Privacy notice

Last changed: 3 November 2026

1. Who is responsible

Mimir Lineage is run by Kjell Arne Brudvik as a private individual. Questions about privacy go to mimir@mimirlineage.com. The controller for the accounts and for what the service itself decides – storage, sharing, publishing and security – is the operator of Mimir Lineage.

2. About the service

Mimir Lineage is a genealogy tool in a closed beta. You enter information about persons, their relationships and the sources it rests on yourself. Trees are private: only people you invite see them. The owner of a tree can choose to publish deceased persons from it on family.mimirlineage.com (section 7).

3. What we process

• Your account: name, e-mail address, language, a profile picture if you upload one (shown to those you share a tree with), your password as a secure hash (never in plain text), passkeys (the public key only) and two-step sign-in settings.
• What you record in trees: persons – living ones too –, names, dates, places, relationships, sources, transcriptions, notes, photos, signatures and documents. Location, camera data and other metadata are removed from images when they are uploaded. The creator, date and copyright are read before that and kept only if you accept the suggestion; location is never read. PDF documents are kept as you uploaded them, with the metadata they carry. The file name you uploaded with is kept.
• DNA if you upload tests – see section 6.
• Change history: who changed what in a tree, and when. Tree members can see it.
• Bug reports and feedback you send from the app: your text, screenshots you attach, which page and version it was about, your browser and a technical trace id. Only those who do support read them.
• Technical logs: the app's event log for operations and security, with internal ids – never names, e-mail addresses or tree contents. The web server's log holds the IP address and the address of the page fetched.
• E-mails we send: e-mail confirmation, password reset, notice of a changed password, tree invitations, the answer to a beta application, notice of a reply to a bug report, messages from public trees (section 7) and a receipt when an account is deleted.
• Beta application: the name, e-mail address and language you applied with, how long you have done genealogy, your answers, and when you confirmed and were invited. Only the person running the beta reads it; the notice we get by e-mail holds only your name. Unconfirmed applications are deleted after 7 days, applications that lead to no invitation 30 days after they were sent, and invited ones 90 days after the invitation.
• Beta tester: if you are invited from an application – or marked by us – your account records that you are a beta tester and since when. We may use it for beta tester prices later.

We never ask for national identity numbers, and you must not record them.

4. Purposes and legal basis

• Providing the service you asked for – account, trees, sharing, publishing and support (contract, GDPR Art. 6(1)(b)).
• Assessing your application for a beta place, and later beta tester prices (steps you asked for before a contract, Art. 6(1)(b)).
• Security, abuse prevention, troubleshooting and backups (legitimate interest, Art. 6(1)(f)).
• DNA: your explicit consent (Art. 9(2)(a)) – see section 6.
• Information about other persons in trees: you are responsible for being allowed to record them. The service gives living persons extra protection – see section 5 – and processes them on a legitimate interest in genealogy, with strict limits.

5. Protecting living persons

A person counts as living unless a death or burial is recorded, the owner has marked the person as deceased, or the birth is more than 110 years ago. Living persons are shown only to members the owner has explicitly given access, and are never published. Information such as adoption, donor, surrogacy, gender transition and earlier names of living persons needs an extra permission.

6. DNA

DNA is genetic data – a special category of personal data. We process it only when you upload a test yourself and consent to it. If you upload a test for someone else, you confirm that this person has given you their consent.

• What: raw data from the testing company, matches, segments, ethnicity estimate and Y/mt DNA. The names of the tester and the matches, notes, raw data and ethnicity are encrypted with a key of your own. Haplogroups, centimorgan figures and the matches' countries are stored unencrypted, so they can be compared.
• Who sees it: you decide how much each tree may see. Full insight you give only to chosen members, for at most a year at a time. You can see who has seen what. Support and administrators never see DNA.
• Deletion: you can delete a test, only the raw data file, or all DNA data. Your key is deleted too, and the data is gone from the backups within 90 days. DNA is never published.
• You can withdraw your consent at any time by deleting the DNA data.

7. Public trees and messages

The owner of a tree can publish deceased persons on family.mimirlineage.com. Only persons who died at least 25 years ago (the owner can raise this), or were born more than 110 years ago, can be shown. Notes, DNA, adoption, donor, surrogacy, earlier names and change history are never published. What is shown is a copy taken when publishing. If the owner takes the tree down, the copy is deleted at once. Public trees set no cookies.

Visitors can send the owner a message («Contact the owner», «Do you know more?») or report content («Report content»). You give no name. A reply address is optional.

• Messages to the owner are not stored by us: they are e-mailed to the owner with the text and any reply address.
• «Report content» is stored as a case our moderators handle, and is also sent to the owner. The case – text and any reply address – is deleted 90 days after it is closed, and at once if the tree is deleted.

8. Who has access

• The members you invite to a tree, with the role you give them.
• Everyone sees what the owner has published (section 7).
• Support sees a tree's contents only when its owner has explicitly given time-limited permission. Access is read-only, and every look-up is shown to the owner.
• Processors:
  • E-mail: Brevo (Sendinblue SAS, France – in the EU).
  • Backups: encrypted on the server before they are stored in a data centre in Norway. The provider cannot read them.
  • During the beta the service runs on hardware in Norway that the operator owns. Virus scanning, document conversion, photo colouring and text reading run on the same machine – nothing is sent out.
• Maps: when you look at a map, your browser fetches map images directly from Kartverket (Norway) or the OpenStreetMap Foundation (United Kingdom, approved by the EU). They get your IP address and the area you are looking at – never names, dates or which tree it is.
• Digitalarkivet: when you fetch a page from Digitalarkivet, our server asks for that page's id – nothing about you or the tree.

We do not sell information, use it for advertising or share it with others.

9. Storage and deletion

• The account is kept until you delete it. You can delete it yourself once you own no trees. Your DNA data, profile picture, bug reports and private notes are deleted with it.
• A tree is kept until its owner deletes it. Then everything in it is deleted – persons, sources, photos, documents, the publication and the change history.
• Finished export files are deleted after 7 days, unfinished uploads after a day.
• Bug reports and feedback are deleted, with their attachments, 90 days after the case is closed.
• The web server's logs with IP addresses are deleted after 14 days. The app's event log holds no personal data beyond internal ids and is overwritten as it goes.
• Backups are deleted after 90 days. So what you delete is gone from the backups within 90 days.

10. Your rights

You have the right of access, rectification, erasure and data portability. You can do much of this yourself: change information in the app, download a tree (GEDCOM 5.5.1, GEDCOM 7, Mimir archive or GEDZIP with images) and your DNA data (ZIP), and delete trees, DNA or the account. You can also object to processing and ask for restriction. Write to mimir@mimirlineage.com. You can complain to Datatilsynet, the Norwegian data protection authority.

11. If you are recorded in someone's tree

If someone has entered information about you and you do not want that, you can contact us at mimir@mimirlineage.com – also without an account. We contact the tree's owner and make sure the information about you is corrected or removed where you are entitled to it.

12. Cookies, browser storage and visit statistics

We use only the cookies sign-in and security need: the sign-in (until you close the browser, and at most 8 hours without activity), two-step sign-in (also «remember this machine» if you choose it) and protection against forged forms. No tracking, no third-party analytics. The app remembers some choices in your browser – theme, views and the persons you looked at last. The recent persons are removed when you sign out.

We count visits to the website, the app and the public trees ourselves, without cookies and without storing anything in your browser. The visit count never stores your IP address: it is used only in the moment to find the country (and the county in Norway) – looked up on our own server in a database from DB-IP (CC BY 4.0), the address is sent nowhere – and for a day key that lets us count how many different visitors there were that day. The key's secret is deleted every night, so a visit today cannot be linked to a visit tomorrow. We store which page you saw, which site you came from (the domain only) and the campaign in the link, language, type of device and screen size, browser and operating system (without versions), how long the page was open and some actions, such as a film being started. In the app only the kind of page is stored, never which tree or person. On public trees, which tree and which published person the page was about is stored, so the owner can see the visits to their own tree. The figures cannot be linked to you and are kept without a fixed end. The basis is our legitimate interest in knowing how the service is used (GDPR Art. 6(1)(f)).

13. Changes

Material changes to this notice are announced by e-mail before they take effect.