A record carries responsibility.

1. These terms

These Terms of Service form an agreement between you and Golden Record, a service operated by Unicorn Road. They apply when you access goldenrecord.app, create an account, record or upload content, use AI-assisted features, or open a private sharing link.

By creating an account or using the service, you agree to these terms and acknowledge the Privacy Notice. If you do not agree, do not use the service.

2. Who may use Golden Record

You must be at least 18, or the age of legal majority where you live, to create an account. A younger person may participate through an account managed by a parent or legal guardian who accepts responsibility for the activity and content.

You must provide an email address you control and keep access to it secure. You are responsible for activity under your account and should tell us promptly if you believe it has been compromised.

3. Your content remains yours

You retain ownership of recordings, transcripts, photographs, documents, stories, names, descriptions, and other content you add to Golden Record.

You give us a limited, non-exclusive licence to host, copy, transmit, format, transcribe, analyse, generate drafts from, display, and otherwise process that content only as needed to operate, secure, improve, and support the service or comply with law. This licence ends when the content is deleted from active systems, except for temporary backups, legal retention, and content another authorised person has independently copied.

We do not acquire ownership of your family history. You may edit, download where available, stop sharing, or delete content through the service.

4. Permission to record and contribute

You are responsible for the content you record, upload, or share. You promise that:

• you own the content or have the permissions needed to use it;
• you have told interviewees that they are being recorded and how the material will be used;
• you comply with recording, privacy, copyright, publicity, confidentiality, and data protection laws that apply;
• you will respect reasonable requests to pause, correct, restrict, or remove a person’s contribution; and
• you will use particular care with children, vulnerable people, medical information, family disputes, and material intended for publication.

Consent to participate in a family interview is not automatically consent to publish it publicly. Ask separately before wider publication or commercial use.

5. AI-assisted interviews, transcripts, and stories

Golden Record uses artificial intelligence to conduct conversational interviews, transcribe audio, clean transcripts, identify useful context, and create editable story drafts. These features can make mistakes, including incorrect names, dates, quotations, speaker labels, or conclusions.

You are responsible for reviewing and editing AI output before relying on, exporting, or sharing it. Do not present an AI-generated story as a verified biography, obituary, legal statement, medical record, or historical fact without human review and appropriate source checking.

AI output may resemble common phrases or material created for other users. We do not guarantee that generated wording is unique or eligible for intellectual property protection.

6. Private records and sharing links

New records are private by default. If you create a sharing link, anyone with that active link may be able to listen to recordings and read the material available on the shared page without signing in.

You are responsible for choosing recipients and protecting links. You can turn a link off or replace it, but doing so cannot recall copies already downloaded, recorded, or forwarded by a recipient. Do not create a sharing link for material you are not authorised to disclose.

7. Acceptable use

Do not use Golden Record to:

• record someone covertly where consent or notice is required;
• harass, exploit, impersonate, threaten, defraud, or unlawfully discriminate against anyone;
• upload material that infringes privacy, confidentiality, copyright, or other rights;
• create or distribute unlawful sexual content, including any sexual content involving children;
• identify a person through biometric voice analysis or make high-impact decisions about employment, housing, credit, insurance, education, healthcare, or legal services;
• introduce malware, probe security, evade usage controls, scrape private records, or interfere with the service; or
• use the service or AI output in a way that violates applicable law or a provider’s safety rules.

We may restrict access, remove content, preserve evidence, or contact relevant authorities where reasonably necessary to address a serious safety, legal, or security risk.

8. Preservation and backups

Golden Record is designed to help preserve memories, but no online service is an infallible archive. Browser failures, account loss, provider outages, file corruption, or other events can affect access.

Keep independent copies of irreplaceable recordings and source files. Where export is available, use it regularly and test the exported files. The proposed Ever Archive format is still under development and should not be treated as a guarantee of permanent compatibility.

9. Service changes and availability

Golden Record is an evolving service. We may add, change, suspend, or retire features, providers, file limits, or supported formats. We will try to give reasonable notice where a change materially reduces an established feature, particularly when it affects access to stored content.

We do not promise uninterrupted or error-free availability. Maintenance, emergencies, security issues, provider failures, and events outside our reasonable control may interrupt the service.

10. Fees

Features described as free may be used without charge subject to published limits. If paid plans or purchases are introduced, the price, billing period, included usage, renewal terms, taxes, and cancellation information will be shown before you agree to pay. We will not convert a free account into a paid subscription without your affirmative agreement.

11. Our intellectual property

The Golden Record service, design, software, branding, editorial guides, prompts, and documentation are owned by us or our licensors. These terms do not transfer those rights to you.

You may use the service for its intended personal and family-history purposes. You may not copy, resell, reverse engineer, or exploit the service except where law permits or an open specification or licence expressly allows it. The proposed Ever Archive specification may be offered under separate open terms.

12. Suspension and ending use

You may stop using Golden Record at any time. You may delete individual recordings in the workspace and may ask us to close the account and delete remaining personal data by contacting privacy@goldenrecord.app.

We may suspend or end access when reasonably necessary for security, non-payment, serious or repeated breaches, legal requirements, or risk to another person. Where appropriate, we will provide notice and a reasonable opportunity to export content or correct the issue.

13. Disclaimers

Golden Record provides tools for personal recording, organisation, transcription, writing, and sharing. It is not legal, medical, genealogical, archival, counselling, or professional publishing advice. Guides and AI output are general starting points and may not fit your circumstances.

To the extent permitted by law, the service is provided “as available.” We do not guarantee that a transcript or story is complete, accurate, historically verified, legally publishable, permanently preserved, or suitable for a particular purpose.

14. Liability

Nothing in these terms excludes liability that cannot lawfully be excluded, including liability for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, or any consumer rights that law gives you.

To the extent permitted by law, we are not responsible for losses caused by content you or another user uploads or shares, an unauthorised recipient forwarding a link, failure to keep an independent backup, reliance on unreviewed AI output, or events outside our reasonable control.

If you use Golden Record as a consumer, these terms do not limit remedies available under mandatory consumer law. If you use it for business purposes, our total liability arising from the service will not exceed the greater of the amount you paid for the service during the 12 months before the event giving rise to the claim or £100.

15. Resolving concerns

Contact us first through the support page so we can try to resolve a concern. These terms are governed by the laws of England and Wales, except that mandatory laws and courts available to consumers where they live continue to apply.

16. Changes to these terms

We may update these terms when the service or law changes. Material changes will be brought to account holders’ attention where appropriate. Continuing to use the service after the new terms take effect means you accept them, but a change will not retroactively remove rights you already have.