Akin is built so that we cannot read your family tree. This page says what that means in practice, what little we do hold, and who else is involved. Last updated 13 August 2026.
Your family tree lives on your phone. If you never create an account, nothing about it reaches us at all. If you share a family through the cloud, it is encrypted on your phone first with a key we never see: what we store is unreadable to us, and therefore also to anyone who asks us for it. We hold your email address so you can sign in, and that is roughly the whole list.
Everything stays on the device, stored encrypted (SQLCipher, key in the iOS Keychain). No names, dates, photos or relations ever leave the phone unless you export or share them yourself. We run no analytics and see nothing.
An account is your name (as you choose to give it), your email address, and a password hash. When you save a family to the cloud, each person in the tree is encrypted on your phone (XChaCha20-Poly1305, key wrapped by your twelve words) before upload. Our server stores ciphertext, its size, and timestamps. We cannot decrypt it, cannot search it, cannot show it to a court, and cannot email it back to you if you lose your words. Invitation emails carry only the inviter's chosen display name and a link, never anyone from the tree.
Our server runs at Hetzner (Germany). Invitation and account email is sent through Mailjet (EU). Payments for Akin Plus are handled by Apple and RevenueCat: we never see card numbers, and RevenueCat receives only an account id and purchase state. There is no advertising in Akin, on any plan. Akin runs no analytics, adds no tracking, and does not use Apple's advertising identifier.
Export is built in and free of lock-in: JSON and GEDCOM leave with you whenever you want. Deleting your account in the app removes the account, its devices, its memberships and its wrapped keys; a shared family's ciphertext is removed when its last member leaves. Under the GDPR you can ask us to access, correct or erase what we hold about you, which is your email address and billing state, since the rest is unreadable to us by design.
Akin is made by Amaze Security B.V., Netherlands. For anything about privacy, write to info@akin-family.nl and a person answers.