1 Private by design

No public profiles, no sharing buttons, no search engines that can find us. The Vault runs on a dedicated server in Joe's office — a Mac Mini we call Deep Thought — not in someone else's cloud. Face recognition and the knowledge graph run locally on that same machine. Nothing family-private ever leaves this office.

Voice input is turned off. The Vault does not listen. Speaking to Fergi AI would have sent your recording to an outside transcription service, so that feature is switched off at the server for this release — not merely hidden. Type to Fergi AI instead.

Every family member gets their own account, reached by a private invitation link that belongs to you alone. Nobody outside the family has access at all right now — the guest and visitor lane is switched off at the server for this release. If that changes, it will be by a named, time-bounded invitation, scoped to one story.

2 Bringing public material inward is not a privacy issue

Many Fergusons have a public presence — books, podcast appearances, practice listings, news mentions, academic pages. Those materials are already visible to anyone who searches. The Vault simply gathers what's already public so the family's story isn't told without you, in someone else's words.

Nothing is revealed that wasn't already there. It is existing public information, organized so the Vault can speak accurately about each family member — and always with the source cited, so you can see exactly where every claim came from.

3 Sharing Vault material outward would be — and we do not do that

Public in, private out. Your private material in the Vault — photos, home videos, letters, transcribed conversations, AI-written biographies — never flows outward. No export to social media. No automatic posting. No indexing for public search engines.

Today there is exactly one way anything leaves the Vault: you download it yourself, deliberately, and the Vault records that you did. Guest and demonstration passes are switched off for this release, so no one outside the family can be handed a link at all.

4 Cited sources · per-member exclusion · minors opt in

Every claim is cited. Every sentence in your biography, every fact surfaced by Fergi AI when asked what the Vault knows about you, carries its source. You can click any citation to see the exact source URL, fetch date, and text.

Per-member exclusion. If you'd rather the Vault not draw from a particular website or domain, add it to your exclusion list — the orchestrator skips that domain at fetch time.

Minors opt in only. No Internet enrichment happens for any family member under 18 unless a parent or guardian explicitly opts in on their behalf. The default for minors is enforced in the orchestrator, not just the UI.