Privacy
Your family’s records belong to your family. We hold them privately, in the EU, we do not sell them, we do not show advertising, and we never use them to train AI. This page says what we hold, who can see it, and what you can do about it, in plain words.
Who we are
the big family is built and run by withPICA Ltd, the data controller for everything described here.
withPICA Ltd
Suite 2015, Fleet House
Springhead Enterprise Park, Springhead Road
Northfleet, Kent, DA11 8HJ, United Kingdom
For anything about your data, write to hello@thebig-family.com.
What we hold
- Your account.
The email address you sign in with. There are no passwords: signing in works by a link sent to that address.
- What your family records.
Names, dates, places, relationships, stories and photos, entered by the members of your own archive. Every fact names who recorded it, and nothing is lost when it is corrected: the earlier version stays in the record’s history.
- The cookies that keep you signed in.
Those are the only cookies we set. No advertising cookies, no tracking cookies, and our performance measurements do not use cookies either, which is why there is no cookie banner: there is nothing here that needs one.
Who can see what
One family’s archive can never be read by another. Inside your archive, everyone can see the shape of the family: who is in it, their names, and how they connect. The substance, meaning facts, stories, photos and the history of changes, is shared with the relatives it belongs to: the people who share an ancestor with that person, or who are married to someone who does.
On top of that, every fact carries the visibility its subject chose: shared with their relatives, shared with the family’s stewards only, or kept to themselves. “Only me” means only them. Not even a steward can read it.
Relatives who have not joined yet
A family archive naturally holds people who have not signed up themselves: a relative may record your birthday or home town before you ever see the product. Here is what protects you if that person is you.
- Only your relatives see it.
What is recorded about you is visible to your relatives in that archive, under the rules above. It is never public and never shown to another family.
- You are told, and asked.
When you join, the archive shows you each fact recorded about you, names the relative who recorded it, and does not close the question until you have confirmed or changed it, including who may see it.
- You can have it erased.
If you would rather not have a record at all, write to hello@thebig-family.com or ask any steward of the archive, and the record is erased completely.
Where it lives
Your family’s records are stored in the European Union, and the computing that serves them runs there too. Photos live in private storage that is only reachable through short-lived links created for a signed-in relative; there are no public photo URLs.
If your family chooses to turn on voice recording for spoken memories, the archive tells the speaker, at the moment of recording, that the recording will leave the EU to become text: it is transcribed by a provider in the United States under terms that forbid keeping the audio or using it to train anything. The transcript arrives as a draft for a person to correct, never as a fact. Recording is off unless your family turns it on, and typing always works instead.
What you can do
- See everything we hold about you.
One page in the product shows every fact about you and who can see each one, and lets you change either.
- Take it with you.
Export your family tree in GEDCOM, the standard format any genealogy tool can open, or export your own record on its own.
- Erase it, for real.
Erasure removes a person’s record completely, including its history. It is the one true deletion in the product, it cannot be undone, and the archive says exactly that before anyone confirms.
- Complain, if we get it wrong.
Write to us first and we will put it right. You also have the right to complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), the UK data protection regulator.
Who works for us
Three companies process data on our instructions, and no one else: Supabase hosts the database and photo storage in the EU; Vercel serves the application; and, only if your family turns on voice recording, Groq turns speech into text in the United States without retaining it. None of them may use your family’s content for anything of their own, and nothing is ever used to train AI, by us or by them.
This notice describes the product as it runs today. Last updated 8 August 2026.