Custodianship
How Your Family's Record Is Held
A vault holds the most personal material a family has. This is what happens to it, described as it stands today.
How It Works Today
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The Record Belongs to the Family
A vault holds one family's material: the relatives in it, the ancestors behind them, the photographs, the recordings and the dates. It is built to be the family's own record rather than a profile Sibaya keeps about them.
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You Choose Who Is In
A circle has the members you put in it. You decide who joins, and you can withdraw that. Nothing a family puts in a circle is placed on the open internet by doing so.
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Clan Knowledge Is Not Sibaya's to Write
Clan histories, praise names and origins are maintained with the councils and custodians who hold that knowledge. Sibaya carries it and credits its source. It does not author it, and it does not correct a clan's account of itself.
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Recording Someone Is a Decision You Make
A voice, a story or a photograph enters a vault because a member put it there. Sibaya does not gather material about your family from elsewhere to fill the gaps.
The People Who Cannot Speak for Themselves
Ancestors and the Dead
Most of what a family vault holds concerns people who are no longer alive, and none of them agreed to be in it. There is no way to ask them, and Sibaya does not pretend otherwise.
What follows from that is a duty on the living. A record of a person who has died is kept by their family, and the people who hold it carry the judgement about what belongs in it and who should see it. Sibaya's part is to keep that material where the family put it, and to treat a memorial as a memorial rather than as content.
Children
Children appear in family records from the beginning — in photographs, in dates, in the tree itself. A child cannot consent to that, and an adult in the family is making the decision on their behalf.
The rules covering minors, including what a family may record, who may see it, and what a person can ask for once they are grown, are being written into Sibaya's child safety and privacy documents now. When those are published they will be the binding version, and they will appear on this site.
Decided, Not Yet Built
These are settled in principle and are not in the app. They are listed here so that nobody reads the section above and assumes more than it says.
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Not in the app yet
Who Inherits a Family's Vault
An archive that ends with the person who started it is not an archive. The rule is settled — a successor names themselves in advance and confirms it, and nothing passes to anyone on an assumption or a guess. It is not in the app yet.
What This Page Is Not
This is a description, not an agreement. It carries no undertaking you could hold Sibaya to, and it does not cover the questions a policy has to answer precisely: what is retained and for how long, which companies process data on Sibaya's behalf, how a request to delete is handled, and what rights apply where you live.
Those are being drafted against South Africa's POPIA and the European GDPR, and reviewed before publication. Nothing stands in for them in the meantime, deliberately: a document that reads like a finished policy is indistinguishable from one, and you would have no way to tell which you were reading.
They will be published here as they are approved. Until then this site carries no policy pages at all, rather than empty ones.
Ask Before You Join
A question about how your family's material would be held is a fair question to ask before putting anything in.