Our promise to you

A Story Book is a way to send photos, videos and written memories securely to the person organising it, and to give them permission to use them. It might be a family gathering memories of someone they love, a celebration of an event, or any other occasion.

This page is the short version. Our Terms and Privacy Policy cover the same things in more detail, for contributors and organisers alike.

When you add something, you’re confirming it’s yours to share, and giving the Story Book’s organisers permission to keep, copy and show it as part of that Story Book. They can let the people they choose see it, and save a copy if they allow downloads, and they can use it in a printed book, a poster or another keepsake made from the Story Book.

They can’t sell it or make money from it, and they won’t change it beyond what’s needed for those things, like resizing a photo or cropping it to fit a page.

You still own it. While the Story Book is open for memories you can change or remove what you’ve added, and after that you can ask the organiser to remove it. Once something is removed it comes out of the Story Book, though copies people have already saved or printed stay with them. If that doesn’t sit right with you, it’s best not to share it here.

Each Story Book has an owner, who can invite other organisers to help run it. Together they decide who can add memories, who can see them and who can download them. Nobody else, including us, decides who gets to see a Story Book.

We never sell your memories, use them for advertising, or use them to train AI. They are used for one thing: running the Story Book you shared them with.

No AI looks at your photos, videos or stories today. If The Story Book ever adds features where AI reads what people have shared, the Story Book’s owner would have to switch them on, and you would be asked for your consent first. We don’t use facial recognition.

Photos and videos go straight from your device to private storage, kept separately for each Story Book and in Australia and New Zealand where our providers allow. They are checked for viruses as they arrive, and are only ever reached through private links that expire, never a public folder. Captions, dates and other details sit in a private database in Australia. A few of the services we rely on, such as the one that handles sign-in, are based overseas; our Privacy Policy lists them.

We measure how the site is used, such as pages opened and buttons pressed, so we can support people and keep improving it. We never look at what’s inside a Story Book unless its owner asks us for help with something specific, the law requires it, or we need to deal with a report of abuse or a security problem.

If a Story Book is deleted, it goes to the Bin for 30 days in case it was a mistake. Then its photos and videos are deleted for good, and the last backup copies of everything else are gone within five weeks after that.

If you appear in a memory, or took a photo someone else shared, and you’d like it taken down, ask the Story Book’s organiser, or write to privacy@thestorybook.io and we’ll help.