Acceptable Use Policy

This policy forms part of the Terms of Service and applies to everything stored in or sent through Famvaults, by any member of any vault. A vault owner is responsible for their own use and for the members they invite; if a member breaks this policy, the owner’s vault is affected too.

• store or share material that is unlawful where you or the subject lives — in particular any sexual content involving minors, which we report to the authorities without exception;
• harass, threaten, defame, blackmail or stalk anyone, or build a dossier intended to harm someone;
• store content you have no right to store — material that infringes copyright, or confidential information belonging to someone else;
• impersonate another person, or misrepresent your relationship to a family in order to gain access to their vault;
• distribute malware, or attempt to breach, overload, probe or reverse engineer the service or other users’ vaults;
• resell the service, or use it as general-purpose file hosting or a content delivery network — the 5 GB per vault is for a family archive, not a backup drive;
• run a business, a club membership list, a client file or any other organisational record-keeping on it — Famvaults is for households, and nothing in it is built or warranted for commercial record-keeping;
• bulk-import personal data about people from genealogy databases, public records, social media or data brokers in order to build profiles of people unconnected to your family;
• send bulk or unsolicited email through our invitation system, or invite people who have asked not to be invited;
• circumvent the storage limit, the access levels, or any other limit in the product, including by automated access.

Some records are lawful to hold and still wrong to keep here, because Famvaults is a family archive in beta and not a certified, audited or regulated system. Please do not store:

• payment card numbers, bank credentials, or passwords to other services;
• national identity, passport or tax numbers you have no family reason to keep;
• medical, legal or financial records that a law, a contract or an employer requires to be held in a certified, audited or regulated system;
• anything you are under a professional duty of confidence to protect — a client's, a patient's, or an employer's records;

And please do not make Famvaults the only copy of anything you cannot replace. It is a beta; keep the original wherever originals belong, and export regularly. If you store these records anyway, the risk and the responsibility are yours.

A family archive is mostly information about other people, and most of them never agreed to be in it. That is normal and it is the point of the product — but it carries obligations, and they are yours, not ours.

• Be truthful. Record what you know, and mark family lore as lore. An accusation written as fact about a living person can be defamatory even in a private vault, once another member can read it.
• Take particular care with sensitive details — health, mental illness, addiction, sexuality, immigration status, criminal history. Ask yourself whether the person would want it written down and shared with everyone you have invited.
• Take particular care with information about children, and with photographs of them.
• If a living relative asks you to remove or correct something about them, do it.
• Do not upload someone else’s private letters, photographs, medical records or documents where you have no right to, and do not upload recordings of people made without their knowledge where your law requires their consent.
• Remember that a family is not one opinion. Someone who has left the family, or who never joined it, may reasonably object to being written about at all.

If you believe a vault contains something that breaks this policy, or holds information about you that should not be there, email hello@famvaults.com. Tell us what you found and where, how to reach you, and — if you are claiming a right, such as copyright or that the content is about you — enough for us to understand the basis of it.

Because vaults are private, and wiki articles are encrypted with a key we do not hold, we cannot see the content you are reporting until someone with access shows it to us. In most cases our first step is to put the report to the vault owner. We take reports seriously and will acknowledge yours within a few working days, though during the beta we cannot commit to a fixed response time.

We do not monitor vaults and have no general obligation to do so. We are not the publisher of what a family writes and we do not review it in advance — we act on what is reported.

Where we can, we start with a conversation: most problems are a misunderstanding, or one page rather than one person. Depending on severity we may ask for content to be removed, remove it ourselves, restrict a feature, suspend a member’s access, or close an account.

We will tell you what happened and why, unless the law prevents it. For anything involving imminent harm or material that must be reported, we will act first, without notice, and explain afterwards. Because the service is free, we are not liable to you for loss arising from action we take in good faith under this policy — keeping your own export is, once again, the protection that costs you nothing.