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Roots Vault is an independently-run, personal project — it is not operated by a registered company. For the purposes of data protection law, the individual who operates Roots Vault is the data controller for the account and family-tree data described below.
Contact for all privacy matters: privacy@roots-vault.com
We don't publish the operator's personal name on this site. If a data protection authority or a user needs to establish identity for a formal legal request, this can be provided through the contact address above.
We haven't appointed a Data Protection Officer (DPO). This isn't required for a service of this size and nature under GDPR — a DPO is mandatory mainly for public authorities or organizations doing large-scale monitoring or processing of special-category data, neither of which applies here.
| Data | Why |
|---|---|
| Name and email address | Account identification, login, communication |
| Password | Stored only as a bcrypt hash — we never store or can see your actual password |
| Profile photo (optional) | Shown on your own profile and, if you choose to message another matched user, next to your messages to them |
When you add a relative to your tree, you may enter: first and last name, maiden name, gender, date of birth, birth place, place of origin/hometown, a photo, and free-text notes. These relate to third parties (your relatives) — you are responsible for having a legitimate basis to record this information (see Section 3).
The "Origin / Hometown" field is meant for a geographic place (e.g. a town or region), similar to birth place — not a category like ethnicity or religion. Because it's a free-text field, please don't enter ethnic, religious, or similarly sensitive descriptors there or in the notes field. Data revealing racial or ethnic origin, religion, health, or similar is treated by law as a special, more sensitive category, and we haven't built this app to knowingly collect it — please help us keep it that way.
We automatically log IP addresses, login timestamps, and basic device/browser information, for security purposes (fraud prevention, abuse detection).
For information about your relatives that you enter: because they are third parties who haven't directly signed up to the service, you as the user are responsible for entering this data in good faith, for personal/family record-keeping purposes, and for acting on any request from that person (or their legal guardian) to remove their information if asked.
What happens if you don't provide certain data: your name and email are required to create an account — without them, we can't provide the service. Every other field (photos, birth dates, birth place, notes, and everything about relatives beyond a name) is optional; leaving it blank simply means that information won't appear in your tree.
Roots Vault is in the business of helping people build and preserve family history. When you add a relative to your tree, we consider this processing to be within our and your legitimate interest, for the following reasons:
We do not rely on legitimate interest to justify processing that would be more invasive than reasonably necessary — for example, this is why full birth dates, photos, and free-text notes about a relative are never shared with anyone beyond the tree's owner, even when a tree is otherwise shared (see Section 6).
Roots Vault is intended for adult users (18+) to create accounts. A family tree will naturally include the names and birth years of minor relatives (children, grandchildren) entered by an adult family member. We do not knowingly collect data directly from minors, and minors are not permitted to create their own account. We recommend that, for living minors, users enter only basic information (name, birth year) and avoid adding photos or detailed notes where possible.
We do not sell your data and do not share it with advertisers. Data is only shared in these situations:
This is the most sensitive part of the service, since it involves sharing data with other users, so we've deliberately built it around three separate, explicit steps — nobody can search for you or see any part of your tree unless you've actively taken all three:
If you opt into the matching feature, we use an automated process to compare your family tree members against other users' trees and suggest possible connections. This looks at things like name similarity, birth year, and birth place to produce a similarity score.
This is not a fully automated decision with any legal or similarly significant effect on you — the system only ever produces a suggestion. Nothing is connected, shared, or decided until a real person (you) reviews it and both sides independently choose to accept. You can decline any suggestion with no consequence.
If we become aware of a security incident that puts your personal data at risk, we will notify the relevant supervisory authority within the legally required timeframe (generally 72 hours), where required. If the incident is likely to result in a high risk to your rights and freedoms, we will also notify you directly, without undue delay, by email or a notification in the app, describing what happened and what we recommend you do.
We keep your account and family-tree data for as long as your account is active. If you delete your account, all of your data (trees, members, photos, and matches) is deleted from our live database immediately — there is no waiting period.
Our hosting provider (Globalhost d.o.o.) keeps routine weekly and monthly backup copies of the database for disaster-recovery purposes, retained for up to 3 months. This means that after you delete your account, your data — already gone from our live systems immediately — could still exist in one of these backup copies for up to 3 months, until that backup is naturally cycled out and permanently overwritten. We don't restore individual accounts from these backups except in the case of a full system failure.
Technical security logs (IP addresses, login/action timestamps) are kept only briefly — they're cleared out automatically as part of routine maintenance, typically within about a day, and are never kept for an extended period regardless of whether your account is still active.
Depending on where you live, you may have some or all of the following rights over your data:
We do not use third-party analytics, advertising trackers, or ad-tech pixels of any kind on Roots Vault.
Roots Vault does not use tracking or advertising cookies. To keep you logged in, we use your browser's local storage — this is strictly necessary for the service to function and is not used to track you elsewhere on the web.
| Service | Purpose |
|---|---|
| Brevo | Sending account verification and notification emails |
| Globalhost d.o.o. (Novi Travnik, Bosnia and Herzegovina) | Server hosting and database storage |
We have a Data Processing Agreement in place with each of the above, governing how they may handle data on our behalf.
Roots Vault's servers are located in Bosnia and Herzegovina, which is outside the European Economic Area (EEA). If you're accessing the service from within the EEA or UK, your data is transferred to and stored in BiH.
As of this writing, the European Commission has not issued an "adequacy decision" for Bosnia and Herzegovina (i.e. it hasn't formally recognized BiH's data protection standards as automatically equivalent to the EU's). Because Roots Vault is operated by a single individual rather than a company with a separate EU-based counterpart, the standard mechanism for this kind of transfer — Standard Contractual Clauses between two organizations — doesn't cleanly apply. We instead rely on Article 49(1)(b) GDPR: the transfer is necessary for the performance of the contract between you and us — using Roots Vault inherently means your data being processed on our BiH-based server, which is the service itself, not an incidental add-on to it.
If we make a significant change to this policy, we'll let you know by email or via a notification in the app before the change takes effect.
For any privacy questions, or to exercise any of the rights above, contact us at privacy@roots-vault.com.