Privacy notice
Last updated: September 2026 — applies to app.autotreegen.com
This notice covers the AutoTreeGen application, where you upload your family tree and your DNA data. It is not the same as the notice on our marketing site: that one describes an informational website which receives no genealogy or DNA data at all. This one describes a service that does.
Who this covers
Everyone with an account here, and — indirectly — the relatives who appear in the trees you upload. Data about living people is treated as theirs, not only as yours.
What we collect
Your account identity from our authentication provider; the GEDCOM files you upload and everything parsed out of them (people, families, events, places, sources, notes, media); DNA files and match lists you upload; the decisions you record while working — merges, confirmations, rejected hypotheses; and the technical logs needed to run and protect the service.
DNA is special-category data
Under GDPR Article 9 genetic data is a special category, and we treat it that way in code, not only on paper. A kit cannot be stored without your explicit consent: the upload is refused outright if consent is not granted, a consent-ledger entry is written, and the moment of signing is stamped before anything is saved. If you withdraw consent, the kit stops being readable on every path that reads kits — enforced by a repository-wide guard, not by remembering to add a check.
How it is protected
Your uploads are encrypted at rest with keys that can be rotated without re-uploading anything. The DNA object store cannot be made publicly readable — a build that tried would fail. Logs are redacted at the moment a record is created: SNP rows, genotype runs and email addresses are removed before the line can reach any log destination.
Where AI is involved
Some features — research assistance, archive suggestions, the chat — send the specific content needed for that request to our AI provider and return an answer. Your data is not used to train models, ours or theirs. Genealogical conclusions are hypotheses with stated evidence and confidence, never presented as established fact.
Payments
Subscriptions are processed by Stripe. We store what plan you are on and when it renews; we never see or store your card number.
What we never do
We do not sell your data, share it with advertisers, use it for targeted advertising, or hand it to anyone who is not processing it on our behalf to run the service.
Your rights
Under the Australian Privacy Act 1988 and the EU GDPR you may access, correct, export or delete your data, and we respond within 30 days. An export is produced as an encrypted archive: the download link expires after three days and the key is sent to you separately, so the link alone is not enough to open it.
Deleting your data
You can delete a DNA kit, and its stored data is erased. You can permanently erase a tree; that is irreversible by design, and it is recorded in an audit trail that keeps who did it and when. Deleting the data does not erase the record that a deletion happened — that record is what lets us prove the deletion to you.
Changes
If we materially change this notice we will publish the updated version here and date it.
Questions, or a request about your data: hello@autotreegen.com