Privacy

How we handle your information

This is the plain-language version. A fuller legal text is being prepared and will replace it; until then this page is what we hold ourselves to.

Who we are

Probably Cousins is operated by Probably Cousins LLC, a Delaware limited liability company.

What we collect

Your account email. The family tree files you upload or build. Photos you add. The stories you write. Feedback you send us. If you write to Help, the transcript of that conversation.

Who sees what

Your family's tree is visible to the members of your family who have signed in, and to a guest who has your family's shared password, if your family uses one. Nobody outside your family sees it, with two exceptions your family chooses: a dead relative can be matched against another family's dead relatives, if your family has opted in to that; and your family's reference person — the one person your owner picked to be named in a public relationship sentence on Find — is shown by name even if that person is living, because the owner agreed to it. No other living person is ever named outside your family's own site.

Payments

When a family buys research credit, the payment runs through Stripe. We never see your card number — you enter it only on Stripe's own page. Stripe receives your account email, the amount charged, and a billing address (for calculating sales tax); it tells us back only that the payment succeeded, how many credits it bought, and an id for its own customer record so your receipts stay together for next time.

AI processing

Some of what you send us is read by an AI model provider — Anthropic — so it can be answered or acted on. This includes tree files you upload, questions you ask on the Help page, and the research jobs a family pays for. We do not claim zero data retention with that provider; treat anything you send through these features the way you would treat any other message sent over the internet to a service we rely on.

Living people

Anyone born within the last 110 years with no death record on file is treated as living, whether or not the tree says so. A living person's details are shown in full only inside their own family's signed-in site. On the public parts of this site — search, share cards, anything an anonymous visitor can see — a living person is never named, except the one reference-person exception described above, which the family's owner must agree to before it is shown.

Getting your details removed

Sign in and go to your Account page, then use the removal request there. If you would rather not sign in, or the request is about someone else's tree naming you, email us at the address below. A person handles these by hand, usually within a few days, and you will hear back.

Taking down something you own

If you uploaded a photo, wrote a story, or added a document and want it taken down, ask your family's owner (who can remove it directly from Admin) or email us and we will pass it along.

Contact

hello@probablycousins.com — read by the site's operator.

Governing law

This page is written under Delaware law.