Privacy at youlink.ai

youlink.ai is a private home for one family. Here is what that means.

• You own it. Your family's posts, photos and messages belong to your family.
• It runs on your own server. It sits in your family's own cloud account, and your family's owner controls it.
• Nobody else holds your family's things. Not us, and not an ad company.
• An agent looks after it. It checks your server every 15 minutes, fixes common problems, backs up every night and tells you in the app.
• You decide who is in. You and your admins decide who joins and what each person can see and use.

Starting on our starter server instead? Then we run the server for your family, and the detail below says what that means.

The rest of this page is the honest detail. Last updated 28 October 2026. If this page changes, this date changes too.

This website

• youlink.ai sets no cookies, runs no analytics or tracking and shows no ads. Its fonts and scripts come from youlink.ai itself, never from other sites.
• If you press the light or dark button, your choice is kept in your own browser so the next page matches. It is not a cookie and it is never sent anywhere.
• The site is hosted by Vercel. Like any web host, Vercel receives your device's IP address and the address of the page you asked for, so it can send the page to you, and it may keep short technical logs. We add no tracking of our own.
• An invite link (youlink.ai/join/...) is read in your browser. An ordinary invite link sends nothing anywhere. A link that carries a personal invitation sends that invitation code to the family's own server named in the link, only to show who invited you.
• The "Send to ChatGPT" and "Send to Claude" buttons open those services in a new tab with a prompt already typed in. youlink.ai sends them nothing. What you do there is covered by their own privacy policies.

Where your family's things live

• Each family network runs on a server the family chose. Profiles, posts, comments, likes, photos, videos and messages are kept there, not on this website.
• Your family's own server. It runs in the family's own cloud account (our set-up tool uses Google Cloud, in London unless the owner picks another region). The family's owner controls it. We have no access to it. Google keeps the server's disks and storage for the family, as any cloud host does.
• The youlink.ai starter server. A family can also start on a server we run, on Google Cloud in London (the europe-west2 region). Many small families share it, and each family's posts and members are shown only to that family. Because we run this server, we are in the place an owner is on their own server: whatever the server can read, set out below, we could read.
• Backups. Servers back up every night. On your own server the owner holds the backups.
• Other servers. By default a family's server talks only to itself, so people on other servers cannot message or invite your family. The owner can allow another family's server.

Who can see what

• Posts, photos and videos in the family feed are shown only to your family. Chats are shown only to the people in them.
• The server knows who is in which chat, and when messages are sent. On youlink that sits on your family's own server, not with a big company.
• Photos, videos, captions, comments and likes in the family feed can be read by the family's server, because it makes the sizes and previews that let videos play smoothly. They are shown only to your family, but whoever runs the server could see them: on your own server that is your owner, and on the starter server it is us.
• Feed videos play from long, random web addresses that only your family is given. Like any private link, someone who is handed that address could watch the video.

The agent that looks after your server

• Every 15 minutes it checks that the server's parts are working. When a check fails, it tries a fix from a fixed list. It takes a snapshot first, checks that the fix worked, and puts things back if it did not.
• A fix that keeps failing stops, and the app says it needs a person.
• The owner and admins see all of this in the app: open Me, then Server health. It shows how the server is doing, the fixes it made by itself, its nightly backups, and anything that needs you.
• The checks and fixes are plain, tested code. If the owner adds an Anthropic key, AI can suggest a cause for a problem the checks do not know, but it never acts by itself. Only the name of the failed check and its error message are sent, never your family's posts or messages.

No ads, no selling, no training

There are no ads, no tracking and no algorithm deciding what your family sees. We never sell your data or share it for advertising, and we never use your family's posts, messages or photos to train AI.

AI features

• AI is off unless your family's owner switches it on, first when the server is set up and then in the app. The owner chooses who may use it and how much. Children never get it unless the owner switches it on for that child.
• The owner chooses where the AI comes from: Google's Vertex AI (Model Garden: Gemini for text, Imagen for pictures) in the family's own Google Cloud project, or the owner's own keys for OpenAI, Anthropic or Google Gemini. That provider receives the request and handles it under its own terms.
• What is sent is only what the person, or their agent, asks for: the words of the request (and the conversation so far, if they include it), or the description of a picture. The server does not add your feed or your chats. It does not store or log the request or the answer. It counts how many requests each person made, never what they said.
• The provider may handle a request outside the UK. Our set-up tool's default region for Vertex AI is in the United States (us-central1) unless the owner picks another.
• Nothing AI makes is published by itself. A picture it makes is saved as a draft until the person approves it.

Push notifications

If the family's server has push notifications switched on, Apple delivers them to iPhones. A notification carries no message text, no post text, no picture and no preview: at most a short line such as "Something new in your family" or "New message from Ava", and codes that identify the chat or post. Apple and the family's push relay can see that something arrived, and who from if the line names them, but not what it said.

OpenClaw agents

• An OpenClaw agent joins your family as a member everyone can see. It reads only what is shared with it: the rooms it has been let into, such as the family feed, and its chats with the person it works for.
• A member's own agent sees that person's chats and the family feed, never anyone else's private messages. Member agents are off by default. The owner switches them on one person at a time and can switch them off again. They are not offered on the starter server.
• Everything an agent makes waits as a draft until a person approves it.
• An agent thinks with an AI model chosen by whoever runs it, so what it reads may be sent to that model's provider. Only let in agents you trust.

Children

The owner or an admin marks who in the family is a child. For a child, AI and the in-app browser for other social networks are off, and only the owner can switch either on for that child.

Getting your data out, and deleting it

• There is no button in the app yet to download everything or to delete your account. We will add both and update this page.
• What you can do today: delete your own posts, leave a family network, and sign out on a phone.
• Accounts live on the family's server, so the person who runs it deletes them: ask your family's owner. On their own server the owner holds everything, including the backups, and can export or delete it.
• On the starter server, write to us at the address below and ask.
• When a post is deleted, its files are removed from storage within about an hour. Nightly database backups are kept for 35 days and then deleted, and disk snapshots for 14 days.
• A family network is built on Matrix, an open standard, so it is never locked in to us.

Questions

• Privacy questions: [privacy email address, to be added by the owner]
• If your family runs its own server, your family's owner is the person who holds your data, so ask them first.
• Security problems: please report them privately, through GitHub's private vulnerability reporting on the youlink-ai repositories, not in a public issue.