Your family's memories are not a product.

Who we are

dear18 (dear18.com) is run from Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. We are the controller of the personal information described here. You can reach the people behind it at hello@dear18.com; that is the only address we use.

What we keep

We keep only what the service needs to work. In plain terms:

• Your account. Your email address, your mobile number, your name, and the identifier your sign-in provider gives us when you sign in with Google or Apple. No passwords unless you choose to set one, and then only a hashed form.
• Your family's set-up. Each child's first name, birthday and photo; the dear18 address and phone number you choose for them; the names and contact details of the family members you invite; and the reading rule you set for unsealed notes.
• The memories. Every text, photo, voice memo, voicemail and email sent to a child's number or address, with the sender's number or address and the date and time it arrived. A sealed memory is stored in the same way and read by nobody until the vault opens.
• The waitlist. The email address, child's first name and number of children you give us when you join, and whether you reserved an address.
• Technical records. Our servers log the address, browser and time of each request for security and reliability, and keep them for a short period. A single sign-in cookie keeps you signed in for up to 14 days. There are no advertising or analytics trackers on this site.

What we will never do

Nothing in a vault is sold, shared with partners, used for advertising, analysed for marketing, or used to train artificial intelligence. Your family is the only audience and your child is the only recipient. We make money when families pay for dear18, never from what is inside it.

We do not read your memories. Our systems handle them automatically to store, confirm and deliver them. A person at dear18 looks at a memory only when you ask us to help with it, or when the law requires us to.

Why we keep it

• To run the vault: receive each memory, confirm it arrived, hold unknown senders for your approval, and keep everything safe until the 18th birthday.
• To sign you in and to send you the service's own messages: a sign-in link or code, a receipt, a note that a sender is waiting, a notice that something about your account is changing.
• To open the vault on the 18th birthday: the key goes to the email address you have given us for your child, and a keepsake card with the same code goes to you.
• To keep the service honest: to stop abuse of a number or an address, to apply our fair-use terms, and to meet legal obligations.
• To tell waitlist families when their spot opens. Nothing else.

Sealed memories

Whoever sends a memory decides whether parents can read it before the 18th birthday. A sealed memory is stored exactly as an unsealed one, but it is read only on our servers, is never shown to any family member, and opens with the rest of the vault. We cannot unseal a memory early for anyone, including the account holder.

Children

A dear18 account is opened and controlled by a parent or guardian, who is responsible for what is added to the vault. We do not knowingly collect personal information directly from a child under 13. On the 18th birthday the vault passes to the young adult it was kept for, and from then on this policy speaks to them.

Where it lives and who helps us

dear18 is built on Google Cloud. Your family's data is stored in Google's Firebase and Cloud Storage services in the United States, encrypted in transit and at rest, with versioning, daily exports and point-in-time recovery switched on so that nothing is lost by accident.

A small number of providers process data on our behalf and only for the purpose named: Vercel hosts the website and runs our code; Resend delivers the emails we send you; Twilio carries texts, pictures and voicemails to a child's number; Google reCAPTCHA protects phone sign-in from bots. Each is bound by a contract that limits it to our instructions. None of them may use your family's data for their own purposes.

Because this data is stored in the United States, it is subject to the laws there as well as to Canadian law.

How long we keep it

Memories are kept for as long as the vault exists: through the 18th birthday and afterwards, for as long as the account stays open. You can delete a single memory, or the whole account, at any time. Until the in-app deletion page ships, email hello@dear18.com from your account address and we will do it within 7 days.

When something is deleted it leaves our live systems at once and our backups within 30 days. Server logs are kept for 30 days. Waitlist details are kept until you join or ask us to remove them.

Your rights

Everything in your vault is yours to download, in original quality, at any time, and you can leave whenever you like and take it all with you. You can also ask us to show you what we hold, to correct it, to delete it, or to stop using it for something you had agreed to.

Write to hello@dear18.com and we will answer within 30 days. If you are not satisfied, you can complain to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada or to the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner for British Columbia.

Security

Access to our systems uses short-lived credentials and no shared keys. Media is uploaded and downloaded only through signed links that expire. Our own staff have the least access the work needs. No system is perfectly secure; if we ever learn of a breach that affects your family, we will tell you and the authorities as the law requires.

Changes to this policy

When this policy changes we post the new version here with its date. If a change matters to how your family's data is handled, we email the account holder before it takes effect.