Terms of Service

1. Acceptance of Terms

By downloading, installing, or using the FamiVox application ("the App") on mobile or desktop, you agree to be bound by these Terms of Service. These terms constitute a legal agreement between you and Kannaiyan Natesan ("we", "us", the "Developer"), the developer and operator of FamiVox. If you do not agree to these terms, please do not use the App.

2. Description of Service

FamiVox is a community-driven family tree application that lets you:

• Create, manage, and explore your family heritage with names, relationships, life events, and photos.
• Share your tree with specific family members you invite.
• Optionally contribute to a community-wide ancestry graph where your tree may automatically merge with other users' trees when there is strong evidence of common ancestors. This is called "Cluster Trees" and is governed by Section 6 below.
• Search relationships across your tree and the trees you have access to.

2A. Sharing Principles — Your Tree is Yours

Your family tree never leaves your consented audience. Specifically:

• Tree sharing happens only with your explicit, informed consent. The default state of every account is private. No part of your tree is exposed to any other user, the public web, search engines, advertisers, or analytics providers until you take an explicit action to enable sharing.
• Sharing is bounded to relatives and friends. Two consent paths exist, and only these two: (1) Family Access — people you explicitly invite by email-OTP (Section 8); (2) Cluster Trees — other users whose tree data demonstrably overlaps with yours (e.g. a verified common ancestor or a phone number you both saved on the same person), making them your discovered relatives within the FamiVox graph (Section 6).
• Your tree is never made public. We do not publish a directory of users, we do not allow anonymous browsing of any user's tree, and the marketing website does not embed any user content.
• Your tree is never sold or licensed to third parties for advertising, marketing, training AI models, or genealogy data resale.
• You can revoke a Family Access invite at any time. Cluster Trees contributions follow the permanent-sharing model in Section 7, with explicit narrow exits.

3. Account Registration

To use FamiVox you must create an account. We support multiple sign-in methods:

• Email with one-time password (OTP)
• Sign in with Apple
• Sign in with Google
• Passkey (WebAuthn) for return logins on iOS, Android, and macOS
• Cross-device QR login from a signed-in device to a new desktop or mobile

You are responsible for keeping your sign-in factors and devices secure, and for all activity under your account. You must be at least 13 years old to create an account.

4. User Content

You retain ownership of all content you submit to FamiVox, including family member names, relationships, life events, addresses, and photos ("User Content"). By submitting User Content you grant us a limited, royalty-free licence to store, process, transmit, and display it within the App for the purpose of providing the service to you and to other users you have explicitly granted access to.

You represent that you have the right to submit all User Content and that it does not violate any third party's privacy or intellectual property rights. You agree not to submit content that is unlawful, harmful, defamatory, or violates the privacy or rights of others, including living individuals you do not have permission to add to your tree.

5. Acceptable Use

You agree not to:

• Use the App for any unlawful purpose
• Submit knowingly false, fabricated, or misleading information about real people
• Add a living person to your tree if doing so would violate their reasonable expectation of privacy
• Attempt to access other users' accounts, data, or trees without their permission
• Reverse engineer, decompile, or disassemble the App, except as expressly permitted by applicable law
• Use automated systems, scripts, or scraping tools to access the App or its data
• Upload content that contains malware or harmful code
• Attempt to bypass rate limits, moderation systems, or security controls
• Use the App to harass, defame, dox, or harm other users

6. Cluster Trees and Cross-User Matching

FamiVox supports an opt-in feature called "Share my data anonymously" / Cluster Trees. This feature is OFF by default. Nothing happens automatically — you must explicitly enable it from Settings → Data Sharing, and the App will display a clear permanence notice before turning it on.

When and only when you turn this setting on, the persons you add to your tree from that point forward become candidates for automatic matching with other users' trees, subject to the following bounds:

• Match scope is restricted to demonstrable relatives. A cross-user match only fires when our system has strong evidence (a corroborated ancestor chain, or you and another user have saved the same phone number on the same person) that two persons across two trees are the same human. This is by design — Cluster Trees is a discovery-of-extended-family feature, not a public profile system.
• If a match fires, the App links the two persons as one shared GlobalPerson visible only to the linked users (and to anyone else who later joins the same cluster through the same evidence-based matching).
• When two or more users contribute to overlapping persons, those overlapping branches form a SharedTree cluster. You will see contributions from other users on shared branches; they will see yours. The cluster is bounded — random users with no evidence of relatedness do not appear in your cluster, and you do not appear in theirs.
• Other users who view a shared person from your tree see you as "Contributor #N" using a non-reversible hash. Your name, email, phone number, and account identifier are never revealed unless you both explicitly consent to mutual reveal in a future update.
• Your tree never appears on the public web, in search results, or in any directory accessible without an authenticated FamiVox account that has earned access through this evidence-based matching path.

7. Permanent Sharing Model

Sharing your tree to the community graph is treated as a contribution akin to an open-source code contribution or a Wikipedia edit. By design, you cannot retroactively un-share data through a toggle:

• Turning OFF the "Share my data anonymously" setting stops future additions from being shared. People you previously added while the setting was ON remain part of the community graph.
• If you want to remove a specific shared person, you may use Person soft-delete: if you are the only user who contributed that person, they are removed from the community graph. If other users have also contributed that person, your edge is removed but their contribution stays.
• If you want to leave entirely, you may delete your account (Section 9). At account deletion you choose between two paths: Donate (your shared contributions stay in the community graph but are anonymised) or Delete-where-possible (data only you contributed is removed; data co-contributed by others stays without your edge).

This model is intentionally narrower than a typical "delete and forget" toggle. Please consider it carefully before turning the share setting on.

8. Family Access (Direct Sharing with Specific People)

Separately from Cluster Trees, you can directly invite specific people you know — typically relatives — to view or contribute to your tree. This path is fully consent-driven on both sides:

• You initiate the invite by selecting a specific person in your tree and choosing to invite a relative or friend by email.
• The invitee receives a one-time password (OTP) by email and must explicitly accept the invite at sign-in.
• The invitee can decline. Declined invites do not expose any tree data.
• You can revoke any invite, or remove a member's access, at any time via Settings → Family Tree Access. Revocation is immediate.
• Family Access scope is bounded to the specific people you invited and to the parts of your tree the App has shown them. Invitees cannot share your tree onward to others without going through their own Family Access invite flow.

You are responsible for managing who has access to your tree. We recommend only inviting people you know and trust.

9. Account Termination

You may stop using the App and request account deletion at any time from Settings inside the App, or by contacting us at support@famivox.com. At deletion you choose how to handle data you contributed to the community graph (see Section 7). Personal account data is removed within 30 days, except where retention is required by law or to protect data co-contributed by other users.

We may suspend or terminate your account if you violate these Terms of Service, with notice where practicable.

10. Moderation and Reporting

Any user can report inappropriate content (including a SharedTree cluster, a global person record, or a community contribution) for moderator review. Reports are confidential. If multiple distinct users report the same content within a short window, that content may be automatically hidden pending moderator review. Moderators may hide, blacklist, or remove content that violates these Terms.

11. Phone Numbers and Contact Linking

You may optionally link a phone number or email to a person in your tree using the Contact Link feature. Phone and email become deterministic matching signals: if another user has saved the same phone number on a person in their tree, our system will treat that as strong evidence that you are referring to the same human and may automatically link the two records (subject to your share setting). If you do not want this, do not use Contact Link or do not enable Cluster Trees sharing.

You must not link the phone number or email of a person under 13 years old, and you must not link a phone or email of a living adult without their knowledge and consent. The App enforces a per-user rate limit on contact linking.

12. Intellectual Property

The App, including its design, code, and branding, is the intellectual property of Kannaiyan Natesan. You are granted a limited, non-exclusive, non-transferable licence to use the App for personal, non-commercial purposes. You retain ownership of your own User Content as described in Section 4.

13. Service Availability

We strive to keep FamiVox available at all times, but we do not guarantee uninterrupted access. We may temporarily suspend the service for maintenance, updates, or circumstances beyond our control. We will make reasonable efforts to notify you of planned outages.

14. No Warranty

The App is provided free of charge, on an "as is" and "as available" basis, without warranties of any kind, either express or implied, including but not limited to warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, or non-infringement. We do not warrant that the App will be error-free, secure, or continuously available, or that automatic person-matching will always be correct.

15. Limitation of Liability — Security and Data Loss

While we take all essential security precautions to protect your data — including TLS with certificate pinning, encryption at rest, KMS-encrypted IP records, DPoP per-request token binding, optional passkey credentials, and device-integrity attestation — the developer shall not be held liable for any loss, corruption, unauthorised access, or unintended exposure of your data. This includes but is not limited to:

• Loss of data from cloud-provider outages, infrastructure incidents, or force-majeure events.
• Loss of data from compromises of third-party services we depend on (cloud platforms, identity providers, push notification services, transliteration services).
• Loss of data from compromises of your own device or sign-in credentials (a stolen unlocked phone, a hijacked email account, a malicious app on your device).
• Damages arising from automatic merging of person records under Cluster Trees, including any case where the matcher links two persons that you believe should not have been linked.
• Damages arising from a person being shared with someone you invited and later regret inviting.
• Loss of revenue, loss of business, indirect, incidental, special, consequential, or punitive damages of any kind.

As the App is provided free of charge, you acknowledge and agree that you use it entirely at your own risk and waive any claim for damages arising from data loss or breach. This limitation does not affect statutory rights that cannot be waived under applicable law (including the Indian Digital Personal Data Protection Act 2023). To the maximum extent permitted by applicable law, the total cumulative liability of Kannaiyan Natesan and FamiVox for any claim arising from your use of the App shall not exceed the amount you paid to use the App in the twelve months preceding the claim — which, given the App is free, is zero.

16. Changes to Terms

We may update these Terms of Service from time to time. We will notify you of material changes through the App, on this website, or via email. Your continued use of the App after such changes constitutes acceptance of the updated terms.

17. Governing Law

These Terms of Service are governed by and construed in accordance with the laws of India, including the Information Technology Act 2000 and the Digital Personal Data Protection Act 2023. Any disputes shall be subject to the exclusive jurisdiction of the courts in India.

18. Contact Us

If you have questions about these Terms of Service, please contact:

Kannaiyan Natesan
Developer, FamiVox
Email: support@famivox.com