These aren't data. They're someone's life.

Most companies write a page like this because a lawyer told them to. I'm writing it because if you're thinking about handing me your mum's voice, you deserve to know exactly what happens to it.

I'm David. I built Tell Me for my own parents, and their stories are in here alongside yours.

Where the stories live

Every story, every recording and every photo is encrypted while it travels to us, and recordings and photos sit on storage that's encrypted at rest. Backups go further: before a backup ever leaves our server, it's encrypted again by us — and the key that unlocks it is kept offline, nowhere near the stories themselves.

Everything is backed up every day, to more places than is probably reasonable — including one copy that can't be altered or deleted, even by us, and one on a drive that spends its life unplugged. The backups are checked every day, the copies are compared byte-for-byte every week, and every so often I restore one in full to prove it works. A backup you've never restored isn't a backup. It's a folder you feel good about.

Who can see them

Your storyteller's archive belongs to your family. It's visible to you, and to anyone you choose to invite. No other family can ever see it, search it, or stumble into it — every archive is its own island. That's a deliberate decision, not an oversight.

I can access accounts when I need to fix something or when you've asked me for help — that's the honest answer, and any company that tells you otherwise is being economical with the truth. I keep those occasions to the minimum, and the admin tools keep a log of any change that's made.

Who else is involved

Three things touch your storyteller's words, and it's only fair you know what they are.

However they answer. WhatsApp, email, or our own app. If they reply on WhatsApp, that message travels through WhatsApp exactly like any other message they send.

The shaping. We use AI to turn a voice note into something readable. It reads the words in order to shape them, and that's all it does with them. Nothing your family says is ever used to train anything — not our systems, not anybody else's.

Nobody else at all. We don't sell anything to anyone. There are no advertisers, no data brokers, no analytics companies reading your mum's childhood.

The original recording and the exact original words are always kept alongside the shaped story. If the shaped version ever gets something wrong, the truth is right there next to it.

A word about the questions themselves

This is the bit nobody expects on a page like this, and it's the reason I wrote it.

Some of the things we ask look a lot like the security questions banks and utility companies use. Your first pet. The street you grew up on. Your first car.

We ask them because they're brilliant story questions — the first car is never really about the car. But it's worth saying out loud that they overlap.

Two things follow from that.

How we write them. Our questions chase the story, not the fact — the summer spent driving that first car, not the registration number. But I won't pretend the overlap can be written away completely: a good story about a first pet will probably still mention its name.

What you might want to do. If your mum or dad uses any of those as security answers on their accounts, it's worth changing them — regardless of whether they ever use Tell Me. Those answers are the sort of thing a stranger on the phone can talk somebody into confirming. Made-up answers work perfectly well, and are safer than true ones.

That advice is free and it applies whether you sign up or not. There's more of it — the phone calls to hang up on, the number to dial instead — on Keeping your mum and dad safe.

Things we will never do

We never delete stories because you stop paying. Not if you cancel. Not if a card expires. The archive stays exactly where you left it. The only thing that deletes stories is you asking us to close your account for good — and even then we wait 14 days, in case you change your mind.

We never make coming back hard. If a plan ends, reading pauses but nothing is lost: the archive waits, complete and untouched, for as long as you need. Reactivate and it's exactly where you left it — or Legacy mode reopens it for reading and listening without new questions.

We never sell, share or train on your family's stories.

We never chase or nag your storyteller. If they skip a question, we move on.

Your copy is yours to take home

On any plan — Legacy included — you can download everything for a storyteller: every story, every original recording — voice and video — and every photo. We bundle it up and email you a link. You don't have to ask nicely, and you don't have to be leaving. (One small formality: because that download is your whole family archive, we ask you to confirm it's really you before it leaves the account — even if you're already signed in.)

I'd genuinely encourage you to do it once in a while and keep a copy somewhere of your own. Not because I plan on going anywhere, but because the safest copy of anything is the one that doesn't only exist in somebody else's hands.

If something ever went wrong

If anything ever happened to your family's stories, you'd hear it from me — quickly, in plain language, with what happened and what to do about it. Not a carefully worded email six weeks later.

I hope never to write it.

Found a problem?

If you've spotted something you think is a security issue, please tell me before you tell anyone else: david@tellme.bio

I'll reply personally, I'll take it seriously, and I'll thank you for it.