One question a week · Fifty-two stories · One book
Your words
The most private thing we hold is somebody’s story.
So here is exactly where it sits, who can reach it, and what we will never do with it.
How it is kept
Everything is encrypted where it sits.
Stories, photographs, recordings, letters, and what your family writes back.
What that means in practice
If somebody steals the disk, the backups, or a copy of the database, they get nothing readable. That is what encryption at rest is for, and it is the threat that actually happens.
We hold the key, because the site has to open a story to show it to your family, and again to set the book at the end of the year. It means somebody here can open one as well. That happens when something is broken and needs fixing.
The details, for anyone who wants them: AES‑256‑GCM for stored content, the same encryption banks and governments use, and scrypt for passwords. No plain copy of a password exists anywhere — not even we can look one up.
The screens we work in every day can tell us how many stories a family has told. They cannot show us a word of them.
What he wrote
He worked the night shift at the print shop for thirty-one years. The whole house smelled of ink on a Sunday.
What sits on the disk
enc1:2JkdjpKGFqRqIEw4P4sWoILRWud9K7fUz+6xmj7sHt1TUIDPmsztIilGKiRYUhG6+cWqewAmihBL/H3Hoj+k6Mwqg/9B7/u1+xE1wc28EzEQ89r3lbG0/C1AShWzQ2tmr5h3XcJ3WM41G2r+tHoGEYMc7Ie8dESHspBvx80L3LerOAHSV2r+NdI=
And a photograph
4c 54 65 6e 63 31 00 48 30 2e f0 bc 5d fe c9 8a 13 4d fe e1 b7 f0 6b ec 15 9d 54 c3 37 bb 4c 50 9e 4c 15 54 ee 48 45 9b b9 42 d0 01 5a 34 ae d3
The only part that involves AI.
One thing is written by a machine: next week’s question. Nothing else in Longtold is, and the stories themselves never are.
Does it leave
Yes, and only this
To write a question that hasn’t been asked, the curator is sent your family tree, a handful of recent stories, and the list of questions already used. Never anybody’s email address or phone number. It goes to Anthropic, and it goes nowhere else.
Is it trained on
Not this one
Some AI tools learn from whatever people type into them. What we send is never used to train a model, so what your family tells stays theirs rather than turning into part of somebody else’s product. That was part of why we chose Anthropic.
Can I stop it
Completely, in one tick
Turn curation off and nothing is sent at all — not less, none. The check happens before anything is gathered, so there is no request to make. Your questions then come from the bank every family starts with, and anything your own family adds.
Story by story
Anything can be held back
Mark a story “don’t build questions from this one” as you tell it, and the curator never sees it. Subjects your family puts off‑limits are kept out too.
The short list
What we will not do with any of it.
- Sell it, or rent it, or hand it to a data broker. Not the stories, not the photographs, not your family’s email addresses.
- Train anything on it. Not a model of ours, and not by handing it to somebody else to train theirs.
- Show it to anyone outside the family. No public profiles, no shareable feed, nothing indexed by a search engine.
- Advertise to you, or let anyone else advertise to you. There is no advertising in Longtold and there is not going to be.
- Read your stories to decide what to sell you. The only thing that reads them writes next week’s question.
The links your family gets.
Everyone on the family’s list gets their own private link, so they can read and react without an account. It is a key, not a password — whoever holds it can use it.
If it gets forwarded
Old links go read-only
Sixty days after a link was last sent, it can still open the stories it was sent for. It can no longer react, write in the margins, or ask the storyteller a question.
If it goes somewhere wrong
Any link can be replaced
Ask us and we will retire that person’s link entirely. Every copy in every email they have ever been sent stops working, and nothing they wrote is lost.
On your way out
It is yours, and you can have it back.
Or have it gone. Ask, and it is done within a day or two.
A copy of everything
Ask and we will send it
Every story, every photograph, every recording, in ordinary files you can open without us.
Gone for good
Ask and we will delete it
The stories, the pictures, the addresses, the lot.
Ask us anything about this.
If something here is unclear, or you want to know what happens in a case we have not thought of, write and ask. We would rather answer it than have you wonder.
Write to us