Most services that gather a life story keep every word, so they can compile it into something later. In My Time doesn't work that way — and this page explains exactly what that means, in plain language, not a policy you have to take on faith.
What they say to you — the voice notes, the messages, the photos, the videos — passes through us and is gone from our side the moment it's delivered. There is nowhere in our system for it to land. Not a hidden backup, not an "anonymised" copy, not a database column waiting to be filled in later. It was never built. We call this a shallow room: a place stories pass through, not a place they're kept.
Nothing about what they actually share, ever — regardless of how they answer:
We don't transcribe anything. We don't read it to summarise it, tag it, or "improve" future questions with it. Nothing is analysed. It's relayed to you and forgotten.
When they send a photo or a voice note, our server never downloads it. WhatsApp hands us a reference to the file, and we pass that same reference straight to you — your copy of WhatsApp fetches it directly. The bytes of what they shared never sit on a server we control, not even for a moment. Text works the same way in spirit: it's forwarded, not filed away.
A short, honest list — this is genuinely all of it:
That's the entire list. Every field in our database is either a name, a number, a preference, or a timestamp. None of it is their story.
Most privacy policies are a promise about how data will be handled — which means they can quietly change. Ours is closer to a fact about how the system is built: there is no field in our database for storing what they tell you. We didn't decide not to use it. We didn't build it. If that ever changed, it would mean rebuilding the product from the ground up, not adjusting a setting — which is precisely why we treat a proposal to add one as a five-alarm moment internally, not a routine update.
WhatsApp is, unfortunately, a common place for scams aimed at older people, so it's fair to be cautious about messages arriving there. Nothing from In My Time ever reaches them cold. The very first message only goes out once someone they already know and trust has set things up — and if they're starting their own story themselves, it's their own choice from the very first message, not a stranger's.
In My Time · a life, gathered gently. Questions about any of this? Use the feedback panel on the homepage — a real person reads every one.
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