Privacy Notice

1. About Family Heritage

Family Heritage is a digital platform designed to help families preserve their history, relationships, memories and heritage for present and future generations.

The platform may allow users to create accounts, establish family relationships, maintain family trees, create profiles, upload photographs and memories, communicate with relatives and preserve family information.

In this notice, "Family Heritage", "we", "our" and "us" refer to the Family Heritage platform and authorised persons responsible for operating it.

2. Information We Process

The information processed depends on how Family Heritage is used.

This may include:

• Name and profile information.
• Email address and mobile number.
• Date or year of birth.
• Family relationships.
• Family-tree information.
• Profile photographs and family photographs.
• Life stories, memories and biographical information.
• Messages sent through Family Heritage.
• Documents and other content uploaded to the platform.
• Account and authentication information.
• Account recovery information.
• Security and activity records.
• Technical information required to secure, maintain and troubleshoot the service.

Family Heritage aims to avoid collecting personal information that is not reasonably necessary for providing, protecting or maintaining the service.

3. Information About Other Relatives

Family Heritage has an important characteristic that differs from many ordinary online services: one person may create a family-tree record describing another person.

For example, a user may identify a parent, child, sibling, grandparent or another relative who does not yet have their own Family Heritage account.

Where appropriate, a person represented within Family Heritage may request that inaccurate information about them be corrected or that eligible information be removed or restricted.

4. Why We Use Personal Information

Family Heritage may process personal information to:

• Create and maintain user accounts.
• Establish and display family relationships.
• Build and maintain family trees.
• Preserve family history and memories.
• Enable communication between relatives.
• Allow relatives to find and connect with each other where permitted by privacy settings.
• Recover and secure accounts.
• Detect unauthorised access or misuse.
• Maintain security and activity logs.
• Back up and restore Family Heritage.
• Diagnose technical problems.
• Improve the reliability and security of the platform.
• Meet applicable legal obligations.

Where processing depends on consent, appropriate consent should be obtained and users should be provided with a mechanism to withdraw that consent where applicable.

5. Privacy and Profile Visibility

Family Heritage provides privacy controls that allow registered users to make choices about how other relatives interact with their account.

Finding you

Depending on the functionality available to the account, users may control whether relatives can find them using their name, email address or mobile number.

Contact details used for matching should not automatically be displayed merely because a search produces a match.

Profile visibility

Users may be provided with controls over who can view information such as:

• Profile and life story;
• Birthday information;
• Profile photograph;
• Memories.

Available visibility choices may include family members, accepted relatives and private access.

6. Messages

Family Heritage may provide private messaging so relatives can communicate.

Messages may be stored in the Family Heritage database so conversations can be delivered and displayed to the intended participants.

Access to message content should ordinarily be limited to the participants. Limited administrative access may be necessary where reasonably required to investigate abuse, address security incidents, troubleshoot a technical problem or meet a legal obligation.

7. Children's Information

Family trees may contain information about children. Family Heritage recognises that information relating to children requires particular care.

Adults adding information about children should provide only information appropriate for the family-history purpose of the platform.

Users should avoid adding unnecessary sensitive information about a child or information that could create an unreasonable privacy or safety risk.

Where parental or guardian consent or another safeguard is required under applicable law, Family Heritage should apply the appropriate requirement.

8. How We Protect Information

Family Heritage uses technical and organisational safeguards intended to protect personal information against accidental loss, unauthorised access, alteration, disclosure or destruction.

Safeguards may include:

• Secure account authentication.
• Password hashing.
• HTTPS encrypted connections.
• Secure session controls.
• Role and permission controls.
• Privacy visibility controls.
• Administrative access restrictions.
• CSRF and other web security protections.
• Activity and security logging.
• Database backups.
• Security maintenance and software updates.

No online information system can guarantee absolute security. Family Heritage therefore seeks to improve its security measures as the platform evolves.

9. Service Providers

Family Heritage may use external technology providers where necessary to operate the service.

These may include providers of:

• Web and database hosting;
• Email delivery;
• Backup or storage services;
• Security services;
• Future SMS or messaging-based account recovery.

Such providers may process limited personal information where necessary to provide their services.

Family Heritage should assess providers and implement appropriate safeguards before allowing them to process personal information.

10. International Data Processing

Technology providers used by Family Heritage may operate servers, infrastructure or support services outside Botswana.

Where personal information is processed or transferred internationally, Family Heritage will seek to apply safeguards required by applicable data-protection law.

11. Data Retention

Family Heritage aims to keep personal information only for as long as it is reasonably necessary for the purpose for which it was collected or where retention is otherwise required or permitted.

Different information may require different retention periods.

When information is no longer required, it should, where appropriate, be deleted, anonymised or securely archived.

Family-history information may require special consideration because preserving historical family records is one of the core purposes of Family Heritage.

12. Database Backups

Family Heritage creates database backups to help protect family information against accidental deletion, database corruption, system failure and other incidents.

Database backups are automatically created and stored in a protected location outside the publicly accessible website directory.

Family Heritage currently applies an approximately 30-day backup retention period.

Backups older than the configured retention period are automatically removed.

13. Your Data Protection Rights

Subject to applicable law and any relevant limitations, individuals may have rights concerning personal information processed about them.

Family Heritage may need to verify a person's identity before providing, changing or deleting personal information. This helps prevent an unauthorised person from using a privacy request to access or alter someone else's information.

14. Account and Data Deletion

Registered users may request deletion of their account and eligible personal information.

Family Heritage may require identity verification before carrying out a deletion request.

Some information may need to be retained where there is an applicable legal, security, dispute-resolution or legitimate record-keeping reason.

15. Data Breaches and Security Incidents

Suspected personal-data breaches and significant security incidents should be investigated promptly.

Family Heritage should take reasonable steps to contain an incident, understand its impact, protect affected accounts and prevent recurrence.

Appropriate incident records should be maintained.

Where applicable law requires notification to affected individuals, regulators or other authorities, the appropriate notification process should be followed.

16. Changes to This Privacy Notice

Family Heritage may update this Privacy Notice when its features, technology, data-processing practices or applicable legal requirements change.

Material versions of this notice should be assigned a version number and an effective date.

Where appropriate, registered users may be informed of significant changes and may be asked to review or acknowledge an updated notice.