Our promise

What you entrust to us.

Your family’s stories belong to you. Our responsibility is to care for what you choose to keep here.

  1. 1

    Your family’s stories belong to you.

    Heartwood is their steward. Keeping something here does not make it ours. The photographs, recordings and words you bring retain their authorship, their context and their place in your family.

    Ownership stays with the people whose material it is.

  2. 2

    You decide what is shared.

    A family story is not automatically a public story—or even a story for everyone in the family. Privacy should be the starting point. Sharing should be a deliberate choice, with a clear view of what you are inviting someone to see.

    A private beginning. A specific invitation.

  3. 3

    Understanding begins with permission.

    When Heartwood helps you understand your material, it begins with your permission. A suggestion is shown as a suggestion, with its source available. You can check it, correct it or leave it aside. It never quietly becomes a fact about your family.

    A question can open a story. It should not presume the answer.

  4. 4

    Your memories are never advertising inventory.

    Our commitment is no advertising and no sale of family data. That includes anonymized or aggregated versions. What you entrust to Heartwood should never become something offered to advertisers or data buyers.

    These are commitments for the company we are building.

  5. 5

    What Heartwood learns about your family is your family’s.

    As you keep things, Heartwood learns who is who, which names belong to whom, what you care for and what you wave away. That knowledge lives only in your family’s record and works only for you. Your material is never used to train an AI model, ours or anyone’s, and never leaves your record to improve Heartwood for someone else. Heartwood improves for every family by counting outcomes, such as how often a kind of finding is kept, never by learning from what any family said, wrote or photographed.

    Your record teaches your Heartwood, and no one else’s.

  6. 6

    A person’s voice remains their own.

    We will not imitate someone who has died, invent their memories, or generate words and present them as that person’s own. A recording can preserve what someone said. An unanswered question can remain unanswered.

    The original voice. The words they actually chose.

Absence is part of truth.

The promise in practice

What this means today.

The principles above set our direction. These are the controls available in this early version.

Everything, with you, whenever you want it.
In Settings, under Archive, one download gathers everything you keep: every original exactly as you kept it, every voice you are allowed to download, every transcript and reading as plain text, and a complete record in an open format. It is assembled on your own device. A draft kept only in your browser has not yet been saved to your account.
A specific person. A specific original.
Your saved originals are scoped to your account. When you request an invitation, only the original you select accompanies the question. Your private notes and the rest of your collection are not included. Heartwood currently arranges delivery and reviews replies before they appear.
How Heartwood reads what you keep.
To transcribe a voice, read a letter or recipe, and connect what you keep, Heartwood sends the file to OpenAI. OpenAI does not train its models on it and may keep it for up to 30 days for safety review; Heartwood asks it to store nothing beyond that. Photographs are read for what is plainly in them (a cake, a lake, snow) and when they were taken. Heartwood never sends a face or a voice anywhere to be recognised. On your own device, and only there, it can suggest who is in a photograph by comparing faces with the people you have named; nothing it measures is sent or kept, and a suggestion is only ever a question. Heartwood never recognises voices. A person is only connected to something when their name is in the words, or when you say so. What Heartwood finds is shown only to you, with its evidence, and anything you correct is kept as you wrote it.
Search has a limited scope.
Private search finds matching words in your labels, notes, small text originals and approved reply transcripts. Where text preparation is enabled, you can choose to send a supported original to OpenAI for transcription or text extraction. Search can then find that prepared text and your corrections. It does not infer emotional patterns; results lead back to the original.
Some controls are still ahead.
Scheduled release, age-based access and inheritance controls are not available. We have not yet published a long-term retention or service-closure policy. We cannot promise perpetual hosting; keep an independent copy of material that matters to you.

Ian HeinrichFounder, Heartwood · September 2026

There should be room to ask us, too.

A question about our promise