Safety & Community Rules

1. The standard, in three layers

• Everywhere on Storyus - including private stories - the baseline in section 2 applies. There is no privacy level at which prohibited content is acceptable.
• Inside your collective, its owners and admins set and enforce the tone above that baseline - they know their family. A collective of grown-ups can keep the rude birthday card; one full of young children will hold itself to more.
• In public (and anything guests can see), the full family standard applies regardless of your collective's own tone: nothing you wouldn't show a visiting grandparent and a young child together. Public stories sit on the open, indexable internet - hold them to it.

2. Never on Storyus

These are removed wherever they appear, at any privacy level.

Illegal content - removed swiftly once we're aware of it, evidence preserved, and reported to the authorities where the law requires:

• child sexual exploitation or abuse material, and grooming behaviour;
• intimate images shared without consent;
• terrorism, or the encouragement of serious violence;
• credible threats, criminal harassment, or stirring up hatred;
• fraud, scams and impersonation;
• encouraging suicide or serious self-harm;
• anything else unlawful in the UK.

Also banned here, even where the law might allow it:

• pornography and sexually explicit content;
• gratuitously graphic violence or gore (documentary family history - a grandfather's war photographs - is legitimate at collective level; shock content is not);
• hate material - content promoting hatred of people for who they are;
• content promoting dangerous stunts or challenges, or glamourising self-harm or eating disorders.

3. Family photographs

Everyday photographs of family life - children included - are what Storyus is for. And we recognise that many family albums hold entirely innocent photographs that happen to include a child's nudity: the toddler in the bath, the baby on the beach. There is nothing wrong with those moments, or those photographs. But we are unable to host them - protecting every child on the platform means we can't put ourselves in the position of judging such images one by one, so photographs of unclothed children can't be uploaded to Storyus at any privacy level, private included. Keep them safe in your own family archive, and tell the bath-time story here with the towel-on photo.

If one is uploaded, we'll simply remove it - no blame attached. More broadly, because children's images deserve more protection than anyone's, we keep an unrestricted right to remove or restrict any image of a child, at any privacy level, where we reasonably judge it necessary - and to preserve evidence and report to the authorities where a child's safety or the law requires. We will always err on the side of the child.

Anything that sexualises a child is illegal, full stop: it is removed, preserved as evidence, and reported to the authorities.

4. Junior Mode

Children under 13 don't hold Storyus accounts. Instead, a guardian can hand a child a device in Junior Mode: a supervised, PIN-locked state in which the child reads their family's archive and tells stories under their own byline (terms, section 3). The mode is deliberately narrow:

• the child sees only the collectives where they are a junior author - private stories, drafts, settings and admin surfaces stay hidden, along with anything a guardian has flagged as hidden from Junior Mode;
• posts made in Junior Mode reach the family collective or stay private, and a junior-bylined story cannot be made public;
• story forms built on location data (journeys, told on maps from photo locations) and externally hosted video are not available in Junior Mode - so the mode never assembles a map of a child's whereabouts, and a child is never handed off to an outside video platform.

The guardian remains responsible for what happens on a handed-over device, and taking it back requires their PIN. If you come across anything on Storyus that puts a child at risk, report it (section 6) - reports about children are prioritised.

5. Real stories, real photographs

Storyus is an authentic record - family history told by the family that lived it. Content here should be human-made: write your own words, upload photographs of real moments. AI-generated stories, images or "photographs" don't belong on Storyus.

Tools that help real stories get told are welcome: spelling and grammar help, speech-to-text and transcription, translation, accessibility tools, the restoration and enhancement of old photographs, and ordinary post-production on real ones (blurring a background, tidying an object out of a picture). What's not welcome is content substantially generated by AI and presented as a genuine family memory. The line is simple: a story should be told by a person, and a photograph should be of something that actually happened.

6. Reports, and what happens to them

Report anything that shouldn't be here at storyus.life/report (or email [email protected]). You don't need an account, and you can report anonymously. A person reads every report; reports of illegal content or harm to children are prioritised.

Depending on what we find, we may: remove content; restrict its visibility (for example, take it out of public); warn the person who posted it; suspend or close accounts; and, where the law requires, preserve evidence and report to the authorities. We don't review content before it appears - see the terms, section 7 - so reports are how most things reach us, and we act on them swiftly.

7. If you think we got it wrong

If we act on something you posted, or decline to act on something you reported, you can ask us to look again: reply to the message we sent you, or email [email protected]. A human re-reads the decision - not the person who made it, wherever our size allows.

8. Emergencies

This site is not staffed around the clock. If someone is in immediate danger, contact the police (999 in the UK) before reporting anything to us. For concerns about online child sexual abuse you can also report directly to CEOP (ceop.police.uk).

9. Who's responsible for what

The person who uploads content is responsible for it (terms, sections 5 and 7). A collective's owners and admins administer their own family space and its tone. Storyus enforces the baseline in section 2, the public standard in section 1, and its legal duties as a UK service - including the duty to report child sexual abuse content to the authorities.

Addendum: safety by design - what Storyus deliberately isn't

Much of how Storyus keeps families safe isn't a rule on this page - it's what the product doesn't have. These are design facts, and they're worth stating plainly:

• Storyus is a family archive, not a social network. Its purpose is record-keeping: stories, albums, journeys and magazines, built to be kept and inherited. The interaction here is co-authoring an archive and reading it.
• No comments, no likes, no reactions, no direct messages, no follower counts - anywhere in the product.
• Closed by construction. Collectives are invitation-only. There is no directory, no people-discovery, no friend-finding, and no way for a stranger to contact anyone. You share only with the people your collective's owner admitted.
• No algorithms deciding what you see. Feeds are chronological; magazines follow rules your family writes. There is no recommendation system and no engagement optimisation - nothing is tuned to keep anyone scrolling.
• Paid for honestly. No advertising and no data sale means no commercial interest in maximising anyone's time on the platform - least of all a child's.
• Children are inside the walls, not on the platform. There are no under-13 accounts. A junior author reads only what the family's privacy levels and their guardians permit, posts only into guardian-controlled family collectives, and is never published to the open internet (section 4).

If any of this ever changed, this page would change with it - and material changes to these rules follow the terms' change process (terms, section 12).