Your family’s stories are not our product

Longtold is a product of Wood Candle Co, Verona, WI · Effective July 2026

What we collect

Account basics (name, email, a hashed password, an optional birth year, and an optional cell number if you turn on texts); your family’s content (questions, stories, photos, weekly check-ins, reactions); the recipient list your family builds (names and emails); and the minimum technical record needed to run a website (session cookies and server logs).

What it’s for

Running Longtold — sending questions, delivering stories to the people your family chose, showing your book as it grows, and printing it. That’s the whole list. No advertising, no selling data, no sharing addresses. Recipient emails are used for story emails only, never marketing, unless a person explicitly opts into something more.

AI-assisted questions

To choose good next questions, short excerpts of recent stories and preferences are processed by Anthropic, our AI provider. Excerpts are not used to train AI models and are retained by the provider for roughly 30 days before deletion. Stories themselves are never published or shared beyond your family’s chosen recipients.

How stories are protected

Story text is encrypted at rest on our servers. Access requires your account or a private recipient link that your family controls and can regenerate. Sign-in attempts are rate-limited.

Texts and phone numbers

If you opt into SMS notifications, your number is used to send them and for nothing else. No mobile information is shared with third parties or affiliates for marketing or promotional purposes; text messaging originator opt-in data and consent are never shared with any third party. Reply STOP anytime. The full program policy is at longtold.life/sms.

Who touches your data

A short list of service providers, each doing one job: Railway (hosting), Resend (sending email), Anthropic (question curation, as above), Stripe (subscriptions and tips — we never see card numbers), and Twilio (text delivery, if you opt in). We share only what each needs to do its job.

Cookies

Three, all boring: your sign-in session, your light/dark preference, and (during the preview period) the site password. No analytics trackers, no ad pixels.

One honest exception inside the family: story emails include a tiny image that records the first time each recipient opens the story, so the storyteller and the family member running the book can see the stories are reaching people. It notes only that first open — no location, no device details, nothing shared outside your family, never used for advertising.

Your choices

Every story email has one-click unsubscribe. SMS stops with STOP or a Settings toggle. And your family can take everything with it: write hey@longtold.life to export or permanently delete your data. Longtold accounts are for adults; stories may mention family members of any age, and they stay within the family.

If this policy changes in a way that matters, account holders get an email first. See also the Terms of Service.