Privacy Policy
VysyaFamily.com is a genealogy site for the Arya Vysya community. This policy describes exactly what it collects, what it does with it, and what it will never do. Last reviewed 24 August 2026.
1 · Who we are
VysyaFamily.com is operated by Krishna Grandhi. Questions about this policy, requests for a copy of your data, and requests for erasure go to vysyafamily2000@gmail.com.
2 · What we collect when you sign in with Google
Signing in uses Google OAuth with the scopes openid,
email and profile. Google returns four things and we
store those four things:
| What | Why |
|---|---|
| Your email address | To identify your account and let your family recognise you. It is never shown on any public page. |
| Your display name | Shown to other members of families you belong to. |
| Your Google account identifier | So the same Google account signs you back into the same account next time. |
| Your profile picture URL | Shown as your avatar. You can remove it. |
We do not request access to your Gmail, Drive, Contacts, Calendar or any other Google service, and we could not read them if we wanted to. The three scopes above are the minimum needed to sign you in and are classed by Google as non-sensitive.
3 · What we collect because you entered it
Everything else on this site is there because a person typed it in: names, relationships, dates, places, photographs, stories, timeline events and messages between members. You decide what to add.
Some of this is information about other people — that is what a family tree is. Records about living people default to being visible only to your own family, not to the public. Records about minors carry stricter defaults again. You are responsible for having a reasonable basis to record information about living relatives, and for removing it if they ask you to.
4 · Cookies
Three, all strictly necessary. There are no advertising, analytics or tracking cookies of any kind.
| Cookie | Purpose | Lifetime |
|---|---|---|
vysya_session | Keeps you signed in | 30 days |
vysya_oauth_state | Protects the Google sign-in against request forgery | 10 minutes |
vysya_oauth_next | Returns you to the page you were on after signing in | 10 minutes |
All three are HttpOnly, SameSite=Lax and sent only
over HTTPS.
5 · What we do not do
- No analytics and no trackers. No Google Analytics, no Tag Manager, no advertising pixels, no session recording, no third-party fonts or CDNs. Every asset on this site is served from this site.
- We do not sell or rent your data, to anyone, for any purpose.
- We do not share your data with advertisers or data brokers.
- We do not use your family's records to train AI models.
- We do not email you marketing. Notifications happen inside the site.
6 · The research feature and AI
The site can search published sources for historical records about a surname and present them as citations for a family to verify or reject. When that runs, what leaves this server is the surname and the text of public web pages — sent to Anthropic's API for analysis. Your family's own records are never sent. Nothing the AI produces is ever stored as a fact; it is stored as a candidate carrying the source it came from, and a human decides.
7 · Where your data lives
On a single server in New York, United States, operated by DigitalOcean, in a SQLite database. Backups are held on the same server. If you are in the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom or India, your data is therefore transferred to and stored in the United States.
8 · Who can see what
- Your email address is never displayed publicly and is not included in any public page or API response.
- Family names and the directory of surnames are public — that is the point of the site.
- Records of living people default to your family only.
- Sample placeholder records, which are marked as such throughout, are fictional and describe nobody.
9 · Your rights over your data
Export
You can download everything your family holds at any time, from the family's Export page, as GEDCOM, JSON, CSV or a photo archive. No request needed.
Correction
Any family member with edit rights can correct a record. Significant changes are logged so your family can see who changed what.
Deletion — stated honestly
When you delete a record in the site, it is marked deleted and hidden rather than immediately destroyed, and your family's administrator can restore it for a period. This is deliberate: in genealogy an accidental deletion can lose work nobody else has a copy of.
That is a recovery feature, not a refusal to erase. If you want your account and the records you contributed permanently erased, email vysyafamily2000@gmail.com and we will do it and confirm when it is done. If a record concerns you and was entered by somebody else, write to the same address and we will act on it.
Withdrawing Google access
You can revoke this site's access to your Google account at any time at myaccount.google.com/permissions. That stops future sign-ins; to have the stored data removed as well, email us.
10 · Children
This site is not intended for use by children under 13, and accounts are not knowingly created for them. Families do record children as part of a family tree; those records carry stricter visibility defaults and should not include more detail than a family would put in a printed family book.
11 · Security
Traffic is encrypted with HTTPS. Session cookies are HttpOnly and Secure. Passwords, where used instead of Google, are stored hashed and never in plain text. No system is perfectly secure; if we discover a breach affecting your personal information we will tell affected users.
12 · Changes
If this policy changes in a way that affects what we do with your data, we will change the review date at the top and note the change on this page. We will not quietly widen what we collect.