Privacy Policy

Your information is personal. We treat it that way. HearthBook is designed to help you organize important parts of your life, which means you may choose to trust us with information that deserves careful handling. We collect and use information only as described in this Policy and do not sell your personal information.

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This Privacy Policy explains how Hearth LLC, an Idaho limited liability company ("HearthBook," "we," "us," or "our"), collects, uses, and shares information when you use HearthBook (the "Service"). By using the Service, you acknowledge the practices described here.
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1. Information we collect

We collect information directly from you, automatically when you use the Service, from people who invite you to use certain HearthBook features, and from service providers that help us operate the Service.

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Information you provide. When you create an account and use the Service, you provide information such as your name, email address, mobile phone number (if you choose SMS as your second authentication factor), and the content you choose to store which may include details about your financial accounts, documents, insurance, real estate, key contacts, household information, and the people you designate for emergency access. You decide what to add. You may also provide questions you submit through Ask HearthBook, our in-product help feature; how those questions are processed is described in Section 4.

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Sensitive information. Some information you choose to store in HearthBook may be considered sensitive under applicable law, including financial, health-related, identity, or other private information. We process this information only as needed to provide the features you request, secure the Service, comply with law, and as otherwise described in this Policy.

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Information about other people you add. HearthBook is designed to hold information about the people in your life: family members, key contacts, professionals, collaborators, and emergency contacts. When you add information about another person (such as their name, relationship, contact details, or role in your plans), you are responsible for having the right to share it with us. We use information about the people you add solely to provide the Service to you, and we do not use it to market to those individuals. If you invite someone to become a collaborator or emergency contact, we use the email address (and phone number, if provided) you supply for that person to send and manage the invitation. If they accept, they create their own account governed by this Policy; if they do not accept, the invitation record is retained only as needed to operate the feature and for the audit records described in Section 8.
Payment information. When you subscribe, our payment processor (Stripe) collects and processes your payment details. We do not store full card numbers on our systems; we retain limited billing-related identifiers (such as customer references and subscription status) needed to manage your membership.

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Information collected automatically. When you use the Service, we and our infrastructure providers automatically collect technical information such as your IP address, device and browser type, log data, and usage activity, in order to operate, secure, and improve the Service.

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2. Cookies and similar technologies

In the HearthBook application. HearthBook uses cookies and similar technologies only to operate and secure the Service: keeping you signed in, maintaining your session, enforcing two-factor authentication, and protecting against fraud and abuse. These are essential to the Service and cannot be disabled without breaking sign-in. We do not use advertising cookies, third-party advertising networks, or cross-site tracking technologies in the Service, and we do not disclose your information to advertising platforms to build audiences or target ads.

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On our public website. Our public marketing website (hearthbook.com pages you can view without signing in) currently uses no analytics or advertising technologies. If we later add basic analytics to understand visits and improve the site, those tools would collect technical information such as pages visited and general location, and we would not connect that information to your HearthBook account content.
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Because we do not sell personal information or process it for targeted advertising, there is no advertising activity for a browser "Do Not Track" or opt-out preference signal to opt out of; we honor the substance of those signals by not engaging in the practices they target. You can manage cookies through your browser settings; note that blocking essential cookies will prevent the Service from functioning.
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3. How we use information

We use your information to: provide and maintain the Service; authenticate you and secure your account; process subscriptions and payments; extract and organize information from documents you upload so you can find and manage it; respond to product-support questions through AI-assisted help features; enable the emergency-access and sharing features you configure; communicate with you about your account and the Service; comply with legal obligations; and detect, prevent, and address fraud, abuse, or security issues.
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De-identified and aggregated information. We may create de-identified or aggregated data (for example, overall usage statistics) that can no longer reasonably be linked to you, and use it to operate, improve, and secure the Service. We do not attempt to re-identify de-identified data.

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4. Artificial intelligence and automated processing

HearthBook uses automated tools, including third-party artificial-intelligence services, to provide certain features.
Document AI. To help you organize your files, relevant portions of documents you choose to process are transmitted to our AI provider (Anthropic) to provide extraction, classification, and summarization. Extracted information is presented to you for review, and nothing is saved in your HearthBook records until you confirm it. Some routine text extraction is performed on our own systems without sending document content to third parties. Our agreements with AI providers restrict their use of your content to providing and securing the processing service and do not permit your content to be used to train their general-purpose AI models.
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Ask HearthBook. When you use Ask HearthBook, the question you type is transmitted to our AI provider to generate a response grounded in HearthBook help content. Each request sends only the current question; HearthBook does not send prior conversation history. HearthBook does not save your questions or answers to your HearthBook account or application database, and our server logs record request status information rather than the content of your question or response. The conversation may remain visible in your browser during your current session. Our AI provider may retain request data for up to 30 days under our subprocessor terms. If you include personal information in a question, that information is included in the request sent to the provider.

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What our AI features do not do. HearthBook does not use your documents, records, or Ask HearthBook questions to train AI models; ours or anyone else's. HearthBook's AI features assist with organizing and finding your own information; they do not make legal, financial, insurance, credit, or medical decisions about you. Read more on this from Anthropic: https://www.anthropic.com/legal/data-processing-addendum.

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5. How we share information

We do not sell your personal information. We do not share, sell, or provide your mobile phone number or SMS consent data to third parties or affiliates for their own marketing or promotional purposes. We disclose your mobile phone number only to service providers necessary to deliver the SMS authentication service, as described in Section 12. We share other information as follows:

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Service providers (subprocessors). We use trusted third parties to run the Service. These currently include categories such as cloud hosting and application infrastructure; database, authentication, and file storage; content delivery and security; payment processing; transactional email delivery; and AI-assisted document processing and in-product help responses. These providers may process your information only to provide services to us and are bound by confidentiality and data-protection obligations.

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Contacts you authorize. If you designate an emergency contact and grant or enable access, the information you have chosen to share will become available to that person under the conditions you set. You control these settings.

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Sharing you initiate. If you use HearthBook to share a document or other information with a collaborator or other person, we make that information available according to the sharing settings you choose. Some sharing features add a watermark to shared documents or record access activity for your protection. You are responsible for choosing the recipients and the information you share.

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Legal and safety. We may disclose information if required by law, subpoena, or legal process, or where we believe in good faith that disclosure is necessary to protect rights, safety, or property, or to investigate fraud or security issues.

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Business transfers. If HearthBook is involved in a merger, acquisition, financing, or sale of assets, your information may be transferred as part of that transaction. We will notify you of any change in ownership or use of your information.

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6. Data storage and security

Your information is stored using established cloud infrastructure providers and is protected by access controls, encryption in transit and database-level access restrictions. Two-factor authentication is required on every HearthBook account. Sensitive access events, such as emergency access to your information, are recorded in audit logs for your protection. Access controls are designed to limit access to you, contacts you have authorized, and personnel and service providers with a legitimate operational, security, support, or legal need. No method of transmission or storage is completely secure, and we cannot guarantee absolute security. You are responsible for keeping your credentials confidential and for maintaining your own backup copies of important documents. If you believe your account has been accessed without your authorization or your credentials have been compromised, contact us immediately at hello@hearthbook.com.

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7. HearthBook and health information

You may choose to store health-related documents (such as a healthcare directive) in HearthBook. HearthBook is an organizational tool: Hearth LLC is not a healthcare provider or health plan and is not a covered entity under HIPAA. Health-related content you store is protected as described in this Policy.

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8. Data retention

We retain your information for as long as your account is active or as needed to provide the Service. If you delete your account, there is a 72-hour cancellation window; after it ends, we delete your active-service account data and stored files, including your profile and authentication data, documents and their metadata, contacts, Life Map and Life Tools records, collaboration and emergency-access relationships, and drafts and other content you created; and future paid billing is terminated. We retain only narrowly defined records where needed for legal compliance, accounting and tax, fraud prevention and security, dispute resolution or legal holds, or the integrity of append-only audit logs, and we minimize identifiers where feasible. Security and access audit logs are retained as append-only records for as long as needed for the protection purposes they serve. Invitations that are never accepted are retained only as needed to operate the feature and for the audit records described in this Section. Individual documents you delete are removed from live service and expire from encrypted backups on the same rotation schedule described below. Our payment processor (Stripe) may retain its own transaction records. Residual copies in encrypted backups expire on our normal backup-rotation schedule and are not restored into live service except for disaster recovery.

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If your paid Membership ends but you keep your HearthBook account, documents stored through Membership remain accessible for 30 days after paid access ends and are retained for up to 90 days after paid access ends. During days 31 through 90, retained documents are not accessible through HearthBook Free. If Membership is not reactivated, the document files and associated document metadata are deleted after the 90-day retention period, subject to the limited retention obligations and backup practices described above.

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9. Your choices and rights

You can access and update much of your information directly within the Service, export your Life Map data from Settings, and delete your account at any time.

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U.S. state privacy rights. Depending on where you live, state law may give you rights regarding your personal information, which can include the right to: know the categories of personal information we collect, the purposes for collecting it, and the categories of third parties to whom we disclose it; access and receive a copy of your personal information; correct inaccurate personal information; delete personal information; and receive your information in a portable format. HearthBook honors requests of these kinds from any U.S. resident, regardless of whether a particular state statute applies to us.

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We do not sell personal information, and we do not process personal information for targeted advertising, so there is no sale or targeted-advertising processing to opt out of.

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To make a request, contact us at hello@hearthbook.com. We will need to verify your identity before acting on a request, typically by confirming control of the email address on your account, and, for sensitive requests, through your existing two-factor authentication and we will respond within the time required by applicable law. You may designate an authorized agent to submit a request on your behalf; we will require proof of your written permission and may still verify your identity directly. If we decline a request, we will explain why, and where state law provides an appeal right, we will tell you how to appeal. We will not discriminate against you for exercising your rights.

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10. Children's privacy

The Service is not intended for use by anyone under 18, and people under 18 may not create HearthBook accounts. An adult account holder may choose to include limited information about a child or other minor as part of their own HearthBook records, for example, listing a child or grandchild in their family information or estate plans. The adult account holder is responsible for having authority to provide that information. If we learn that a person under 18 has created an account, we will delete it.

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11. Communications

We may send you service-related messages (such as account, security, and billing notices) that are necessary for your use of the Service. Where required, marketing messages will include an option to opt out.

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12. SMS text messaging

If you choose SMS as your second authentication factor, we collect your mobile phone number and use it solely to send one-time verification codes for authenticating access to your account. Message frequency is one message per login or enrollment attempt. Message and data rates may apply depending on your mobile phone service plan. Reply HELP for help or STOP to cancel SMS authentication messages at any time. If you opt out of SMS, you will need to use an authenticator app as your second authentication factor to continue accessing your account.

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We do not share, sell, or provide your mobile phone number or messaging consent data to third parties or affiliates for marketing or promotional purposes. Your mobile phone number is disclosed only to our SMS delivery provider (Twilio) for the sole purpose of transmitting your verification codes to you and is not used for any other communication. SMS is used only for authentication; other service communications may be sent by email or displayed in HearthBook.

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13. Third-party links and outside services

The Service may display links to third-party websites or list third-party professionals and businesses; for example, results returned by the Find a Pro tool, or external links you save to your own records. These are provided for your convenience. We do not control, endorse, or take responsibility for third parties' practices, and any information you provide to them is governed by their own policies. Listing a professional in search results is not a recommendation or referral.

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14. United States operation

HearthBook is operated from the United States and is intended for people in the United States. Your information is processed and stored in the United States. If you access the Service from outside the United States, you understand that your information will be transferred to and processed in the United States, where privacy laws may differ from those in your location.

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15. Changes to this Policy

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. If we make material changes, we will notify you by email or through the Service before they take effect. The "Effective date" above shows when this Policy was last revised.

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16. How to Contact Us
For privacy questions or requests, contact:
• Email: Email us at hello@hearthbook.com and put “Privacy Policy Question” in the subject line.
• Mail to: Hearth LLC, 1093 East Iron Eagle Drive Ste 125, Eagle, Idaho 83616.

HearthBook is a service of Hearth LLC.