Content policy

What kind of content belongs here

Next of Kin is designed to capture the personal, human knowledge that formal care systems were never built to hold. That means:

What belongs here:

• How someone communicates — their words, phrases, signals, and body language
• What makes a good day and what makes a hard one
• Who they love, who they've lost, who they light up around
• What brings them joy and what gives them purpose
• The things that carers consistently get wrong
• Routines, preferences, sensory needs, food, sleep
• Stories, memories, and the texture of a life

What doesn't need to be here:

• Medical records, clinical assessments, and care plans — these belong in formal systems and don't need to be duplicated here. If you want to upload them, you can, but they aren't the point.
• Legal documents — same principle. Useful as context, not the core.

You know better than we do what matters about the person you care for. Upload what you think a new carer would need to know.

How interviews are structured

The guided interviews in Next of Kin are designed around seven domains of knowledge that carers consistently say they need but formal assessments rarely provide:

1. First 24 hours — what every new carer must know before they start
2. Communication — how this person expresses themselves, what gets misread
3. Daily life — routines, food, sleep, what a good day looks like
4. Joy and purpose — what they love, what gives them energy
5. People and relationships — who matters, who they've lost, who they light up around
6. Health and body — the lived experience of their health, not the clinical record
7. Looking ahead — what the caregiver hopes for, what they're afraid of, what they want to say to whoever comes next

These domains were developed through our founding conversation with Evelyn Popper, who has cared for her son Ben for 38 years. They will be refined as we learn from more families.

Interview questions are open-ended and follow where the conversation goes. There are no right answers. The AI interviewer does not judge, summarise, or edit what is said — it captures it.

How we handle sensitive disclosures

Sometimes what a caregiver shares in an interview or uploads in a document will contain something difficult — evidence of harm, a safeguarding concern, something that suggests a person is at risk.

We are not a regulated safeguarding body. We do not have the legal authority or professional training to investigate or act on disclosures. But we take seriously our responsibility not to ignore them.

Our current position:

If you disclose historical harm in an interview or upload, that information is stored securely and treated with the same confidentiality as everything else in your profile. We do not report it unless required by law.

If you disclose an immediate or ongoing risk to the person being cared for, we ask you to contact the appropriate authority — in the US, Adult Protective Services; in the UK, your local safeguarding team. We will not act as an intermediary, but we will not discourage you from acting.

If something in the content you share causes us serious concern about an immediate risk, we reserve the right to contact the appropriate authority. This would be an exceptional last resort and we would tell you we had done so.

We know this is a sensitive area. We would rather be honest about our limits than overstate what we can do.

Content on the public Stories page

When someone shares their story via our Share Your Story form and gives permission for it to be published, it appears on our public Stories page at nextofkin.ai/stories.

We do not edit stories before publishing. We do not correct spelling, grammar, or presentation. What appears is what was written.

We do review stories before publishing to confirm they do not contain:

• Content that could identify a third party who has not given consent
• Content that makes specific accusations about a named individual
• Content that is defamatory or potentially harmful

If we decide not to publish a story, we will tell the person who submitted it and explain why.

Published stories can be removed at any time at the request of the person who submitted them. Write to hello@nextofkin.ai.

What we don't do with your content

• We do not read your profile or uploads unless you request technical support
• We do not train AI models on your content. When you use the chat or voice features, your content is processed by our AI providers (Anthropic and OpenAI) under strict data agreements — they do not use it for model training either.
• We do not share your content with third parties for any commercial purpose
• We do not use your content to generate statistics, case studies, or research reports without your explicit consent
• We do not publish anything from your profile without your permission

Changes to this policy

This policy is reviewed when we add new features that affect how content is handled, when our interview framework changes, or when we receive feedback that suggests clarification is needed. The review date at the top reflects when it was last checked.

Questions about this policy: hello@nextofkin.ai