Terms of Service

These terms govern your use of beinand, a private family network operated by Philipp Zöchner (see the Imprint). By creating an account or accepting an invitation, you agree to them.

1. The service

In short: a private space for your family to build a tree and keep photos, stories and messages together.

beinand lets a family privately build a shared family tree and keep photos, stories, events and messages together, within one or more households. Some features depend on your household's plan.

2. Your account

In short: keep your login safe, give accurate details, and be old enough to consent.

You are responsible for keeping your sign-in credentials secure and for activity under your account. Provide accurate information and keep it up to date. You must be old enough to consent to online services — in Austria, age 14; for a younger child, a parent or guardian must set up the account and consent on the child's behalf.

3. You own your content

In short: it stays yours; we only host and show it to your household, and we never sell it or train AI on it.

You keep ownership of everything you contribute. beinand claims no ownership of your photos, stories, wiki pages or the family tree you build. You grant us only a limited, non-exclusive, royalty-free, non-sublicensable and non-transferable licence — which ends when you delete the content or your account (residual copies in routine backups are removed in the ordinary backup-rotation cycle) — to host, store, back up, process and display that content to the other authorised members of your household, solely in order to operate the service. For what happens to contributions others have built upon, see section 7.

We will never sell your content, use it for advertising or profiling, or train artificial-intelligence or machine-learning models on it, and we will not share it with third parties beyond the processors named in our Privacy Policy.

4. Using beinand responsibly

In short: keep it private, respect others, and only add data you are entitled to.

• Content shared within your household is for that family's private use. You may not bulk-extract, scrape, or republish a substantial part of the family tree or other members' content.
• You may not re-share other people's data outside the household without a lawful basis.
• When you add information or upload a photo about another person, please make sure, as far as you reasonably can, that you are entitled to do so and are not infringing anyone's rights. If you are not sure, do not upload it.
• Photos can contain hidden location data (GPS). If you do not want to share where a photo was taken, remove that data or clear the suggested coordinates before saving.
• Do not upload unlawful content, infringe others' rights, or misuse the service or attempt to circumvent its security or access controls.
• Respect other members and the privacy choices (including face-recognition consent) they make.

5. Your data-protection rights come first

In short: these terms can never override your GDPR rights.

These terms are a contract about content. They do not, and cannot, limit the data-protection rights that you and other people have under the GDPR and the Austrian DSG. Where the two ever conflict, those statutory rights — including the right to erasure — always prevail. How we handle personal data is set out in our Privacy Policy.

6. Plans, payment and sponsorship

In short: no in-app charging today; if that changes, you get a 14-day right of withdrawal.

A household may use a free plan or a paid plan. Any member may pay for or extend their household's plan ("sponsor" it); only the household owner can cancel the plan itself. There is currently no automated in-app checkout: plans are arranged with us, and a contribution is a one-off payment for a chosen period that never auto-renews. If we later offer paid plans through an in-app checkout, then — where you take one out as a consumer — you will have a statutory 14-day right of withdrawal (FAGG): we will give you the withdrawal instructions and the model withdrawal form before any payment, and if you ask a paid feature to start within those 14 days we will obtain your express consent (after which the right ends once we have fully performed).

7. Suspension and termination

In short: leave anytime; deletion purges your data on clear timelines, and shared contributions are anonymised.

You can stop using the service at any time. Deleting your account deactivates it immediately and irreversibly purges your personal data after a 30-day recovery window. Contributions you shared into the family archive (for example tree entries others have built upon) are not deleted but are irreversibly anonymised so they no longer identify you — this is consistent with your right to erasure, which applies to your personal data. Deleting a household permanently purges it and all its data after a 28-day recovery window. We may suspend or terminate access if you materially breach these terms or where required by law, giving notice where reasonable.

8. Availability, warranties and liability

In short: we work hard on reliability but can't promise perfection — please keep your own copies.

We work to keep beinand available, secure and functioning as described, but cannot guarantee that it will be uninterrupted or entirely error-free. Your statutory warranty rights (Gewährleistung) for any paid plan remain fully unaffected. Nothing in these terms limits liability that cannot be limited by law (including for death or personal injury caused by negligence, or for intent or gross negligence). Subject to that, and for claims on any legal basis whether in contract or in tort, our liability for slight negligence is limited to foreseeable, contract-typical damage. Please keep your own copies of important photos and content. Your mandatory rights as a consumer under Austrian law (including the Consumer Protection Act, KSchG) remain unaffected.

9. Changes to these terms

In short: we give six weeks' notice of material changes and you may object and leave for free.

We may need to update these terms for objectively justified reasons (legal or regulatory changes, security, or the evolution of features), without altering the essential balance of the bargain or any price you have already paid. If we make a material change, we will notify you personally (by email or in the app) at least six weeks before it takes effect. The notice will say what is changing, when, and that you may object and end the contract free of charge before that date — and that if you do not object before the effective date, the change will be treated as accepted. You may always end the contract instead, and we will, if you have prepaid for a period that then goes unused, refund the unused portion. Each version of these terms carries a date, and we record which version you accepted when you signed up, so it is always clear which text applies to you.

10. Governing law and jurisdiction

In short: Austrian law applies, and your consumer protections are never taken away.

Austrian law applies, excluding its conflict-of-laws rules and the UN Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods. If you are a consumer, the choice of Austrian law never deprives you of the mandatory consumer protections of your country of residence; you can always bring proceedings in the courts of your country of residence, and we may sue you only there. Only if you are not acting as a consumer is the court with competence for Graz the exclusive place of jurisdiction.

11. Contact

In short: how to reach us.

Philipp Zöchner, hello@beinand.app — see the Imprint for full details.