honestTree

Privacy policy

Last updated October 28, 2026

This page explains what information honestTree stores about you, why it is kept, how long it is retained and what you can do about it. honestTree is a small private family-tree site: there is no advertising or tracking, and your data is never sold.

Who is responsible

Wieslaw Zych runs this site and is responsible (the “controller” under the GDPR) for the accounts and for how the site works. Contact: contact@honesttree.uk.

Each family tree is put online by its owner, who decides what it holds and with whom it is shared; for the people in a tree, the owner is responsible for the information, and the operator only stores it for them.

What we keep about you

  • Your account: username, email address, display name, password (stored only as a secure hash, never in readable form), dates of sign-up, terms acceptance and last login, settings (colours, font, contrast, language and privacy years), and the person you chose as “me”.
  • If you enable two-step login: its secret (encrypted once the site has a secret key) and recovery codes (stored only as hashes).
  • Sharing: trees shared with you and your role in each; invite links to your trees until they are used or expire.
  • Messages to us: reports and data requests, with the page you were on; error records associated with your account.
  • If you pay or give: your plan and Stripe reference, and amounts you gave. Card details go only to Stripe and never reach this site.
  • If you ask to join while sign-up is closed: your name, email address and message.
  • Your trees: the people, families, notes, sources, places, photos and documents you add or import, faces marked on photos, the trees' change history and backups.

Why, and on what basis

  • To give you the service you signed up for: your account, your trees, sharing, backups (contract).
  • To keep the site safe and working: error records, limiting repeated sign-up and log-in attempts (legitimate interest).
  • To handle payments and keep the records the law requires (contract, legal obligation).
  • To answer your reports and data requests (legal obligation, legitimate interest).

Living people in family trees

Family trees name living people who did not sign up here. To protect them, people not known to be dead and born or married less than a set number of years ago (150 by default) are left out of the tree entirely for anyone the owner did not make “family” or “editor”. Trees are never public: only people the owner invited can open them.

Any living person may ask to see what a tree says about them, or their minor children, and to have it corrected or removed (contact: contact@honesttree.uk). The owner of the tree is told and the request is handled within one month.

Cookies

The site uses only cookies needed for it to work: one keeps you logged in (30 days); one lasts a few minutes between your password and the code for two-step login; two remember your language and contrast choices (one year each); and, if enabled, one shows your trees as a visitor would. There are no advertising or tracking cookies and no third-party analytics, so there is no cookie banner.

Visit counts

For the administrator, the site counts page views per day and kind of page (never which tree or person) and which accounts were active each day; these counts are kept 400 days and hold no IP address. To limit repeated attempts, the IP address of a failed log-in, a password-reset request or a sign-up is written down for a short time and erased within two days (the daily copies of the accounts keep it up to 7 days more); when one address fails many times, the administrator's error records note it.

Who else sees your data

Nobody, except the services the site needs to run:

  • The hosting provider (the operator's own server in the United Kingdom), which runs the server where everything is stored.
  • An email service, to send address checks, password resets and security notices (your email address and the message).
  • Stripe, for payments and gifts (your email address and payment details, under Stripe's own privacy policy).
  • Cloudflare Turnstile, on the sign-up page only, to tell people from bots (your IP address and browser details, under Cloudflare's own privacy policy).
  • The map service, from which the server fetches the map pictures (it does not see who looks at a map).
  • A place-search service, which gets place names (never people) to find them on the map.

How long

  • Your account and trees: until you delete them or close your account. Closing the account deletes it, your trees, their photos and their backups at once; the daily copies of the accounts drop it within 7 days.
  • Backups: the last 3 copies of each tree; daily copies of the accounts: the last 7 days.
  • Payments and gifts: their amount and date stay in the site's accounts, without your name, after you close the account; Stripe keeps its own records as the law requires.
  • Reports: until the administrator deletes them (without your account once it is closed); error records: the last 1000.
  • Requests to join: until the administrator deletes them, 180 days at most.
  • Place searches: 180 days; visit counts: 400 days.
  • Accounts whose email address was never confirmed and that hold or share no tree: deleted after 7 days.

Your rights

You can view and update your account in your profile, download a ZIP there with your account data and the available trees you own (including GEDCOM, photos and documents), and close your account yourself. You may also ask for a copy of everything kept about you, for correction or deletion, or object to a use of your data (contact: contact@honesttree.uk). If you are unhappy with how your data is handled, tell us first (contact: contact@honesttree.uk): we reply within 30 days. You may also complain to the data-protection authority of your country (in the UK, the Information Commissioner's Office).

Security

Passwords are stored as slow salted hashes, an optional two-step login asks for a code from an app on your phone, sessions expire, every tree is private to the people its owner chose, and copies of the trees are kept on the server (and in a second place when a backup service is listed above). No system is perfectly safe: keep your own exports of the trees that matter to you.

Children

Accounts are for people aged 16 or more.

Changes

If this policy changes in a way that matters, account holders are told by email or on the site before it applies.