Privacy policy
Life stories are personal. This policy explains in plain words which data Storyvelle processes, why, for how long and what rights you have. It applies to everyone who uses Storyvelle: givers and family members, storytellers, institutions and visitors of our website.
1. Who is responsible
The controller is Alessandro Napolitano, Vogelsanger Str. 39c
58135 Hagen
Deutschland, email: privacy@storyvelle.com.
For residents of care homes, residences and hospices, the institution is the controller; Storyvelle processes the data on its behalf under a data processing agreement (Art. 28 GDPR).
2. What we process and why
Account and family. Name, email address, language, country and your role in a life book – to provide the service (Art. 6(1)(b) GDPR).
Storytellers. Name, form of address, language, time zone, phone number and/or email address, preferred contact times – so that the questions reach the storyteller (Art. 6(1)(b) and (f) GDPR: the family's interest in giving the gift, balanced by the storyteller's consent described next).
Recordings, transcripts and stories. Voice recordings, their transcripts, the gently edited texts, translations, photos and comments. Recordings are only made after the storyteller has agreed (Art. 6(1)(a) GDPR). Life stories may contain information about health, religion or origin; this information is processed on the basis of the storyteller's explicit consent (Art. 9(2)(a) GDPR). Consent can be withdrawn at any time; all contact stops immediately.
Payments. Order data, billing address and the payment status. Card details are processed only by our payment provider, never by us (Art. 6(1)(b) and (c) GDPR).
Communication. Emails and text messages we send, replies we receive and support requests (Art. 6(1)(b) GDPR).
Technical data. IP address (stored only in shortened or hashed form), time of access and error logs – to keep the service secure and stable (Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR). Logs are deleted after 14 days.
Free try-out. If you try Storyvelle without an account, your answer and recording are deleted automatically after 24 hours.
3. Artificial intelligence
We use AI services to transcribe recordings, to remove filler words, to suggest titles and follow-up questions, to translate and to conduct phone interviews. The AI interviewer always introduces itself as an AI voice. We never clone or imitate anyone's voice. AI never invents content for the book: the edited text is checked automatically against the original transcript, and the original recording is always kept. Your data is not used to train AI models – neither by us nor by our providers, with whom we have agreed the corresponding contractual terms and, where available, zero data retention.
4. Who receives data
We work with carefully selected processors who are bound by contract to our instructions:
- Hosting and storage: data centres in the European Union.
- Payment processing: Stripe Payments Europe Ltd., Ireland.
- Email: Postmark (ActiveCampaign, LLC, USA) – EU data region where available.
- Telephony and text messages: Twilio Ireland Ltd.
- Speech recognition: Speechmatics (United Kingdom) or OpenAI (USA).
- Text processing and phone interviews: Anthropic (USA).
- Translation: DeepL SE, Germany.
- Printing and shipping of books: Lulu Press, Inc. (USA) – only the print files and the delivery address.
Family members only see the life books they have been invited to. Stories marked as private are visible only to the storyteller and the book's owner and never appear in the book.
5. Transfers outside the EU
Where a provider processes data outside the EU or EEA, we rely on an adequacy decision (e.g. EU–US Data Privacy Framework for certified companies or the United Kingdom) or on the EU standard contractual clauses with additional safeguards.
6. How long we keep data
Life books and recordings are kept for as long as the account exists, so that the QR codes in printed books keep working. You can delete individual stories, a whole life book or your account at any time. Deleted data is removed from our systems within 30 days and from backups within a further 30 days. Invoices are kept for the retention periods required by tax law (usually ten years).
7. Your rights
You have the right to access, rectification, erasure, restriction of processing, data portability and objection (Art. 15–21 GDPR), and the right to withdraw consent at any time with effect for the future. Owners of a life book can download all stories, recordings (FLAC and MP3), photos and the book as a ZIP file at any time. To exercise your rights, write to privacy@storyvelle.com. You also have the right to lodge a complaint with a data protection supervisory authority.
8. Cookies
We only use cookies that are strictly necessary: for signing in, for your language and country and for completing a payment. We do not use advertising, tracking or analytics cookies, and we do not show a cookie banner because none is needed.
9. Security
Data is encrypted in transit and at rest. Links for storytellers are long and unguessable, PIN codes and passwords are stored only as hashes, and access to recordings uses short-lived signed links.
10. Changes
If we change this policy, we will publish the new version here and inform registered users by email about significant changes.