Who can see what

Privacy is the first thing families worry about, so here is the whole model in plain words. Every single thing in an archive — each memory, photo, chapter, letter, timeline event — carries one of five visibility levels, and everything starts at the most private one.

The five levels

• Private — only you (and the archive's owner) can see it. Where everything begins.
• Family — visible to the people you've made members of the archive, and no one else.
• Contributor — visible to family plus invited contributors (the cousins and old friends you've invited to add memories, even without accounts).
• Public — visible to anyone you share the archive's public page with. Nothing reaches this level except by your explicit choice, one item or one chapter at a time.
• Hidden — kept, but shown to no one. For the things a family wants preserved and not displayed.

Two rules that do the real work

• Private by default, always. New memories, new uploads, new contributor submissions — all arrive private (or pending your review). Visibility only ever widens because a person chose to widen it.
• The public page respects chapters too. A memory only appears on the public Life Page if both the memory and its chapter allow it. The hard chapter stays home even when the rest of the life is shared.

The three promises

These are commitments, published and permanent:

• Nothing becomes public by accident. No default, update, or feature will ever widen your visibility choices as a side effect.
• Remembrance is never paywalled. Reading, adding to, and keeping a family's memories is free, forever, and no lapsed payment ever locks a family out of their archive.
• You can always leave with everything. Full export, originals included, in an open documented format, free, any time. See our preservation commitment for the long version.