How we keep your stories safe

Every recording starts out private: only you can see it. You decide, one recording at a time, whether your family can watch it — your close family, your extended family or everyone on your tree — whether it goes to one person on a date you pick, or whether it waits until after you're gone.

There is one more choice — letting anyone with the link watch — and it only ever happens if you pick it yourself and answer “yes” when we ask if you're sure. Whoever can see a recording is written right beside it, every time.

Your recordings are kept in private storage. Nobody can open one by guessing its address. When somebody you've allowed presses play, we check that they're allowed, then give their screen a link that stops working after a few hours.

People who work at The Attic can't browse your recordings. We only ever look at one if you ask us to help you with it, if the law requires it, or to deal with a report of something illegal — and when we do, it's written down. We never sell what you record, never show you adverts, and never use your recordings to train AI.

Everything is scrambled (encrypted) while it travels between your device and us, and again where it's stored, so it can't be read along the way or lifted off a disk.

Our storage is run by Cloudflare, which keeps every file in more than one building. One broken machine, or one bad day in one place, can't lose a recording.

A recording stays on your own computer or phone until we've confirmed it's safely stored with us. If the internet drops or the battery runs out halfway, it's still there — the next time you open The Attic, it offers to finish saving it.

You can download everything you've recorded whenever you like, on any plan — including the free one. On the website it's under Account, “Email me everything”.

Nothing is deleted while anyone might still come for it. If a payment stops, your account goes back to the free plan after 30 days and everything stays — you can still watch, share and download all of it, you just can't add new recordings.

We then keep your recordings for two years. Before anything is ever removed, we write to you — and to the trusted contacts you've named — three times: 90 days, 30 days and 7 days before. Every one of those emails has a link to download everything, and a button that keeps your account for another year, free, with nothing to pay.

Recordings of someone who has died are never deleted because a payment stopped — not after two years, not ever.

Nothing is ever passed on automatically. There are only two ways we come to believe someone has died:

• They stop answering our check-in emails. We write every six months, then again after one month and two, and after nine months of silence we write one last time to every address we have.
• One of the trusted contacts they named tells us, and sends a death certificate, a published obituary or funeral-home notice, or a signed statement. We email the person first, at every address we have, and then wait: 14 days with a death certificate, 30 days with an obituary or notice, 90 days with a signed statement alone — longer, if they asked for more. A signed statement alone also needs a second trusted contact to confirm it, if they named more than one.

Either way, a person at The Attic looks at it before anything is sent. If the person signs in, answers one of our emails or records something, it stops straight away — and whoever reported or confirmed a death that wasn't true can't report it again.

Everyone chooses for themselves in the app: turn reports off and rely on check-ins alone, accept only a death certificate, or add one or three months to the wait. Only the trusted contacts a person named can report a death, and they are also the people who receive the recordings.

If you have lost someone, here is what to send us.

We would tell you at least 90 days beforehand, by email, with a link to download everything you've recorded. We would send the same to the trusted contacts you've named, so nothing is lost if your own inbox is quiet. That promise is written into our Terms.