Privacy Policy

How Beneficiary.io collects, uses, shares, and protects your personal information.

1. About this Policy

This Privacy Policy explains how Beneficiary.io ("Beneficiary.io", "we", "us", "our") collects, uses, shares, and protects your personal information when you visit mybeneficiary.io or use the Beneficiary.io application (collectively, the "Service").

Beneficiary.io provides estate-planning tools, including legal will generation, beneficiary management, encrypted secret notes, linked financial-account aggregation (via Plaid), and remote online notarization (via BlueNotary).

If you have questions about this Policy, contact us at [email protected].

2. Information We Collect

2.1 Information you provide directly

• Account information — email address, password (hashed by Firebase Authentication; we never see or store the plaintext), display name.
• Profile information — legal name, date of birth, phone number, street address, city, state, ZIP code.
• Estate planning information — will details (marital status, spouse/partner name, executor, no-contest clause, independent administration, self-proving affidavit), beneficiaries (names, relationships, percentages, contact info), guardians for minor children, physical asset records, secret notes intended for delivery to designated beneficiaries.
• Communications — support tickets, security reports, privacy inquiries.

2.2 Information from third parties

• Plaid — we use Plaid to connect to financial institutions on your behalf and retrieve account information including institution name, account type, masked account number, current balance, transactions (where applicable), and account ownership details. See the Plaid disclosure in Section 4.
• Stripe — for payments and subscription billing. Stripe is the payment processor; we receive subscription metadata, not raw card numbers.
• Firebase / Google — for authentication. If you sign in with Google, we receive your name and email address from Google.
• BlueNotary — for remote online notarization sessions, we receive session status, notarized document references, and notary metadata.

2.3 Information collected automatically

• Device and usage data — browser type and version, operating system, IP address, screen size, pages visited, actions taken, and timestamps.
• Audit-log events — every state-changing action you take in the Service produces an audit record (user ID, action, target resource, IP, user-agent, timestamp). These are used for security monitoring and your own activity-history view.
• Cookies and similar technologies — we use cookies and local storage to keep you signed in and preserve session state. We do not currently use third-party advertising or behavioral-tracking cookies.

3. How We Use Your Information

• Provide the Service — create your account, generate your will, manage beneficiaries and assets, link and synchronize financial accounts (via Plaid), facilitate notarization (via BlueNotary), store and release encrypted secret notes per your instructions.
• Authenticate and secure your account — verify your identity, enforce multi-factor authentication when enrolled, detect and prevent abuse.
• Process payments and manage subscriptions — via Stripe, for paid plans and one-time notarization purchases.
• Communicate with you — send service emails (verification, receipts, notarization status, subscription notices, security alerts).
• Notify designated beneficiaries when conditions you have configured occur (e.g., release of secret notes upon a configured event).
• Improve the Service — analyze aggregated, de-identified usage data to improve performance and product experience.
• Comply with legal obligations — tax, accounting, fraud-prevention, breach-notification, and other legal requirements.

We do not sell your personal information. We do not use your financial-account data for advertising. We do not train artificial-intelligence models on your personal data.

4. How We Share Your Information

4.1 Service providers (sub-processors)

We use the following vetted service providers to operate the Service. Each is bound by a written agreement to use your data only as needed to provide their service to us.

4.2 Plaid

You may disconnect any linked financial institution at any time through the Beneficiary.io application; doing so revokes Plaid's authorization to retrieve further data from that institution on your behalf.

4.3 Designated beneficiaries

When you designate a beneficiary or set up a secret note for delivery, we will share the relevant information with the named recipient(s) only upon the conditions you have specified (for example, time-based release of a secret note or a configured release event). You control what is shared and when.

4.4 Legal and safety

We may disclose your information if we believe in good faith that disclosure is required to comply with applicable law, a subpoena, court order, or other valid legal process; to protect the rights, property, or safety of Beneficiary.io, our users, or the public; or to investigate fraud or security incidents.

4.5 Business transfers

If Beneficiary.io is involved in a merger, acquisition, financing, reorganization, bankruptcy, or sale of all or part of its assets, your information may be transferred to the successor entity, subject to this Policy or notice of any material change.

4.6 With your consent

We will share your information for any other purpose only with your explicit consent.

5. Your Rights and Choices

You have rights regarding your personal information. Depending on where you live, these may include:

• Access — request a copy of the personal information we hold about you.
• Correction — ask us to fix inaccurate information.
• Deletion — request that we delete your personal information (subject to legal retention obligations).
• Portability — request a machine-readable copy of your data.
• Restriction or objection (GDPR) — limit how we process your data.
• Withdrawal of consent — withdraw consent for processing that relies on consent.
• Marketing opt-out — unsubscribe from non-essential emails at any time. Essential service emails (security, billing, legal) cannot be opted out of while your account is active.
• Right to non-discrimination (CCPA/CPRA) — we will not discriminate against you for exercising any of these rights.

To exercise any of these rights, email [email protected]. We will respond within the timeframes required by applicable law (typically 30–45 days). We may need to verify your identity before fulfilling a request.

You also have the right to lodge a complaint with your data-protection supervisory authority.

6. Data Security

We implement industry-standard administrative, technical, and physical safeguards to protect your information, including:

• TLS 1.2+ encryption for all data in transit.
• AWS-managed KMS encryption at rest for all stored data, with per-resource KMS keys for highly sensitive items such as secret notes.
• Stateless token-based authentication via Firebase, with optional SMS-based multi-factor authentication.
• Per-request authorization and multi-tenant isolation.
• Comprehensive audit logging.
• Vendor security review for every sub-processor.

For full details, see our Information Security Policy.

No system is perfectly secure. While we work hard to protect your data, we cannot guarantee absolute security. If you believe your account has been compromised, contact us immediately at [email protected].

7. Data Retention

We retain your information for as long as your account is active and as needed to provide the Service. Specific retention periods include:

• Account data: for the lifetime of your account, plus a short period after deletion for backup expiration.
• Will and estate-planning records: for the lifetime of your account. Notarized wills are retained per legal-record retention norms (typically 7 years from notarization).
• Audit logs: per your subscription plan — 90 days (Free) to 7 years (Enterprise).
• Billing and tax records: 7 years to satisfy tax and financial-reporting obligations.
• Marketing communications data: until you unsubscribe.

When you request account deletion, we cascade-delete your records across our data stores subject to the legal-retention requirements above.

8. Children's Privacy

The Service is intended for adults 18 years of age or older. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 18. If we become aware that we have collected information from a child under 18, we will delete it promptly. If you believe a child has provided us with information, contact us at [email protected].

9. International Users

Beneficiary.io operates in the United States. If you access the Service from outside the U.S., you understand that your information will be transferred to, stored in, and processed in the United States, which may have data-protection laws different from those of your country.

If you are a resident of the European Economic Area, United Kingdom, or Switzerland, we rely on Standard Contractual Clauses or equivalent legally recognized transfer mechanisms with sub-processors that store or process data on our behalf.

10. State-Specific Rights

California (CCPA / CPRA)

If you are a California resident:

• We do not sell your personal information, and we do not share it for cross-context behavioral advertising.
• We have collected, in the past 12 months, the following categories of personal information: identifiers (name, email, phone, address); customer records (financial account info via Plaid, billing info via Stripe); internet and network activity (IP, device, usage); commercial info (subscription history); and inferences (none).
• You have the right to: know, delete, correct, opt out of sale or sharing (not applicable here), and non-discrimination.
• To exercise: email [email protected].

Other states

Residents of Colorado, Connecticut, Virginia, Utah, and other states with analogous privacy laws have similar rights. We honor these rights as described above. Contact [email protected] to exercise them.

11. Cookies and Similar Technologies

We use a small number of cookies and similar storage technologies, all strictly necessary to operate the Service:

• Authentication tokens — to keep you signed in across sessions.
• CSRF / session-state cookies — for security.
• Local storage — to remember UI preferences (theme, sidebar state).

We do not currently use third-party advertising or cross-site tracking cookies. If we begin to use analytics cookies in the future, we will update this Policy and, where required, request your consent before setting them.

12. Changes to This Policy

We may update this Policy from time to time. The "Effective date" at the top of the Policy reflects the latest version. We will notify registered users by email of any material changes, and we will request renewed consent where required by law.

13. Contact Us

• Privacy inquiries: [email protected]
• Security reports: [email protected]
• General support: [email protected]
• Mailing: Beneficiary.io, c/o the founder, registered office on file with the Washington Secretary of State.