Last updated: 8 August 2026
AncestorPass asks about your family history, which is personal by nature. This page explains exactly what happens to what you type, who else sees it, and how long it lasts — in plain English first, then in the detail the law expects.
AncestorPass is an educational citizenship-eligibility screening tool available at ancestorpass.com. In data protection terms, AncestorPass is the data controller for information processed through this website — meaning we decide what is collected and why, and we are accountable for it.
Everything on this page applies wherever you are using the site from. Where we refer to rights under the UK GDPR and the EU GDPR, we apply the same standards to everyone, whether or not the law where you live requires it.
You can reach us about anything on this page at privacy@ancestorpass.com. We aim to reply to any data protection request within 30 days.
The eligibility checker is a conversation. What you type — the country you're interested in, which relative your claim runs through, birth years, places, emigration and naturalisation dates, marriages, and which documents you already hold — is processed in order to apply the relevant citizenship rules and give you a result. This is the core of the service and there is no way to provide the result without it.
We ask you not to type full names, addresses, passport or document numbers, or national identifiers. The check does not need them and they do not improve your result. If you include them anyway, they are handled the same way as the rest of the conversation, but you are volunteering more than we asked for.
When you start an interview, your browser generates a random identifier (for example web-3f7a…) so that our server can keep your conversation separate from everyone else's. It is created fresh in your browser's memory each time, it is not stored on your device, it is not a cookie, and it is not linked to you as a person. Reloading the page or pressing Start over generates a new one and abandons the old conversation.
Like any website, ancestorpass.com is served by infrastructure that records ordinary technical request data — IP address, timestamp, the page requested, browser and operating system type, and referring page. This happens at the hosting and network layer, is used for delivering the site, security, and diagnosing faults, and is not combined with the content of your interview.
Paid purchases are handled entirely by Stripe. Card details are entered on Stripe's own checkout and never reach our servers — we cannot see your full card number at any point. We receive from Stripe only the confirmation that a payment succeeded, the amount, and a reference we use to attach the right plan to the right interview. Stripe processes your payment details as its own controller under its own privacy policy, and may hold billing information such as your name, email and country for its legal and anti-fraud obligations.
It is worth being explicit, because a lot of sites in this field do the opposite:
At the time of writing this site sets no cookies at all and loads no third-party scripts, so there is nothing to consent to and you will not see a cookie banner. The only script on the page is the site's own code, served from the same domain.
We intend to add Google Analytics so we can see which country guides people find useful. To be clear about the sequence: it is not installed today, and this section describes what will happen when it is. We will change the date at the top of this page when it goes live.
Google Analytics sets cookies and involves sending data to Google, so when we add it:
Until that banner appears on the site, nothing in this subsection is active, and the statement above stands: no cookies, no analytics, no third-party scripts. Once it is live you can change your mind at any time using cookie settings.
Some citizenship routes are built on facts that data protection law treats as special category data — information revealing religious belief, ethnic origin, or political opinion. German restoration claims under Article 116(2) of the Basic Law, for example, turn on an ancestor being stripped of citizenship on racial, religious or political grounds. Hungarian and Croatian routes can touch on ethnic origin.
We do not need this information to run a first-pass check, and the interviewer is instructed not to fish for it. Where a route genuinely depends on it, we will explain why we are asking. If you choose to tell us, you are giving your explicit consent for us to process it for the sole purpose of assessing your eligibility, and you can withdraw that consent at any time by ending the session, which discards the conversation. If you would rather not put it in writing at all, say so — we will tell you which route to investigate and point you to the relevant consulate instead.
We rely on the following legal bases, using the framework set out in the UK GDPR and EU GDPR:
| What | Legal basis |
|---|---|
| Running the free eligibility interview and producing a verdict and timeline | Consent. You choose to start the interview and choose what to type. Withdrawing is as simple as pressing Start over or closing the tab. |
| Any special category data you volunteer (religion, ethnic origin, persecution history) | Explicit consent under Article 9(2)(a). |
| Producing a paid Action Plan you have bought | Performance of a contract. |
| Keeping the site up, secure, and free of abuse; keeping short-lived error logs | Legitimate interests in operating a secure service. |
| Retaining payment and tax records | Legal obligation. |
We keep the list of third parties as short as the service allows:
| Who | What they do | What they see |
|---|---|---|
| Vercel | Hosts and serves the website | Technical request data such as IP address and timestamp. Not the content of your interview. |
| Our own n8n server (n8n.apps.joinwebzero.com) | Runs the interview logic and holds your conversation in memory during the session | The conversation, for the duration of the session. |
| Google (Gemini API) | Generates the interviewer's questions and your eligibility assessment | The conversation, sent to Google for processing each time you send a message. Google acts under its own API terms; it does not receive your IP address from us or any identifier that names you. |
| Stripe | Takes payment for the Action Plan | Your card and billing details, which go directly to Stripe and never to us. |
This table lists the providers in use today. When Google Analytics is added, as described in section 3, it will be added here too.
Because the interviewer's replies are generated by a large language model, your conversation is necessarily sent to Google to produce them. If you are not comfortable with that, the honest answer is not to use the interview — the country guides on this site set out the same rules in static form and can be read without sending us anything.
Some of these providers operate outside the UK and the European Economic Area, including in the United States. Where personal data is transferred outside the UK/EEA, it is done on the basis of the safeguards those providers offer, such as the UK International Data Transfer Addendum and the EU Standard Contractual Clauses, together with the providers' own certifications. You can ask us for details of the safeguards relied upon for any specific provider.
| Data | Retention |
|---|---|
| Your interview conversation | Held in memory for the duration of your session only. It is not written to a database on completion, and it is discarded when the session ends, when you press Start over, or when the session expires. |
| Your session identifier | Exists only in your browser's memory. Gone on reload. |
| Technical and server logs | Short-lived, retained by our hosting provider for operations and security in the ordinary course. |
| Error diagnostics | If a request fails, the failed run may be retained briefly so we can find and fix the fault, then removed. |
| Payment and transaction records | Retained by Stripe, and by us in summary form, for as long as tax and accounting law requires. |
Anything you download — your family timeline or your Action Plan — is saved to your own device and is yours. We do not keep a copy.
You have the right to access the personal data we hold about you, to have it corrected or erased, to restrict or object to our processing, to receive it in a portable form, and to withdraw consent at any time. These are guaranteed to users in the UK and the EEA by law, and we extend the same rights to everyone else who uses the site.
There is an honest practical wrinkle worth stating: because the checker has no accounts and we do not retain completed interviews, we usually hold nothing that identifies you and so have nothing to look up. The fastest and most complete way to exercise your right to erasure is simply to press Start over or close the tab, which discards the conversation immediately. If you have bought an Action Plan, email us from the address on your Stripe receipt and we can act on the transaction record.
You also have the right to complain to the data protection authority for the country you live in — for example the Information Commissioner's Office in the UK, or your national supervisory authority in the EEA. We would appreciate the chance to put things right first.
AncestorPass is intended for adults investigating their own eligibility and is not directed at children. We do not knowingly collect personal data from anyone under 16. If a parent or guardian is checking on behalf of a child, please describe the child by relationship rather than by name.
The site is served over HTTPS and all traffic between your browser, our server and our providers is encrypted in transit. Access to our infrastructure is restricted and credentials are held in a secrets store rather than in the website's code. No system is perfectly secure, which is the practical reason the interviewer keeps asking you to describe relatives by relationship: the most reliable protection for information is not to collect it in the first place.
If we change what we collect or who processes it, we will update this page and change the date at the top. Material changes to how the interview handles your information will be flagged on the homepage.
Questions, requests, or concerns about anything on this page: privacy@ancestorpass.com.
Guides: Irish citizenship · Italian citizenship · German citizenship · Polish citizenship · Slovak citizenship · Czech citizenship · Croatian citizenship · Hungarian citizenship · Portuguese citizenship · Swedish citizenship · Norwegian citizenship
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AncestorPass provides educational information about citizenship eligibility, not legal advice. Citizenship rules change and individual circumstances matter — always confirm your case with the relevant consulate or a citizenship lawyer.