Terms of Service

Keeper — you, the person recording and curating your own memories.

Portrait — the curated view of a Keeper’s memories, built from what they’ve recorded, that can be shared with others.

Inner Circle — the specific people a Keeper authorizes to view their Portrait and the entries they’ve marked visible.

Voices — people a Keeper invites to contribute their own perspective on a particular memory.

Content — anything a Keeper or a Voice records, uploads, or submits through the Service, including written answers, recordings, photos, videos, dates, locations, and feeling tags.

Legacy Contact — a person a Keeper may optionally designate, while living, to be granted access to their account after the Keeper’s death, at the level of access the Keeper selects.

2.1 Age requirement

You must be at least 13 years old to create a Decembers account. If you are under 18, you confirm that you have a parent or legal guardian’s permission to use the Service and that they have reviewed these Terms and our Privacy Policy with you. Decembers is not directed at children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 13. If we learn that a child under 13 has created an account, we will close it and delete the associated data.

2.2 Signing in and keeping your account secure

You create a Decembers account by signing in through a third-party provider (such as Google). You’re responsible for:

• Keeping your sign-in credentials secure, and for all activity that happens under your account;
• The security of any device you use to access Decembers;
• Signing out of Decembers on shared or public devices when you’re done; and
• Telling us right away at decembers@hythere.co if you suspect unauthorized access to your account.

We’re not responsible for losses caused by someone else accessing your account because of a compromised device or shared credentials, though we’ll do what we reasonably can to help you recover your account.

2.3 One account per person

Decembers accounts are personal to the Keeper who creates them. You may not sell, transfer, or share your account. Decembers offers an optional way to plan for what happens to your account after your death — see Section 2.4 below.

2.4 Legacy Contacts (coming soon)

We’re building a feature that will let you optionally designate one or more Legacy Contacts — people you choose, while you’re living, to be granted access to your account if you pass away. This section describes how that feature is designed to work once it’s available. It is not yet live, and nothing in this section grants anyone access to your account today.

Once available, here’s how it will work:

• You’ll choose the level of access for each Legacy Contact: view-only access to your Portrait and the entries you’ve made visible to your Inner Circle, or full account control, including the ability to export your Lists and Portrait, change privacy settings, and manage the account going forward. You can choose a different level for each Legacy Contact you designate.
• Before granting any access, we’ll require the Legacy Contact to submit proof of your death, such as a death certificate or a published obituary, and we may take reasonable additional steps to verify it.
• Once we’ve verified your death, we’ll grant your designated Legacy Contact(s) access at the level you selected.
• A Legacy Contact you’ve designated through this feature will take priority over other requests for access to your account, including from an estate executor or other legal representative, to the fullest extent permitted under the law of your state. Many states allow an online designation like this one — made through what the law calls an “online tool” — to control digital account access after death, under the Revised Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act or similar law.

If you haven’t designated a Legacy Contact, we may, at our discretion, work with someone who provides appropriate legal documentation of authority over your estate (such as letters testamentary) to determine next steps for your account, consistent with applicable law.

You’ll be able to add, remove, or change your Legacy Contacts, and their access level, at any time while you’re able to access your account.

We’ll update these Terms and notify Keepers when Legacy Contacts becomes available.

4.1 You own what you create

Whatever you record — your written answers, voice recordings, photos, videos, and the details you attach to them — belongs to you. We don’t claim ownership over your memories.

4.2 The license you give us

To provide the Service — storing your Content, building your Lists, generating your Portrait, and sharing it with the Inner Circle you choose — you grant HyThere a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license to host, store, reproduce, and display your Content solely for the purpose of operating, maintaining, and improving Decembers for you and the people you’ve authorized to see it. This license ends when you delete specific Content or your account, except for copies that we’re legally required to retain briefly, as described in our Privacy Policy.

We will never sell your Content, use it to train third-party advertising products, or share it outside the Service except as described in our Privacy Policy. We also don’t use your Content to train general-purpose AI models — ours or anyone else’s — without your explicit permission. Decembers does use AI to power specific features, like generating your Portrait, memory joggers, and memory summaries; see our Privacy Policy’s “How We Use AI” section for how that works and how it’s different from training a model on your memories.

4.3 Content from Voices

When you invite a Voice to contribute their perspective on a memory, the Voice retains ownership of what they contribute, and they grant HyThere the same limited license described above with respect to that contribution. Because a Voice’s contribution becomes part of your memory and follows the privacy setting you’ve chosen for it, please make sure the people you invite as Voices understand and are comfortable with that before you invite them.

Because a Keeper’s memory and a Voice’s contribution to it are legally distinct but practically intertwined, here’s what happens to a Voice’s contribution in a few specific situations:

• If the Keeper deletes their account, or deletes the specific memory a Voice contributed to, the Voice’s contribution is deleted along with it, as part of our normal account and Content deletion process (see Section 9.4). A Voice’s contribution doesn’t persist on Decembers independently of the memory it was added to.
• If a Voice deletes their own separate Decembers account, that doesn’t remove what they’ve already contributed to someone else’s memory. It was contributed to become part of that memory at the Keeper’s invitation, and stays there unless removed as described below.
• A Voice may ask us to remove their specific contribution from a memory at any time by emailing decembers@hythere.co. We’ll remove it, but the rest of the memory — the Keeper’s own written answers, dates, and other details — will remain.

Because a Voice’s contribution can be removed if the Keeper deletes their account or the memory it belongs to, we encourage Voices to keep their own copy of anything meaningful they contribute.

4.4 Your responsibility for your Content

You’re responsible for what you record and share, and for making sure you have the right to share it (for example, photos or stories that involve other people). Don’t upload Content that:

• Infringes someone else’s intellectual property or privacy rights;
• Is unlawful, threatening, or knowingly false in a way intended to harm someone;
• Contains malicious code or attempts to disrupt the Service; or
• You don’t have the right to share, including someone else’s private information shared without their consent.

We generally don’t review Content before it’s stored — Decembers is built around your private record — but we may remove Content or suspend accounts that violate these Terms or the law, and we may access Content when necessary to provide support you’ve requested, investigate a violation, or comply with a legal obligation. See our Privacy Policy’s “Law Enforcement and Legal Requests” section for how we handle requests from law enforcement and other government authorities.

4.5 Health and other sensitive information

Life stories often include health-related details — a diagnosis, an illness, a recovery, a loved one’s passing. Including that kind of information in your memories is entirely your choice; Decembers never requires it. If you choose to include it, it’s stored and protected the same way as the rest of your Content, as described in our Privacy Policy, and shared only according to the privacy setting you choose for that entry. Decembers is not a healthcare provider, and information you record with us is not treated as protected health information under HIPAA or similar laws. If we ever receive a legal request for health-related Content, we handle it under the heightened process described in our Privacy Policy’s “Law Enforcement and Legal Requests” section.

5.1 Inviting people

When you invite someone into your Inner Circle or as a Voice, you’re telling us to send that person an invitation using the contact information you provide. You confirm that you have the right to share that contact information with us for this purpose, and that you won’t use the invitation feature to contact people who haven’t agreed to hear from you.

5.2 How Inner Circle access works

We provide access to a Portrait through a secure private link, through a Decembers account, or a combination of both — the exact mechanism may vary or change as the Service evolves. However access works at a given time, it’s designed so that only the people you’ve chosen can view your Portrait, and you can change what an Inner Circle member can see, or remove their access entirely, at any time from your account.

5.3 You control what’s shared

You choose the privacy setting for each memory (just you, or your Inner Circle), and you can change it at any time. When you invite a Voice to a specific memory, they’ll be able to see the content of that memory — including what you’ve already recorded about it — so they have context to add their own perspective. A Voice does not get access to your full Lists or Portrait, only the memory you’ve invited them into.

8.1 Reporting infringing material

If you believe Content on Decembers infringes your copyright, send a written notice to our designated agent that includes:

• A physical or electronic signature of the copyright owner, or someone authorized to act on their behalf;
• A description of the copyrighted work you claim has been infringed;
• A description of where the material is located on the Service, specific enough for us to find it;
• Your name, address, phone number, and email address;
• A statement that you have a good-faith belief the use isn’t authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law; and
• A statement, made under penalty of perjury, that the information in your notice is accurate and that you’re the copyright owner or authorized to act on their behalf.

Designated DMCA Agent: HyThere Corp, Attn: DMCA Agent — 2800 Irving Ave S, Minneapolis, MN 55408 — decembers@hythere.co.

8.2 What happens next

On receiving a valid notice, we may remove or disable access to the reported Content and will make reasonable efforts to notify the Keeper who uploaded it, including how to submit a counter-notice.

8.3 Counter-notice

If you believe Content you uploaded was removed by mistake or misidentification, you may submit a counter-notice to the same address, including:

• Your physical or electronic signature;
• Identification of the Content removed and where it appeared before removal;
• A statement, made under penalty of perjury, that you have a good-faith belief the Content was removed as a result of mistake or misidentification; and
• Your name, address, phone number, and a statement consenting to the jurisdiction of the federal court in your district (or, if you’re outside the United States, Minnesota) and that you’ll accept service of process from the person who filed the original notice.

Unless the original notifying party files a court action seeking to restrain the Keeper from the allegedly infringing activity, we may restore the Content within 10–14 business days of receiving a valid counter-notice.

8.4 Repeat infringers

We will, in appropriate circumstances, terminate the accounts of Keepers who are repeat infringers.

9.1 Currently free

The MVP is free to use. We are not charging you anything right now.

9.2 Future paid tiers

We expect to introduce paid subscription tiers in the future. When we do, we’ll update these Terms and our pricing pages with clear information about cost, billing, and cancellation before any charge applies to you. Continuing to use paid features after that point will constitute your agreement to those additional terms.

9.3 Cancelling

You can stop using Decembers at any time. Since the MVP is free, there’s no subscription to cancel yet.

9.4 Deleting your account

You can delete your account at any time from Account settings, or by emailing decembers@hythere.co. Deleting your account permanently removes your Lists, your Portrait, and every Inner Circle connection, as described in our Privacy Policy. Before deleting your account, you can export your Lists and Portrait as a PDF.

9.5 Our right to suspend or terminate

We may suspend or terminate your account if you violate these Terms, if required by law, or if we discontinue the MVP or the Service generally. Where practical, we’ll give you notice and an opportunity to export your Content first.

14.1 Agreement to arbitrate

You and HyThere agree that any dispute, claim, or controversy arising out of or relating to these Terms or the Service — except as set out below — will be resolved through binding, individual arbitration rather than in court, under the Federal Arbitration Act. The arbitration will be administered by the American Arbitration Association (AAA) under its Consumer Arbitration Rules. You can find those rules at adr.org.

14.2 Class action waiver

YOU AND HYTHERE AGREE THAT EACH MAY BRING CLAIMS AGAINST THE OTHER ONLY IN AN INDIVIDUAL CAPACITY, AND NOT AS A PLAINTIFF OR CLASS MEMBER IN ANY PURPORTED CLASS OR REPRESENTATIVE PROCEEDING.

Unless both parties agree otherwise, the arbitrator may not consolidate more than one person’s claims.

14.3 Exceptions

Either party may bring an individual claim in small claims court instead of arbitration if it qualifies. Either party may also seek injunctive relief in court to prevent actual or threatened infringement, misappropriation, or violation of intellectual property or confidentiality rights.

14.4 Opting out

You can opt out of this arbitration agreement. To do so, email decembers@hythere.co with the subject line “Arbitration Opt-Out” within 30 days of first accepting these Terms, including your name and the email address on your account. If you opt out, this Section 14 won’t apply to you, but the rest of these Terms will.

14.5 Severability

If the class action waiver in Section 14.2 is found unenforceable for a particular claim, that claim (and only that claim) will proceed in court rather than in arbitration; the rest of this Section 14 will still apply to all other claims.

17.1 Entire agreement

These Terms, together with our Privacy Policy, are the entire agreement between you and HyThere regarding the Service and replace any earlier agreements on this subject.

17.2 Severability

If any provision of these Terms is found unenforceable, the rest of the Terms will remain in full effect.

17.3 No waiver

If we don’t enforce a provision of these Terms, that doesn’t mean we’re waiving our right to do so later.

17.4 Assignment

You may not assign these Terms without our consent. We may assign these Terms in connection with a merger, acquisition, or sale of assets, as described in ourPrivacy Policy.

17.5 Notices

We may provide notices to you by email, through the Service, or by posting on our website. You can reach us at decembers@hythere.co — a person reads every note.