Data Sovereignty Charter

Your family's data belongs to you — not to us. This charter says, in plain English, what that means in practice. It sits alongside our Privacy Policy, which is the binding legal document. If anything here is unclear or feels at odds with what you see in the product, email us at privacy@tamizhconnect.com — that's a bug on our side, and we want to know.

1. Your family data is yours

The names, dates, villages, stories, and photos you enter about your family belong to you. We hold that data on your behalf, in the same way a bank holds your money — we operate the safe; we do not own what's inside it. You can view, edit, export, or delete it any time from your account.

2. We will never sell it

We do not sell, rent, license, or trade your family data to any third party — advertisers, data brokers, researchers, governments, other genealogy companies, or anyone else. This is a permanent commitment, not a current preference; if we ever change our mind on this, we will shut the service down before we do it, and give you 90 days to export and leave.

3. You can take it with you at any time

Everything you have entered can be exported from your account:

  • GEDCOM — the standard genealogy format, so you can move your tree to Ancestry, MyHeritage, FamilySearch, or any other tool that reads it.
  • JSON — the raw structured data, including fields other tools may not preserve.
  • PDF — human-readable printouts of your tree and any stories you have written, suitable for keeping offline or sharing with family who don't use the site.

You do not need to be on a paid plan to export your own data. Export is free, forever.

4. Delete means delete

If you delete your account, we permanently erase your family data within 30 days from our production database. Backups purge on the same 30-day rolling cycle. We retain a minimal audit record showing that a deletion happened (not what was in it), because we may need to prove we honoured your request — that log is retained for up to 24 months and contains no family data. Full detail is in our Data Deletion Policy.

5. We encrypt it, in transit and at rest

All connections between your device and our servers use HTTPS with modern TLS. Data at rest in our database is encrypted at the disk level by our hosting provider. Access to the production database is limited to a small number of operational staff, and every access is logged. Multi-factor authentication is mandatory for that access.

6. Your data lives in the United Kingdom

Our primary database and file storage are located in the United Kingdom, under UK GDPR jurisdiction. Some auxiliary services (email delivery, analytics, and AI providers) may process data in the United States or European Union under Standard Contractual Clauses — the list is in Section 5 of the Privacy Policy. What we do not do is host or process your family data in any jurisdiction you would consider a governance risk for a Tamil family — for example, we do not use PRC-hosted infrastructure for any part of the service.

7. AI helps, it does not decide — and it never trains on you

We use AI (Google Gemini) for three optional features: the Tamizh Mani chatbot, surname etymology summaries, and the heritage-inference tool. AI-assisted record matching is not currently live — matches are computed from your typed queries against our archive database, without an AI call. Two commitments:

  • No model training on your data. We contract with our AI provider on terms that prohibit them from training their models on the queries or content you or the product send. If the provider changes those terms in a way we can't accept, we replace the provider — not the promise.
  • AI is a suggestion, not a verdict. Every record match, confidence score, or research hint the product shows you is a lead for you to evaluate — never a decision made about you. See Article 22 UK GDPR (no automated decisions with legal or similarly significant effect) in the Privacy Policy.

Community submissions have their own consent

When you contribute records, photographs, or oral histories to the shared archive via the Contributor Portal, that contribution is a separate act of consent from the family data in your own private workspace. Contributor submissions are governed by the Contributor Portal terms shown at submission time, and you can withdraw a contribution or de-attribute yourself later. See Privacy Policy §1, §8 for detail.

Partnerships with institutions

Where a partner institution (an archive, a university, a diaspora organisation) works with us on a shared project, no personal family data ever leaves our systems in identifiable form without a further, explicit act of consent from the family concerned. Institutional partners receive access to their own collections and to anonymised, aggregated statistics — never to named family records our users have entered.

Where to raise a concern

Email privacy@tamizhconnect.com — a human replies. If we cannot resolve a concern to your satisfaction, you have the right to complain to the UK Information Commissioner's Office at ico.org.uk.

Charter last updated: 2026-09-06.
Business entity: Tharviyan Limited (Company No. 12127865), registered office 5 Brayford Square, London, E1 0SG, United Kingdom.