What we keep, and what we don’t

A family tree is personal, and part of it is about people who are alive. Here is exactly what happens to it. Last updated: October 5, 2026.

The free tree check

• Your file is not stored. It is read on the server, in memory, for the seconds the check takes, and then discarded. A .zip is unpacked in your browser; only the tree itself is sent.
• We log counts only: how many people, how many lines stop, how many towns were recognized. No names, no dates, no places.

The report by email

• If you ask for a copy, we check the tree once more and save the finished report — not your file — together with your email address.
• Living people are not named in the saved copy. We treat as living anyone with no death recorded who would be under 100, or whose age is unknown.
• The report sits behind a private link that only your email contains. It is deleted after 30 days. You can delete it sooner with the button at the bottom of the report, or by writing to us.

When you order

• Payment. Your card or PayPal details go to our payment partner lava.top (LAVALANE LTD, Cyprus), never to us. We receive your email, the amount and whether the payment went through, and keep that order record for as long as accounting rules require.
• Your tree. For a dossier you send us the tree file by email. We keep it, and the records we find, for as long as we work on your tree and your private family-tree site is open.
• Your family-tree site is private: it opens only with the link and password we give you. Nothing is published, indexed by search engines or added to public trees.
• Deleting. Write to us and we delete your tree, your site and the saved copies. The dossier you already received stays with you.

The waiting list and your messages

If you leave an email — for the waiting list, or with a note about a tree you have no file for — we keep it to write to you about that one thing. No newsletter, no passing it on. Ask, and we remove it.

Measuring how the site is used

• No advertising trackers and no third-party cookies.
• Your browser keeps a random number so that we can count steps — page opened, tree checked, order started. These events go through our own server to an analytics service and carry numbers and step names only: no email, no names, no places from your tree, no IP address — only the country.

Who processes the data for us

• Cloudflare — hosting, the database and incoming mail.
• Resend — sends our emails to you.
• Google (Gmail) — the mailbox where your messages to us arrive.
• lava.top — takes payments.
• Amplitude — the anonymous usage counts described above.
• Slack — tells us that a request or an order came in; the message contains your email address.
• AI language models (Anthropic) — for a paid dossier, we use them to read, transcribe and translate records and to draft the texts, which are then checked against the scans. Your tree is processed by them for that work.
• Google Fonts and cdnjs — deliver the typefaces and the .zip unpacker to your browser, which means they see that your browser asked for them.

Most of these services run in the United States. We don’t sell personal data, and we don’t share it with anyone else.

Your rights

You can ask what we hold about you, have it corrected or deleted, or object to how it is used — whatever country you live in. Write to leo@alteheym.com; a person answers. Alte Heym is run by Leo Katz, a private individual based in Israel.