Privacy

Responsible: Andante Genealogy, Andreas Kyburz, Kreuzlingerstrasse 55, 8570 Weinfelden, Switzerland, [email protected].

What we collect and why

• When you order: your name, your email address, your country and billing address, the package, the amount and an order number. Order and invoice live in our order system (Odoo). The payment itself runs at Stripe; we never see card details. Stripe receives your billing address for tax purposes.
• In your customer account: an order creates an account that you sign in with on this website. It holds your details about the family (names, rough years and places of grandparents and great-grandparents, the place of origin, what else you know, your choice on sensitive finds, and for Max your consent to the online tree), for gifts, if you give them, the recipient’s first name and your personal line for the certificate, the progress of the order, the delivery and the invoices. It also holds the family papers and photos you upload (scans, photos, family trees, documents) and the messages you exchange with us there, with their attachments; nobody but you and us can open them. We also need your email address to write to you as soon as the family history is ready in your account. Relatives you invite get their own account with access to the family website. We need this for the research and the delivery and for nothing else.
• In the contact form: your email address, your message and, if you give it, your name. The message lands there as a contact request. We need this to answer you.
• In the chat: while we are online you can chat with us on this website; the conversation is stored on our server, in the order system, so that we can read back what was said. When we are offline the chat is a form: it asks for an email address or a phone number, how you would like to be reached (email, WhatsApp, Signal or SMS), what it is about and, if you give it, your name. That lands with us as a contact request, like the contact form. We use it to get back to you and for nothing else.
• During the research: the documents and notes that come out of it, in a working folder.
• Technical: the server writes a log with the time and the page requested. One cookie remembers your sign-in; the language is part of the page’s address, and if you pick a language in the language switch, a second cookie (andante_lang) keeps that choice for a year so that your next visit opens in it; it holds nothing else. No tracking cookies, no analytics services, no fonts or scripts from other servers. The links to our answers on Reddit are plain links: nothing is loaded from Reddit until you follow one, and from then on Reddit’s own privacy notice applies.

Living people

We research deceased people only. Of living people we need only names and birth years so that the tree holds together; no documents. They appear only in the part of the website that you and the relatives you invited can see. By entering your details you confirm that you may share these names. Names of living relatives that you give us we use only to research and build that family’s history, and for nothing else.

Public online family trees

In the Max package we enter the people we found into an online family tree, for example on FamilySearch. Such trees are public. Only deceased people go there, and only if you allowed it in your details. Living people never go into a public tree.

The gift recipient

With a gift, we research the recipient’s family before they know about it; of the recipient themselves we store at most the first name for the certificate when you order, no email address. If they later want their own access, we create an account for it with their name and email address. With the gift certificate and with the family history they receive the link to this privacy notice, and they can ask us to take the website down and delete their data.

Who sees the data

We do, and the tools we work with. The website, the orders and the customer accounts run in that order system, on a server in Switzerland. AI services from Anthropic and OpenAI (USA) help us search; they see names, years and places, but no documents about living people. On the accounts we use, the use of data for training the models is switched off. Payments: Stripe. We pass nothing else on.

How long

30 days after delivery we delete the working folder and everything you sent us outside your account. The website, your account and the data they need, including the papers you uploaded and your messages with us, stay for as long as the website is online. Enquiries from people without an account (the contact form, the chat form, live chat conversations) we keep until the enquiry is settled and delete at the latest twelve months after the last message, or earlier if you ask us to. Nightly backups of the server include this data too; old backups expire by themselves. Accounting records we keep for ten years, as the law requires.

Your rights

You can ask at any time what we hold, have data corrected, or ask us to delete your website, your account and your data. Write to us through the contact form or to [email protected].

Status: 7 November 2026.