Privacy Policy

Who is responsible

Everjaar is operated by a corporation incorporated in the Province of Ontario, Canada, that does business under the name Everjaar. For the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) Everjaar is the controller of the personal data described in this policy; under Canada’s Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA) Everjaar is the organisation accountable for it. Both laws apply to Everjaar from day one, because our families live on both sides of the ocean.

The owners and admins of a family space decide what goes into their family’s tree. Everjaar stores and shows that content for them, within the rules in this policy. For everything about your data, you can reach us at hallo@everjaar.com.

What we store

• Per person in a family tree: names, sex, life events such as birth, marriage and death with dates and places, relationships (parents, children, partners) and, when someone enters them, a photo, addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, social media accounts and notes.
• Per account: your email address or addresses, display name, language, time zone and notification settings, the family spaces you belong to with your role, and which person in each tree is you.
• Records of use: a change log per family (who changed what, and when), your consent decisions with their date and the version of this policy you saw, sign-in and email delivery records, and the messages you send to family members through Everjaar.
• Billing: the subscription status of a family space and the Stripe references that belong to it. Payments are handled by Stripe. Everjaar never sees or stores card numbers.
• Technical: short-lived server logs with IP addresses and request details, used only for security and troubleshooting.

Where the data comes from

Most of what is in a family tree is entered by the owners and admins of that family, often about relatives who have never used Everjaar. When someone adds you, the invitation email is how you are told that a record about you exists; from that moment you decide what the family may see of you (see “Consent and withdrawal”).

Everjaar does not buy data, does not import from social networks or public registers on its own, and does not combine your data with data from other sources. Imports are started by a family admin from their own files.

Why we process data, and on what basis

• To run your account and your family space: signing in by email link, invitations, the calendar, reminders, the printed calendar and exports. Basis: the agreement with you, our Terms of Service.
• To let a family keep a shared record of its relatives, entered by its owners and admins. Basis: the legitimate interest of a family in keeping its own record, limited by the disclosure rules below and by your right to object.
• To show other family members more of a living person than two initials. Basis: the consent of that person, or of a parent or guardian for a minor child.
• To send reminder and digest emails. Basis: your notification settings. You can switch every kind of email off, and every reminder email has an unsubscribe link.
• To bill a family space and keep accounting records. Basis: the agreement with the owner and our legal obligations.
• To keep Everjaar secure, prevent abuse and investigate problems. Basis: our legitimate interest in a safe service.

We do not use your data for advertising, we do not sell or rent it, we do not build profiles of you and we make no automated decisions about you.

Who sees what

• Owners and admins of a family see everything that was entered in that family; they maintain the tree.
• Other members see of a living person only what that person has agreed to share. A living person who has not decided yet appears to them as two initials, for example “J. V.”, with their place in the tree but without dates or contact details.
• Deceased persons are shown in full to the whole family.
• Every date, address and contact detail can also be marked “only me” or “admins only”. That choice is respected everywhere: on pages, in the calendar, in reminders, exports, the printed calendar and the change log.
• Members of one family never see another family’s space. A person can be linked across two families only when admins of both agree, and each family keeps its own copy and its own consent decision.
• The people who run Everjaar can technically reach stored data. They do so only to operate the service, to fix a problem, or to handle a request or a legal obligation, and never to look around.

Consent and withdrawal

After you claim your page in a family, you choose per category what the family may see: full name, dates, addresses, phone, email, social media and notes. Everything starts off. Parents or guardians decide for minor children until the child claims their own page; the family’s age of majority decides who counts as a minor.

You can change or withdraw your choice at any time under Settings, Privacy. Withdrawal takes effect immediately for pages, the calendar and new reminders. Reminders that were already delivered are not recalled. Your decision is recorded with the date and the version of this policy, so that it can be shown afterwards what was agreed and when.

When this policy changes in a way that matters for your decision, you are asked to decide again on your next visit. Until you do, your earlier decision keeps applying.

Who else receives data

Everjaar runs on a few service providers that process data on our instructions, under data processing agreements, and only for the purposes above:

• Supabase: the database and the sign-in service, hosted in Canada (Montréal).
• Google Cloud and Firebase Hosting: the servers that run the app and the website, in Canada (Montréal), and the storage of our backups.
• Resend: delivery of our emails (sign-in links, invitations, reminders).
• Stripe: payments and subscriptions. Stripe acts as the seller of record for Everjaar subscriptions and handles your payment details under its own privacy policy.

We do not share data with advertisers, data brokers or social networks. We disclose data to authorities only when the law requires it, and we tell you when we are allowed to.

Where data is stored and international transfers

Everjaar stores its data in Canada. If you live in the European Union or the Netherlands, your data is therefore transferred to Canada. The European Commission has recognised that Canada’s PIPEDA provides an adequate level of protection, so this transfer needs no further safeguards.

Sending email and processing payments may involve servers in the United States. For those transfers we rely on the provider’s standard contractual clauses approved by the European Commission.

Cookies and local storage

Everjaar uses no tracking cookies and no analytics, advertising or social media scripts. Your browser keeps a few things locally so that the app works: your sign-in session (until you close the browser, unless you choose “Stay logged in”), your language, your light or dark theme, the family you last opened and an invitation you were in the middle of accepting.

While you are not signed in, your browser also keeps a random number that contains nothing about you or your device. We use it only to count, on our own server, how many people open an invitation or look up a join code and how many then sign in. We do not use it to follow you across other websites and nobody else receives it.

None of this is shared with anyone, and because it is strictly necessary for the service you asked for, no cookie banner is needed.

Matching between family spaces (optional)

Each family space has an owner. The owner can allow the space to be matched with other spaces that allow it too; this is off by default. When it is on, we compare a person’s name and complete date of birth with persons in other spaces that also allow matching. A match is never linked automatically.

If there is a match and one of the two persons has an account, that person is asked, in their own inbox, whether they are the same person. We do not tell them which space it is. A no is not passed on to the other space. We keep only the two record numbers and the answer for this.

How long we keep data

• Family tree data: for as long as the family space exists. Entries that an admin deletes disappear from every view immediately and stay recoverable from the change log for the family.
• Account data: until you delete your account. Your contact details and addresses are then removed in every family. You choose whether your place in the tree (name, dates, relationships) stays, so that the family history remains intact, or goes too. Your consent decisions are deleted, so the family sees your initials again.
• Consent decisions and the change log: for as long as the family space exists, as a record of what was agreed, by whom and when. Values that were private to you are removed from the log when you leave.
• Invitations: until they are accepted or expire. An erased email address is removed from old invitations.
• Billing records: for as long as tax and accounting law requires, in Canada six years.
• Counts of what happens in the app, such as invitations sent and accepted or a plan chosen, without names, email addresses or message text: for as long as we run the service. When you delete your account they are no longer linked to you.
• Server logs: a few weeks at most.
• Backups: kept in Canada for a limited period and used only to recover from a failure, never to bring back data that someone deleted on purpose.
• A family space with a lapsed subscription becomes read-only; its data is not deleted for non-payment and can always be exported by the owner.

Your rights

You have the right to:

• Access and portability: download everything about the persons that are you, as a readable export, under Settings, Data. Admins can export their whole family space.
• Correction: change your own details, or ask a family admin to; changes to your record by members go through the family’s review queue.
• Erasure: delete your account under Settings, Delete account. A confirmation link is sent to your email address first.
• Restriction and objection: mark details “only me” or “admins only”, decline or withdraw consent, or ask the family’s owner to remove your record entirely.
• Withdraw consent at any time, as easily as you gave it.
• Complain to a supervisory authority: in Canada the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada; in the European Union the authority of your country, in the Netherlands the Autoriteit Persoonsgegevens.

If you are in a family tree but have no Everjaar account, email us at hallo@everjaar.com. We will verify who you are and carry out your request ourselves or with the family’s owner. We answer requests within 30 days.

Children

You must be at least 16 years old to hold an Everjaar account. Children do appear in family trees; for them the parent or guardian decides what the family may see until the child claims their own page. Photos and details of minors are never shown outside the family.

Security

All traffic is encrypted (HTTPS). Every family’s data is separated from every other family’s in the database itself, so that one family can never read another’s. You sign in with a one-time link sent to your email address; Everjaar stores no passwords. Invitation and calendar feed links are stored hashed. Every change is logged with who made it and when. Access to live data is limited to the people who run Everjaar.

No system is perfectly secure. Keep your mailbox safe, because a sign-in link is as good as a key. If despite our care a breach happens that puts you at risk, we inform you and the authorities as the law requires.

Changes to this policy

We may update this policy. The date at the top shows the current version. For material changes we notify you by email or in the app before they take effect, and where a change concerns what the family may see of you, you are asked to decide again.