Privacy Policy

Honored Ancestors is a brand of Abilities Finance, LLC, a Wyoming limited liability company ("we," "us," "our") that operates the website at honoredancestors.com (and related domains honoredancestors.net, .org, .info we control), a public memorial platform for African American heritage. You can reach us any time at info@honoredancestors.com.

From everyone who visits the site

• Server logs. Our web server records standard access information — your IP address, the page you requested, the time of the request, your browser's user-agent string, and the referring page. We use this to operate and protect the site.
• Cookies. We do not use third-party tracking cookies, advertising cookies, or analytics cookies that profile you. Any cookies we set are strictly necessary for the site to function.

When you sign up to be notified

• Your email address. Used to send you launch updates and notice of new featured stories. Nothing else.

When you submit a story

The Submit a Story form collects:

• Name of the person being honored, and their dates if you provide them
• Your name and your email address
• Your relationship to the person (optional)
• A one-line story summary, the full story, and any photo/document follow-up note you write
• Your privacy preference (how you want the story credited)
• Your confirmation that you have the right to share the story
• Whether we may email you with editorial questions
• Technical metadata: the time of submission, your IP address, and your browser's user-agent string

Living Legacy is our paid subscription archive. When you become a Living Legacy subscriber, additional data flows apply:

Payment

• Stripe handles your payment in full. We never see or store your card number, expiration, or CVC. Stripe sends us only what we need to honor your subscription: a customer ID, your subscription tier (Annual or Eternal), the timestamp of payment, and your email so we can grant you access. Refer to Stripe’s privacy policy for their handling.

Authentication

• Magic-link sign-in. When you sign in, we email a single-use link via SMTP routed through Hostinger. The email contains a short-lived authentication token; we log only the timestamp of the request and the lowercased email hash for abuse defense.

Your entries

• Drafts. Saved on our server, encrypted at rest, visible only to you when authenticated. Editorial team may review for support purposes; we never publish without your explicit Publish action.
• Published entries and your IPFS record. When you Publish an entry, the entry body is pinned to the open InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) via our own self-hosted node, and a rolled-up manifest of your published archive is pinned alongside (this is the “Verifiable IPFS record” surfaced on your dashboard and public profile). Once content is pinned to IPFS, its Content Identifier is a permanent, public address; anyone who knows the CID can fetch the content from any IPFS gateway worldwide. This is what Guiding Principle 4 commits us to: permanence you can verify.

Third parties — the complete list

• Stripe — payment processing only.
• Let’s Encrypt — HTTPS certificate authority. They see only domain certificate-request metadata; they never see user data.
• IPFS gateway operators (dweb.link, ipfs.io, others) — users may resolve published-entry CIDs through public gateways; those gateway operators see the requested CID and the requesting IP, by the nature of any HTTP fetch.
• Hostinger SMTP — outbound email routing for magic-link sign-in and notification emails.

Nothing else. No advertising networks. No analytics platforms. No data brokers. No AI training partners (per Guiding Principle 6).

Executor designation

• When available (Phase 2). At signup you will be able to designate an executor — one named person who, at the time of your transition, makes the family-choice decision per Guiding Principle 8. The executor’s name and contact are stored alongside your profile and disclosed to no one until activated by death certificate and identity verification.

• To review submissions. A human on our team reads every submission. We may email you with editorial questions or to ask for clarification before publishing.
• To publish approved stories. Once approved, your story is published as a featured page in accordance with the privacy preference you selected.
• To communicate with you. If you signed up for updates or asked us to contact you, we will. We do not send marketing email beyond what you signed up for.
• To operate and protect the site. Server logs and submission metadata help us defend against spam, abuse, and security threats.
• To comply with the law. We may use or share information when required by valid legal process, or to protect the rights, safety, or property of Honored Ancestors, our users, or others.

What appears on a published story page depends on the privacy preference you select:

• Public with submitter credit. The honoree's name, the story, and your name as submitter are public. Your email address is never published.
• Public, submitter anonymous. The honoree's name and the story are public. Your name and email are kept private.
• Review with me before publishing. Nothing is published until we contact you and confirm.

Your email address, IP address, browser user-agent, and any private notes are never published, regardless of preference.

We do not sell, rent, or trade your personal information. We do not run advertising on this site. We share information only:

• With service providers that host or operate the site (our VPS host, our domain registrar, and our email provider), strictly to deliver the service.
• When you publish a story under a public privacy preference — in which case the parts you chose to make public become part of the public archive.
• When required by law, or to protect rights, safety, or property as described above.

• Submissions awaiting review are kept until they are approved, declined, or withdrawn.
• Approved and published stories are kept as part of the public archive. You can request changes or removal at any time (see Section 8).
• Declined or withdrawn submissions are deleted from active intake; minimal records may be retained for abuse prevention.
• Server logs are kept for a short window (typically 30–90 days) and rotated.
• Email signups are kept until you unsubscribe or ask us to remove you.

The site is served over HTTPS. Submissions are stored on our private VPS in a directory not accessible from the public web. We restrict access to authorized people on our team. No system is perfectly secure, but we treat your story and your email with care.

At any time, you can email info@honoredancestors.com to:

• Ask what information we have about you
• Correct something on a story you submitted
• Withdraw a pending submission
• Request that a published story be removed or amended
• Unsubscribe from email updates
• Request deletion of your information, subject to limits we may need to keep for abuse prevention or to honor a separately submitting family member's rights

If you are a resident of a U.S. state with a comprehensive privacy law (such as California, Colorado, Connecticut, Virginia, or Utah), the European Economic Area, or the United Kingdom, you may have additional rights — including the right to access, correct, delete, port, or restrict processing of your personal data, and the right to lodge a complaint with a supervisory authority. Email us and we will honor those rights to the extent the law requires.

We do not sell personal information, do not "share" personal information for cross-context behavioral advertising, and do not use it for automated profiling.

The site is not directed to children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from children. If you believe a child has submitted personal information, email us and we will delete it.

Honored Ancestors is by design a memorial platform. By submitting a story you confirm that you have the right to share it (see our Story Submission Terms). Family members of an honored person may always contact us to request changes to or removal of a published story.

The site is operated from the United States. If you visit or submit from outside the United States, you understand that your information will be transferred to and processed in the United States.

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. When we do, we will post the updated version here with a new "Last updated" date. Material changes will be highlighted on the site or by email if you are subscribed.

Questions or requests about this policy go to info@honoredancestors.com.