— Hearth Press · Privacy Policy —

Privacy
Policy

Last updated June 2026

Last updated: June 2026.

This is the actual policy. We try to keep it short and honest, because most privacy policies are designed not to be read.

What we collect

When you sign up for Hearth, we collect:

• Your email address, name, and payment information (via Stripe — we never see your card number).
• The information you give us about your Storyteller (your parent or grandparent): their name, phone number, age, city, and the notes you write about them in the Project wizard.
• The recordings and transcripts of every interview session we conduct on your behalf.
• Photos, recipe cards, or other family materials you upload.
• The text you and your Co-Keepers write in the editor (memories, sidebars, edits).
• Standard server logs: IP address, browser, the pages you visit on our site.

We do not collect: data from third-party trackers we don't control. We use Plausible Analytics, which is GDPR-friendly and cookieless. We do not use Google Analytics, Facebook Pixel, or any ad-network trackers.

What we use it for

• To run the service: schedule and conduct the AI phone interviews, draft the cookbook pages, print and ship the book.
• To send you the daily/weekly progress emails (you can mute these).
• To improve the AI interviewer's voice and follow-up quality — we may use anonymized session transcripts to fine-tune the prompts. We will never use your data to train any third-party AI model. Your recordings are not sold, licensed, or shared.
• For nothing else.

Who sees your data

• Hearth staff (currently a very small team) who handle edits, customer support, and print QA.
• Our subprocessors: Stripe (payments), Postmark (transactional email), Vapi (the voice calling system that conducts interviews), Anthropic (the AI behind the transcript-to-page editing), Blurb (print on demand), Cloudflare (hosting), Railway (backend hosting).

Your recordings stay encrypted at rest. Each subprocessor only sees the slice it needs to do its job.

The Storyteller's consent

We require you to confirm, when you start a Project, that the Storyteller knows we're going to call them and is okay with being recorded. We trust you on this. The first thing Lila (our AI interviewer) says on every call is to confirm with the Storyteller that this is still okay — and that they understand the call is being recorded. If at any point during a session the Storyteller asks to stop being recorded, the recording is destroyed and we end the call.

How long we keep things

• Active Projects: forever (or until you delete the Project).
• Cancelled Projects: the digital archive (transcripts, recordings, pages, photos) stays available to your account for free, as long as your account exists.
• Deleted Projects: gone within 30 days from all our systems and backups.
• If you delete your account: 30 days after deletion, all your data is gone from our systems.

Your rights

• Download everything: at any time, email us at hello@hearthbooks.love and we'll send you a ZIP of every recording, transcript, page, and photo in your Project, within 7 days.
• Delete everything: same — email us or use the Account → Delete button.
• Export to a competitor: we'll send you the data in a format any of our competitors can ingest. We're not going to make this hard.
• Tell us what to fix: email us. We answer.

Children

This service is not for anyone under 18. The Storyteller is almost always over 60. We don't knowingly collect data from minors. If a Co-Keeper is under 18, we ask them not to use the service.

International

We're a US company. Your data is stored on servers in the US. If you're in the EU/UK/California/anywhere with a stronger privacy law than ours: the rights above are what we offer everyone. We will not give you a more restrictive version because of where you live.

Changes

If we change this policy meaningfully, we'll email you. The "last updated" date at the top will tell you when. The previous versions are kept in our GitHub history.

Contact

hello@hearthbooks.love