TAP

Privacy

Privacy policy

Last updated 15 July 2026

Talk About Pictures keeps the spoken stories behind your family's photos. Those stories are the most personal thing we handle, so the short version is: your photos and recordings are encrypted on your device, and we cannot read them. Everything we do hold is listed below — with one honest exception we want you to see clearly, not bury.

What we store

To run your account and your family's sync, our servers hold:

  • Your email address — how you sign in, and how we send login codes.
  • Your display name — so relatives see who told a story.
  • Your family graph — which families exist, their names, who belongs to each, who owns each, and pending invite codes.
  • Your devices' public keys — so your other devices and your family can be handed the keys to your family's content. We never hold your private keys.
  • Billing metadata — whether a family's subscription is active, when the period ends, and an opaque transaction id from the store. We never see your card. Payment is handled by Google Play, Apple, orStripe acting as our payment processors, under their own privacy policies.
  • Encrypted content — your stories, photos, and audio pass through and rest on our relay as ciphertext. We store the bytes; we do not have the key.

What we cannot see

Your photos, your recordings, and the transcripts attached to them areend-to-end encrypted. The key belongs to your family's devices and is passed between them wrapped for each device. It never reaches our servers in a form we can use. If we were compelled to hand over what sits on our relay, it would be unreadable ciphertext — and that is on purpose.

The exception: cloud transcription

Turning speech into text is the one place the encryption has to open, and we would rather say so plainly than let you assume otherwise.

When your device transcribes a story in the cloud, it sends that story's audio to our transcription service, where it isreadable by the service while it is being transcribed. It is processed in memory to produce the text and is not stored by us afterwards; the resulting transcript is encrypted on your device like any other content. We use Cloudflare Workers AI as the speech-to-text provider, as our processor.

Audio is sent for transcription only when a story is recorded with cloud transcription active. Everything else — your photos, your library, your family's history — is never sent in the clear.

Crash diagnostics

If the app crashes, we collect a crash report through Sentry (our processor): the error, where in our code it happened, and basic device and app version information. Crash reports do not contain your photos, audio, or transcripts. We use them to fix the thing that broke, nothing else.

What we don't do

  • We don't sell your data.
  • We don't share it with data brokers or advertisers.
  • We don't advertise in TAP, and we don't build ad profiles.
  • We don't track you across other apps or websites.

We share data only with the processors named on this page — the payment processors, the transcription provider, and the crash reporter — each doing a specific job for us, and with no right to use your data for their own purposes.

How long we keep it

Account and family records are kept while your account exists. Login codes and invite codes are short-lived and expire on their own. Encrypted content stays on the relay until your devices have it and it ages out, or until the family is deleted.

Deleting your account

You can delete your account from inside the app (Log in → Delete account) or on the web. Either way:

  • Your personal records are deleted — your account, your email, your display name, your devices, and your memberships.
  • A family with other members survives, read-only. Deleting your account doesn't delete your relatives' shared history. If you were paying for it, it stops being paid for and goes read-only; any remaining member can subscribe to reactivate it, and ownership passes to the longest-standing member.
  • A family where you were the only member is deleted outright, along with its stored encrypted media.
  • Photos and stories on your own device stay on your device. Deleting your account doesn't reach into your phone's gallery.
  • Cancel your subscription separately in Google Play (or the App Store, or Stripe). We can't cancel a store subscription on your behalf — deleting your account here does not stop store billing.

See talkaboutpictures.app/delete-account for the full detail.

Children

TAP is built for families, and children's voices and faces are very often in it — added by the adults in that family. TAP accounts are for adults: you must be13 or older (or the minimum age in your country) to create one. We don't knowingly create accounts for children under that age. If you believe a child created an account, write to us and we'll remove it.

Your rights

Depending on where you live, you may have the right to access, correct, export, or delete your personal data, and to object to how we handle it. The portal and the delete-account flow cover most of this directly; for anything else, write to us and we'll act on it.

Changes to this policy

If we change what we collect or who we share it with, we'll update this page and the date at the top, and — for anything material — tell you in the app rather than quietly editing this page.

Contact

Questions, requests, or something we've got wrong: privacy@talkaboutpictures.app.