Legal

Privacy Policy

Retellery holds some of the most personal material a person has. This page says plainly what we store, who else sees it, and what you can take back.

Effective 31 August 2026 · Version 1

01Who we are

Retellery is operated by T-Invent LLC, doing business as Retellery, registered at 7545 Irvine Center Drive, Suite 200, Irvine, California 92618, USA ("Retellery", "we", "us", "our"). This policy covers the Retellery website and application.

We are the controller of the personal information described here. If you have questions about anything below, write to privacy@retellery.co.

02How Retellery holds your story

Understanding two things makes the rest of this policy make sense.

Your vault is the truth. Everything you tell Retellery — answers to interview questions, text you write or paste, photos, video, voice recordings — is stored as structured entries in one private vault belonging to your account. The vault is not a document; it is the raw material.

Outputs are made from the vault. When you choose to generate an illustrated book, a comic, a prose book, an audiobook or a short film, we build it from your vault at that moment and save it as a fixed version. Outputs are separate from the vault, are stored differently, and — as described in section 11 — are stored in a way that makes them reachable to anyone holding their link.

03Information we collect

Account information

Authentication is handled by a third-party identity provider, which holds your credentials, sign-in methods, sessions and any profile details you give it. In our own database we store only: an internal id, your identifier with that provider, your email address, your plan, your customer and subscription identifiers from our payment processor, subscription status and billing dates, a small set of app preferences (such as your default genre), and — if you choose to supply your own AI provider keys — those keys, encrypted. That is the complete list.

Your story content

Text — your answers to interview questions, anything you type or paste, story titles, settings and framing choices.
Photos and video you upload, including photos of identifiable people.
Voice recordings you make in the app, and the transcripts we derive from them.
Derived structure — the facts, tags, people, places and eras we extract from the above so your material can be searched and re-told.

Contributions from other people

If you invite someone to contribute (see section 09), what they send — their chosen display name, their written memory, and optionally a voice recording or a photo — is stored in your vault.

Payment and delivery information

If you subscribe or buy units, our payment processor collects and handles your payment details on its own hosted checkout. We never see or store card numbers. If you order a printed book, we collect the delivery name, address and phone number needed to fulfil it and pass them to our print partner.

If you write to us before you have an account

If you join the waitlist we store the email address you gave us, which of our pages you gave it on, and the time. If you use the contact form we store the name, email address and message you typed. That is all we keep from these forms — no IP address, no browser details — and we use it only to reply to you or to tell you when Retellery opens.

Usage information

We record product events in our own database — things like "a story was generated", "an export was requested" — as identifiers, types and counts. These records deliberately never contain the content of a fact, an answer or a caption.

Where a request reaches us through our hosting provider, we may read a coarse country code for the single purpose described in section 17.

04What we do not collect

No card data. Payment details go to our payment processor directly and never touch our servers.
No third-party analytics or advertising. Retellery loads no analytics SDK, no tag manager, no advertising pixel and no cross-site tracker. We do not sell or share personal information for advertising, and we do not build advertising profiles.
No IP address or user-agent logging by the application. The only location signal we read is the coarse country code in section 17.
No email addresses from guests. Someone who contributes a memory or asks a question through an invite link is never asked for an email address, and does not create an account.
No retained voice biometric. See section 10.

Nothing on this website is loaded from a third party. Every font, stylesheet, script and image on these pages is served from our own domain, so simply reading them tells no other company that you were here.

05How we use information

To run the interview: to ask you the next question based on what you have already said.
To organise your vault: extracting people, places, dates and topics so material can be found and re-used.
To generate the outputs you ask for, in the formats you choose.
To apply the privacy controls you set — hiding, renaming or generalising a person — and to check finished outputs for leaks of anyone you hid.
To detect prohibited content in uploads, where content scanning is enabled (section 12).
To take payment, manage your plan, and fulfil printed orders.
To keep the service working, debug faults and protect it from abuse.
To communicate with you about your account.

We do not use your vault content to train our own models, and we do not sell it. Our contractual position with the AI vendors on training is a matter for section 06.

06AI providers

Retellery cannot work without sending your material to third-party generative AI services. This is the part of the policy most worth reading carefully.

We describe those services by kind rather than naming them. Which model runs a given job is a routing setting we change often, so any list would be stale almost immediately, and our model selection is commercially confidential. What does not change — and what actually affects you — is the category of provider each kind of material reaches.

Kind of provider	What we send them
Text and language models	Interview questions and your answers; extracted facts; story text; and the safety and leak-scan checks we run over generated text.
Image models	Image prompts and, where you have consented to a likeness, photographs of real people from your private vault.
Video models	Video prompts and frames.
Speech and voice models	Chapter text for narration, rendered clips for transcription, and — only where you have enabled it — a voice sample for cloning.
Content-safety classifiers	Uploaded photos and video, for the checks described in section 12.

Several of these run on a hosting platform that operates models on our behalf, so that platform processes the same material in transit. Processing locations are covered in section 13.

Photographs of people leave our storage. When you ask for an illustration that keeps a real person’s likeness, we send that photograph to an image model provider. We send the image bytes inline rather than by public link, so the photo is never given a URL anyone could stumble on — but it is still processed outside Retellery.

What we have contracted, and what we have not. We use these providers on their published standard terms. We have not negotiated bespoke zero-retention terms with any of them, and we have signed no separate Data Processing Agreement. Those published terms, as at the date of this policy, state that material sent through their APIs is not used to train their models by default, and that inputs and outputs are either discarded shortly after a request completes or retained only briefly for abuse monitoring.

Those are the providers’ commitments rather than ours, they apply by default rather than under any contract specific to Retellery, and a provider can change them. We deliberately do not claim a protection we have not contracted for. If you want to know which providers we use before trusting us with something, write to privacy@retellery.co and ask.

07Other service providers

Beyond the AI providers, we rely on specialist companies to run the service. As above, we describe them by function:

Authentication — an identity provider holding your credentials, sign-in methods and sessions.
Database hosting — the managed database holding your vault text, structure and account records.
Application hosting and file storage — for the app itself, your uploaded media and your generated outputs.
Background job processing — the queue that runs long generation jobs.
Rate limiting — counters keyed on identifiers only, never on content.
Payments — a payment processor that collects your card details on its own hosted checkout. We never see or store card numbers.
Print-on-demand fulfilment, if you order a physical book — the printer receives the delivery details and fetches the print files.
Write-once evidence storage, used only in the circumstances in section 12.

We may also disclose information where we are legally required to, to enforce our Terms, or in connection with a merger or acquisition of the business.

08Other people in your story

A life story is about other people, and most of them never agreed to be in a product. We take that seriously, and you should too.

Retellery gives you controls that operate on people, not on words: you can hide a person entirely, rename them, generalise them ("my neighbour"), or merge several people into one composite. Hiding is enforced when an output is generated, and finished outputs are scanned for the names of anyone you hid before they are marked ready.

Two honest limits. First, these controls change the telling, never the vault: the true material stays in your vault, unchanged, which is what lets you produce both a true memoir and a pseudonymous one. Second, no automated check is perfect — review an output before you share it.

If you are a third party and believe your personal information is held in someone's Retellery vault, contact us at privacy@retellery.co. We will acknowledge your request, look at it on its facts, and tell you what we decided and why.

You should know the conflict we are weighing, because we would rather state it than hide it. The material sits inside another person’s private vault, and their recollection of their own life is also their own personal information. So we will not simply delete somebody’s memories because a third party asked us to. What we can do, and will do where it is justified, is remove or restrict specific material, or apply the person-level controls described above so that you are not named or identifiable in anything produced from that vault. Where we decline, we will tell you that too.

09Guests we never signed up

Several Retellery features work by sending someone a private link. If you are the person who received such a link, this section is about you.

Contributing a memory. Before you are asked anything, you are shown what is being asked and can decline. If you agree, you supply a display name and a written memory, and may optionally record your voice or add a photo. Your contribution is stored in the vault of the person who invited you, and is included when they export their vault. Invitations expire after 14 days, accept one submission, and can be revoked by the person who sent them.
Asking a question of a published story. The name the author gave you is stamped on your question. Questions the story cannot answer are kept so the author can see what was missed; questions it answers are not stored. These links expire, can be revoked, and have a fixed lifetime limit on how many questions they accept.
Reading a shared book or bookshelf. We record a coarse indication of how far a reader got — a stage, never a percentage — plus a view count and a last-viewed time.
Public share links. A plain share link records a view count and a last-viewed time and no identity at all.
Leaving feedback. If you are invited to give feedback on a version, your name (if you give one) and your comments are stored for the author.

We never ask a guest for an email address, and a guest never gets an account. If you want a contribution you made removed, ask the person who invited you — they control that vault — or contact us at privacy@retellery.co.

10Voice recordings and voice cloning

You can answer by voice. Those recordings are stored in the private part of our storage and are transcribed so their content can be used like any other answer.

Separately, Retellery can create a synthetic copy of your own voice to narrate your stories. This is off unless we have switched it on, and when it is available:

You must tick a box confirming the voice is your own and that you consent to it narrating your stories. The server refuses to create a clone without it, and records when you attested.
Consent is recorded separately for each place the voice may be used, and can be withdrawn. A withdrawn consent is treated as if it never existed.
There is no mechanism for cloning anyone else's voice, and you must not try to use the feature to do so.
We do not retain a voice biometric. Your sample is passed to a third-party voice-cloning provider, and the copy we made to hand it over is deleted immediately afterwards, whether the clone succeeded or failed. What persists on our side is the provider’s voice identifier, your label for it, and the timestamp of your consent. On their side, their published terms discard the material of an individual request shortly after it completes, and delete a cloned voice that goes unused for a short period; a voice you keep using is retained. We cannot independently verify either from our side.
Where synthesised voice is used in a shared story, listeners in the European Economic Area may be shown a disclosure or served a standard voice instead (section 17).

A cloned voice may count as biometric or otherwise sensitive personal information in some jurisdictions, and we have not yet taken legal advice on exactly how that applies to us. That is precisely why the feature is switched off: voice cloning is disabled by default and is off in the live service. We will not turn it on until that question is settled, and if the answer requires a specific notice or a separate consent, you will get it before anything is cloned.

12Content safety and preservation

Retellery is built to scan uploaded photos and video for prohibited material, in particular child sexual abuse material. When scanning runs, we keep a log of the check — which upload, which classifier, its verdict, whether it was blocked, and the categories returned. The log holds metadata and a verdict only; it never contains the content itself.

If material is flagged, the design is to copy it, together with a manifest, into write-once storage that cannot be altered or deleted for a retention period (365 days by default, extendable under legal hold), so that it can be preserved and reported to the appropriate authorities. Those preservation records are deliberately kept outside the normal account structure, which means they survive the deletion of the account or vault they came from. Access to them is restricted and audited.

Current state, stated honestly: general content moderation is enabled and runs over images and video uploaded by account holders. The classifier that hash-matches known child sexual abuse material is a placeholder that makes no external call and always returns a clean result, and the evidence-preservation store is not configured. We therefore do not perform CSAM detection today, and we do not claim to. Guest photo uploads are switched off for the closed beta, so uploaded media comes only from account holders.

Our reporting posture. Where we become aware of apparent child sexual abuse material, we report it to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC), as required of us by 18 U.S.C. §2258A, and preserve the material as that section requires. Because we do not currently operate a detection classifier, in practice this would follow a report from a person or a human review, not an automated match.

13Storage and security

Your vault media — photos, video, voice, exports — is held in a separate, private storage area from generated outputs. Private files are never served directly; every read passes through an endpoint that checks the request belongs to the owning account. If the credentials for that private store are missing, the application refuses to write rather than falling back to public storage.

Data is encrypted in transit. At rest, it is protected by the encryption our database and storage providers apply. We do not apply our own additional encryption to vault contents, and Retellery is not zero-knowledge: we are technically able to read what you store, and so are the AI providers we send it to.

No service is perfectly secure, and we cannot guarantee that unauthorised access will never occur. If a breach affects your personal information, we will notify you within 30 days of discovering it — the period California law requires (Civil Code §1798.82, as amended with effect from 1 January 2026) — and sooner where we are able to. Where such a breach affects more than 500 California residents, we will also notify the California Attorney General within 15 days of notifying the people affected.

Where your data is held. Retellery is operated from the United States. Our database and our file storage are hosted in the United States. The AI vendors listed in section 06 process what we send them in the United States and, for some of the model providers behind them, in other countries — which ones depends on the vendor and on which model is routed for a given job, and both can change. Because Retellery is offered to residents of the United States only (section 17), we do not rely on Standard Contractual Clauses or any other EU or UK transfer mechanism.

14Retention and deletion

While your account is active we keep your vault, so that your story is there when you come back to it. Outputs you have generated are kept as fixed versions and are not overwritten.

If your subscription lapses or you cancel, we record a date after which your data becomes eligible for deletion. Your vault then enters a 60-day grace period, during which you can still sign in, export everything, or reactivate. After that it is archived for a further 365 days before permanent deletion.

We will not promise more than we do. The application has no self-service “delete my account” control. To close your account and have your data deleted, write to privacy@retellery.co; that address is monitored and the request is actioned by an operator.

Three categories are retained beyond the above, for stated reasons:

Preservation records under section 12 — kept for their retention period regardless of account deletion, because that is their purpose.
Billing records held by our payment processor and by us for accounting and tax purposes. We keep these for seven years, which covers the periods in which the US federal and California tax authorities may examine them.
Backups, which age out on their own schedule. Our database provider keeps a rolling point-in-time restore window that we configure; it is never longer than 30 days, so a deleted record stops being recoverable from backups once that window has passed.

15Your choices and rights

Whatever your jurisdiction, these are available in the product today:

Export everything. You can ask for a full export of your vault. It arrives as a ZIP containing your vault records as JSON — your facts, tags, people, contributions and question history — plus the actual media files, and a signed manifest so the archive can be checked for tampering. This is a genuine take-your-data-and-go export, not a summary.
Control who appears. Hide, rename, generalise or combine any person, per story.
Revoke sharing. Expire or revoke any share, bookshelf, feedback or contribution link.
Withdraw voice consent for any surface, at any time.
Correct your vault. Anything you told Retellery can be edited or removed by you.

Depending on where you live you may also have rights to access, correct, delete, restrict or object to our processing, to data portability, and to complain to a supervisory authority. To exercise any of them, write to privacy@retellery.co. We will respond within 30 days.

California residents (CCPA/CPRA)

Retellery is operated by a California company and is offered to US residents, so the California Consumer Privacy Act applies to us. The rest of this policy already describes what we do; this section restates it in the categories that Act uses.

Category we collect	What it is here	Where it comes from
Identifiers	Your email address, our internal account id, and your identifiers with our authentication and payment providers.	You, and those providers.
Commercial information	Your plan, the unit packs you have bought, and your unit balance and its history.	You, and our payment processor.
Audio, visual and similar information	The photographs and video you upload, the voice recordings you make, and the transcripts derived from them.	You, and guests you invite.
Electronic network activity	Product event records — identifiers, types and counts, such as “a story was generated”. We do not log your IP address or user agent (section 04).	Your use of the app.
Geolocation data	A coarse country code only, read for the single purpose in section 17.	Our hosting provider.
Sensitive personal information	Your vault content is freeform, and a life story can reveal health, religion, racial or ethnic origin, sexual orientation, or the contents of your communications. We do not ask for any of it specifically, but it can be in what you write.	You, and guests you invite.

Why we collect it. For the business purposes listed in section 05, and for no others. We disclose it to the service providers named in sections 06 and 07 so they can perform those purposes for us.

We do not sell or share your personal information. We have never sold personal information, and we do not share it for cross-context behavioural advertising. Retellery loads no advertising pixel, no analytics SDK and no cross-site tracker (section 04). We do not sell or share the personal information of anyone under 16.

Sensitive personal information. We use it only to provide the service you asked for — to conduct the interview, organise your vault, and generate the outputs you request. We do not use or disclose it to infer characteristics about you. The CCPA right to limit its use therefore does not arise, but if you would like us to restrict it further, write to us and we will discuss it.

Your California rights. You have the right to know what we have collected and to receive a copy of it, to have it corrected, to have it deleted, to opt out of sale or sharing (there is none to opt out of), and to limit the use of sensitive personal information. You may use an authorised agent. To exercise any of these, write to privacy@retellery.co — we will verify that the request is yours by reference to the email address on your account.

We will not treat you differently for exercising these rights. We will not deny you the service, charge you a different price, or give you a lower quality of service because you asked. The one unavoidable consequence is a practical rather than a punitive one: if you ask us to delete your vault, we cannot go on producing stories from it.

16Children

Retellery is not intended for children. You must be at least 16 years old to create an account. We ask for your date of birth on the sign-up page and will not open an account for anyone below that age. The date itself is not stored — only the fact that the check passed, for one day, in the cookie described in section 18.

This deserves particular attention in a product like ours: contribution, question and reading links are designed to be sent to family, and a grandchild is a realistic recipient. Retellery is not directed at children, and guests invited to contribute must be 18 or over. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children. If we become aware that a contribution came from a child, we delete it.

If you believe a child has provided us with personal information, contact privacy@retellery.co and we will delete it.

17International users

Retellery is operated from the United States and your information will be processed there and in the countries where our providers operate.

Retellery is offered to residents of the United States. We do not market or sell it to consumers in the European Union or the United Kingdom, and this policy does not set out EU or UK statutory rights. If that changes, we will update this policy before it does.

The one place we look at where a request comes from is synthetic voice. Because the EU AI Act requires artificially generated audio to be marked as such, requests we identify as coming from the European Economic Area can be withheld from cloned-voice playback or handled differently. We determine this from a coarse country code supplied by our hosting provider and nothing else; when we cannot tell, we treat the request as if it were in the EEA. The United Kingdom is not included in that set, and this control is currently switched off by default.

18Cookies and local storage

Retellery uses no advertising or analytics cookies.

An age-check cookie, set when you confirm your date of birth on the sign-up page and kept for one day. It records only that the check passed — never the date you entered. It is strictly necessary: without it the sign-up page cannot know you have been through the check.
Session cookies set by our authentication provider, which keep you signed in. These are strictly necessary; without them the application cannot work. They carry a session reference rather than your personal details, and they track the validity of your session — refreshed as you use the app — rather than expiring on a fixed published schedule.
A development-only impersonation cookie used by our engineers on local machines. It cannot be enabled in production.
Browser local storage, on your device only, to remember small interface choices such as a dismissed tip. This never leaves your browser.

Because we set no optional cookies, there is nothing to consent to and we show no cookie banner. This is the position for the current release: there is no analytics, advertising or marketing tracking of any kind, and therefore no consent banner.

19Changes to this policy

We will update this page when what we do changes, and change the effective date at the top. If a change materially affects how we handle your story content, we will tell you in the product before it takes effect.

20Contact us

Privacy questions and requests: privacy@retellery.co

Everything else: hello@retellery.co

Post: 7545 Irvine Center Drive, Suite 200, Irvine, California 92618, USA