of how you use the site, and we do not use advertising or marketing trackers.

Uploaded files (audio, images, documents) are stored in the administrator's Google Drive, in a folder structure set aside for this archive. The website itself keeps an index - titles, descriptions, dates, contributor names, and links to the files - so the archive can be browsed and searched. Everyday family photos live separately, in the family's shared Google Photos album, which is governed by Google's own terms.

Only approved family members who can sign in to CarsonLore. Nothing on this site is public, nothing is indexed by search engines by design, and there is no public link sharing. That said, please share with ordinary care: any family member who can sign in can see the stories in the archive. Do not contribute anything you would not want the wider family to read, hear, or see.

• We never sell personal information. There is nothing to sell - this is a family project, not a business.
• We never share your information with advertisers or data brokers.
• We never use your stories, recordings, or photos to train artificial intelligence models.
• We never post your contributions anywhere else (including social media) without asking you first.

The site runs on Google services: Google Cloud (hosting), Google Drive (file storage), Google sign-in, and Firebase Authentication (phone-number sign-in, including sending the text-message code). These services process information under Google's own privacy policy. We do not use third-party analytics or advertising services.

Family stories often mention children, and photos or scans may include them. Accounts, however, are for adult family members. If you contribute material about a child, please do so only if you are their parent or guardian, or have their parent's or guardian's permission.

• You can ask the administrator at any time to show you what you have contributed, correct it, or remove it.
• You can delete your own contributions, or ask the administrator to delete them for you.
• You can ask for your account and access to be removed entirely. If you leave the archive, you may choose whether your stories stay (with your name) or are removed with you.
• Removal requests are honoured promptly. Removing something from the archive removes it from the website and its Drive folder; copies someone may have downloaded to their own device in the meantime are outside our control - another reason to share with care.

Access is restricted to approved accounts, sign-in is handled by Google, and files live in access-controlled storage. No system is perfectly secure, and because this is a small family project run by one person, we cannot promise more than reasonable care - but reasonable care is what we take, and if we ever learn of a problem affecting family information, we will tell the family promptly through the Facebook group.

The archive is meant to last - preserving family stories is the point. Contributions are kept for as long as the archive exists, unless you ask for them to be removed. Account information for people who leave is deleted when their access is removed, except where a name remains attached to a contribution they chose to leave with the archive.

If this policy changes in a way that matters, the administrator will announce it in the family Facebook group and note the new date at the top of this page.

This is a family project, not a company, and this policy is written as a good-faith statement of how we handle family information rather than as a legal contract. The administrator is based in Washington State, USA, and family members live in several countries; we will respect reasonable privacy requests from any family member regardless of where they live.