Effective date: August 7, 2026 · Last updated: August 7, 2026
1. Security commitments
- HTTPS / TLS for data in transit between your browser and our services
- Cloud database hosting with access controls and role-scoped APIs
- Admin and invite secrets stored hashed where applicable (not as plain text)
- Separate portals for Personal Representative, family, helpers, advisors, and public sale — one role’s session should not unlock another’s portal
- Important PR and operator actions recorded in activity / audit histories
- Photo and evidence provenance controls intended to preserve capture attribution
No online service is perfectly secure. Protect your devices, email inbox, and PINs. Use unique PINs for helpers and heirs. Rotate the admin PIN if it may have been exposed.
2. What we ask you not to store
Estate Vault does not require Social Security numbers, full bank account or routing numbers, or bank login credentials. Prefer references and attachments you intentionally choose to keep with the estate record. Do not paste unrelated secrets into notes.
3. Record states
Open. Authorized roles may perform normal work. Key inventory, scene, settings, finance, access, and operator changes are recorded in histories.
Closed for records. The estate remains visible and exportable, but the system rejects inventory, finance, settings, family/helper, and auction writes. Closing does not hide or delete data. The Personal Representative may reopen with a written reason; close/reopen events remain in the record.
Hidden (operators). Platform operators may hide an estate from normal listings while keeping live data. Hiding is reversible and is not deletion.
Permanent deletion. Hard delete is reserved for explicitly confirmed test data or narrowly controlled operator processes. Before such deletion, sealed archive / operator-audit steps may apply. Shared authentication identities used outside Estate Vault are not deleted by Estate Vault alone.
4. Retention guidance
- Keep live estate records for the duration of administration and any required objection, tax, or litigation period.
- After an estate is closed, we intend to retain sealed archives and operator-audit records for at least seven (7) years, unless counsel or law requires longer or a lawful deletion request applies.
- There is no automatic hard-delete timer on customer estates. Retention remains deliberate.
- Court evidence packs are point-in-time copies. Keep printable and machine-readable exports together when you need to show exactly what was exported.
- Do not delete source photos merely because a PDF was generated.
Billing lapse pauses access; it does not by itself permanently erase estate content.
5. Backups
We maintain operational backups appropriate to our hosting stack. Restoration drills are performed carefully and are not run against live customer data in place. Backup copies may lag live edits and exist for disaster recovery.
6. Your responsibilities
- Choose strong, private PINs and limit who receives them
- Review invited users and portal tile / finance disclosure settings
- Export and preserve copies counsel requires outside the Service
- Cancel billing when an estate no longer needs paid access
7. Incident response
If we become aware of a security incident that affects your estate data, we will take steps to investigate, contain, and notify affected Personal Representatives as required by applicable law and as practicable given the facts.