Privacy Policy

What Banyan Is

Banyan (banyan.family) is a collaborative family-tree app for festive gatherings. It helps families map relationships and stay connected, on the web and as iOS and Android apps.

Information We Collect

• Account info: your email address, name, and account identifier, via our authentication provider when you sign in with Google, Apple, a password, or an email code. Banyan does not receive your social-login or account password.
• Profile info you provide: name, nickname, phone number, photo, date of birth, gender, and notes you add to a family-tree profile.
• Family-tree data: relationships, events, attendance, and connections you create within your trees.
• Safety and support reports: the report reason, affected tree or profile, description or feedback you submit, page context, and report status.
• Security and service records: authentication session activity (including IP-derived city and country and a device/session identifier) and an audit history of important tree changes, including the acting account, action, affected record, and relevant before-and-after values.
• Billing info: if you upgrade to a paid plan, our payment processor collects and stores your payment details. We never see or store full card numbers.
• Website usage:aggregated page-view information described under Analytics & Cookies below. We do not track you across other apps or websites.

How We Use Your Information

• To authenticate you and maintain your session.
• To display your profile to other members of family trees you belong to.
• To enable family-tree features (relationship mapping, search, events).
• To process subscription payments and send receipts.
• To review safety and privacy reports, respond to support requests, enforce our Terms, prevent abuse, and protect the service.
• To maintain an auditable history of important tree changes and investigate operational or security incidents.
• To understand website traffic in aggregate.
• To improve Banyan's products and services.

We do not sell your data, run ads, or share your information with third parties for marketing.

Optional ChatGPT Connection

If you connect Banyan to ChatGPT, OpenAI receives the family data requested through that connection to complete your task. This can include names, relationships, permitted profile details, gatherings, and invitations. Photos and exports are delivered to the embedded interface when requested. Your selected connection permissions and existing family roles limit access.

The ChatGPT connection is for adults aged 18 or older and shares only adult profiles. A recorded younger age prevents sharing; profiles with no birthday need explicit adult confirmation by an authorized family member. Younger relatives remain in Banyan. Do not include children's personal information in shared notes, gathering text, photos or other content. Gatherings with younger or unconfirmed attendees and complete-tree exports containing such profiles must be managed on Banyan's website.

You can disconnect from Banyan's ChatGPT settings at any time. Disconnecting revokes future access; it does not delete data already present in your ChatGPT conversation. OpenAI's privacy policy and your ChatGPT account settings govern its handling of that data.

Banyan stores hashed connection credentials and temporary records needed to prevent duplicate changes. Private drafts expire after 24 hours and change receipts after seven days. Expired records are removed by a daily cleanup job; they cannot be used after expiry.

Adult confirmations record the profile, confirming account and time. You can withdraw an unknown-age confirmation in Banyan's ChatGPT sharing page. These records expire after ten years or are removed when the confirming account is deleted; recorded birthdays are checked again on each request.

Who Processes Your Data (Sub-processors)

We rely on a small set of trusted providers to run Banyan. Each receives only the data needed for its function:

• Clerk — authentication and identity.
• Neon — our Postgres database (hosted on AWS in Southeast Asia, ap-southeast-1).
• Cloudflare — R2 profile-photo storage, DNS, and inbound support-email routing.
• Stripe — subscription billing and payment processing.
• Vercel — application hosting and aggregated Web Analytics.
• Resend — delivers the transactional emails Banyan sends from banyan.family, such as receipts, invite notifications, and support-report alerts. Banyan does not send newsletters or digest emails.
• Google— the operator's mailbox provider for messages sent to our support address.

The codebase supports optional PostHog product analytics and Sentry crash reporting. Those integrations are not configured in the current production environment and do not receive production data from Banyan while disabled. We will update this policy and any store disclosures before enabling processing that materially changes these practices.

Analytics & Cookies

On the website, Vercel Web Analytics records aggregated page views and related information such as the route, referrer, country, browser, operating system, and device type. Vercel states that this analytics product stores anonymized data, does not associate it with an individual or IP address, and does not use cookies. We do not send family-tree content as analytics event properties. Authentication uses a session cookie that is required for the web app to function. We do not use advertising or cross-site tracking cookies. The mobile app contains no product-analytics SDK in the current release configuration.

Your Privacy Controls

• Phone number: hidden by default. You control visibility per tree in Settings.
• Profile editing: only you (or a tree elder) can edit your profile.
• Tree access:a tree's members and data are visible only to people who join that tree via its invite link.

Children's Privacy

Banyan is not directed to children under 13, and we do not knowingly create accounts for them. Because Banyan is a family directory, an adult may add a relative who is a minor (their name, photo, or date of birth) as a placeholder profile. If you add a minor's information, you confirm you are their parent or guardian, or that you have authority and consent to do so. If you believe a minor's information has been added without authorization, contact us at the address below and we will remove it.

Data Retention & Deletion

You can delete your account at any time from Settings on the web or in the mobile app. Deleting your account removes your name, photo, phone, nickname, notes, gender, and date of birth, unsets your identity from your profiles, revokes your API keys, and deletes your uploaded photos. Bug and support reports you sent are kept so we can fix the problem, but they are disassociated from your account and their screenshots are deleted. Retained audit markers are disassociated from your account and their personal content is neutralized or scrubbed. In a shared tree, your profile remains as a neutral "Former member" placeholder so relationships stay intact; if you were its only elder, Banyan deterministically assigns an eligible active member as elder. A tree with no other active account is removed, and Banyan automatically stops any live subscription for it first. We retain anonymized moderation and security history, and other data, only as long as needed to provide and protect the service or meet legal obligations. For deletion help, email support@banyan.family.

Your Rights

Depending on where you live (including under the EU/UK GDPR and Malaysia's PDPA), you may have the right to access, correct, export, or delete your personal data, and to object to certain processing. To exercise these rights, contact us below.

Contact

Banyan is operated by AZS Ventures. For any privacy question or request, email support@banyan.family.