Branches Terms of Service

Effective date: 2026-09-22
Operator: Zahr LLC, 5806 Grove Ave, Richmond, Virginia 23226, United States
Contact: aminedzare@gmail.com

1. Using Branches

Branches is a private, invitation-based service for recording, exploring, and collaborating on family trees, memories, photos, and relationships. These Terms govern the Branches app and related services at branches.love (the “Service”). “Branches,” “we,” and “us” mean the operator identified above. At launch, the Service is offered to users in the United States.

By creating an account or using the Service after being presented with these Terms, you agree to them, including the limitations described below. If you do not agree, do not use the Service. Accounts are for people aged 13 and older; children under 13 may not create or use an account. If you are 13 or older but under the age of legal majority where you live, you must obtain a parent or legal guardian's permission where required by applicable law. Where the law requires us to obtain parental consent or take additional steps before providing access or processing information, those requirements must be met before the relevant access or processing occurs. Accepting these Terms does not substitute for any legally required parental consent.

Our Privacy Policy explains our data practices. Accepting these Terms does not waive your privacy rights or substitute for any separate consent required by law.

2. Family information and the limits of the app

Branches does not represent or warrant that any family record, relationship label, story, source, diagram, calculation, or other family information displayed in the Service is factual, verified, complete, current, or free from misleading implications. Information comes from users and from software that organizes their entries. Users may disagree, remember events differently, make mistakes, or provide incomplete or inaccurate information. Branches does not independently verify family accounts or resolve questions of biological, legal, or social parentage.

You understand and accept that the Service simplifies relationships and may represent them in ways that are reductive, incomplete, culturally inappropriate, or misleading in a particular context. A limited set of labels, connections, positions, and visual groupings cannot express the full complexity of a family, a person's identity, or a lived relationship. The model may omit or inadequately represent adoptive, step, foster, guardian, chosen-family, estranged, changing, or other relationships. Inclusion, omission, proximity, or a particular label does not establish or negate a person's family membership, identity, importance, or experience.

Kinship descriptions, ancestry views, and other derived results depend on the information entered and the software's assumptions. They are not DNA analysis, proof of ancestry, or an authoritative determination of kinship. A “confirmed,” “approved,” or similar status records an action within the app; it is not an independent certification of truth. Contribution points, rankings, and progress indicators measure activity under app rules, not accuracy or a person's value within a family.

Do not rely on the Service as an official record or as a basis for medical, genetic, legal, inheritance, citizenship, identity, or other consequential decisions. Verify relevant information independently using appropriate records or qualified professionals. Family material may also be sensitive or upsetting. Use the correction, change-request, and reporting tools, or contact us, when something needs attention.

These limitations do not permit users to knowingly post false, defamatory, or unlawful material. They do not excuse fraud or misleading commercial claims by Branches, or limit responsibilities and rights that applicable law does not allow us to exclude.

3. Accounts and family access

Keep your sign-in methods secure, use an email address you control, and tell us if you believe someone has accessed your account without permission. Do not impersonate someone, claim another person's profile without authority, or share access in a way that defeats the Service's permissions.

Family owners and administrators have different permissions to invite members, manage access, and review certain changes. Access to a family tree may change or be removed. A family owner can delete that family's tree. A family role does not give anyone ownership of another person's identity, privacy rights, or intellectual property.

Zahr LLC and its licensors retain their rights in the Branches software, interface, and branding. This does not give us ownership of family facts or your contributions. Subject to these Terms, you have limited, nonexclusive, nontransferable permission to use the Service for personal and family-history purposes. You may not sell or copy the software or branding except as allowed by us, applicable law, or an applicable open-source license. Any app-store software license and usage rules also apply; these Service Terms do not replace them. Access may end as described in section 6.

4. Your contributions and responsibilities

You retain whatever ownership rights you have in the content you submit. You give Branches a nonexclusive, worldwide, royalty-free license to host, store, copy, process, resize and format, display, and transmit that content solely as needed to operate and provide the Service, including sharing it according to the Service's permissions and your settings. We may allow our service providers to perform those functions on our behalf. This license does not authorize unrelated advertising uses or sale of your content.

The license lasts while we lawfully hold the content for those purposes, including any limited retention described in the Privacy Policy. It does not override a valid deletion request or another person's rights.

Only submit content you have the rights and lawful authority to share. Obtain permission where required, including for photos, private information, and information about children. Being related to someone does not automatically authorize you to disclose everything about them. Identify uncertainty and avoid presenting speculation as established fact. Do not upload identification documents, financial credentials, genetic test files, or other unnecessary sensitive records. Do not use Branches to record medical histories, diagnoses, treatment, reproductive-health details, or genetic-test results about living people. Do not post a child’s home address, school schedule, or real-time whereabouts.

Do not use the Service to harass, threaten, exploit, discriminate unlawfully, infringe intellectual property, expose private information unlawfully, or distribute illegal content. Do not bypass access restrictions, scrape private family data, introduce malicious code, or disrupt the Service.

We use basic text filtering and automated photo safety checks before sharing new uploads. A flagged photo may be withheld for operator review and removed if not approved within seven days. These checks can make mistakes; contact aminedzare@gmail.com to request review. Upload and service-wide usage limits may temporarily pause new uploads. A passed safety check is not a statement that content is factual, authorized, or suitable for every person.

5. Sharing, corrections, and reports

Family content is collaborative and may be visible to other authorized members. Some names and relationship connections remain visible when additional profile details are restricted. Other members may make permitted contributions or request changes. Authorized exports and screenshots can create copies outside Branches; changing a setting cannot recall those copies.

Use the in-app tools to propose corrections or report disputed material. You may also contact aminedzare@gmail.com, including if you do not have an account but information about you appears in the Service. Family-admin review is an internal collaboration process, not legal adjudication or independent fact checking. We may restrict access to or remove content while investigating reports or when reasonably necessary to protect people, comply with law, or enforce these Terms.

Source citations and other links may lead to websites or services operated by others. Including a link does not mean Branches has verified or endorsed its destination. Those services have their own terms and privacy practices. This does not remove our responsibilities for our own conduct or for the handling of information described in our Privacy Policy.

6. Account closure and deletion

You may stop using the Service at any time. Signing out, uninstalling the app, losing access to a family, and deleting an entire family tree are different from deleting your Branches account.

You can delete your account from the Families screen or family Settings after verification. You may transfer ownership of your trees to other active members first. Transfer is optional, but any trees you still own will be permanently deleted for all members when you confirm deletion.

Deletion removes your account, your cards and their connections, unclaimed cards you created and their attached content, and your contributions, including content you supplied about other relatives. Cards claimed by another account and content independently supplied by other members on surviving cards remain. Fields last supplied by you are cleared or replaced with neutral placeholders; earlier values are not restored. Owners and admins can view activity logs but cannot revert to older versions. Account deletion removes erased records' logs and strips content snapshots and your account identity from the remaining affected logs.

Invite recipients can use Erase invitation information in the app without creating an account. Entering a valid invitation code and confirming erasure permanently removes its unclaimed temporary card and associated content. An expired code can still authorize this erasure while the temporary card exists. Revoked codes cannot authorize erasure, and a claimed card must be addressed through verified account deletion or a privacy request. An invalid or already erased code returns an unavailable response without disclosing family details. This flow does not delete an account created while joining.

The web form is available at https://branches.love/erase. You may also send personal-data requests to aminedzare@gmail.com. Unclaimed temporary cards expire seven days after creation and are automatically queued for cleanup. The Privacy Policy explains verification, shared records, backup/provider retention, and requests concerning material supplied by others.

We may suspend or terminate access when reasonably necessary for security, unlawful activity, serious or repeated violations of these Terms, or closure of the Service. We will provide notice and an explanation when reasonably possible and legally permitted. Bans revoke existing sessions and may block new sign-ins until an expiry date or until lifted. You can contact aminedzare@gmail.com to appeal a restriction or request deletion even when you cannot sign in. Suspension does not extinguish your privacy rights.

7. Availability and warranties

To the extent permitted by law, the Service is provided “as is” and “as available,” without warranties of accuracy, completeness, fitness for a particular purpose, merchantability, or noninfringement. We do not guarantee uninterrupted availability, error-free operation, or that the Service will meet every family's needs. Keep independent copies of material important to you. These provisions do not exclude any mandatory consumer guarantees.

8. Limits on liability

To the extent permitted by law, Branches is not liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential, or punitive damages, or lost profits, arising from use of the Service, inaccurate family content, or reliance on its simplified representations.

Nothing in these Terms excludes or limits liability for fraud, intentional misconduct, gross negligence, death or personal injury caused by negligence, or any liability that cannot lawfully be excluded or limited. Nothing limits mandatory consumer remedies or remedies for unlawful handling of personal data. Where a limitation is not permitted, it applies only to the extent the law allows.

9. Changes and disputes

We may change the Service and these Terms. We will publish updated Terms with an effective date and give reasonable advance notice of material changes, unless an urgent legal or security reason requires otherwise. Where required, we will ask for renewed agreement. Changes do not retroactively remove accrued rights. You may stop using the Service if you do not accept revised Terms.

These Terms are governed by the laws of the Commonwealth of Virginia and applicable United States federal law, subject to mandatory protections available where you live. State and federal courts located in Richmond, Virginia may hear disputes where they have jurisdiction, without restricting any right you have to bring a claim in your local courts. These Terms do not require arbitration or waive class-action rights. You may contact us to seek an informal resolution, but doing so is not a condition of exercising legal rights.

If a provision is unenforceable, the remaining provisions continue to apply. These Terms govern use of the Service without replacing mandatory law or our Privacy Policy's description of personal-data handling.