GivePeace Death Verification & Posthumous Release Policy

Version 1.0 — Effective October 3, 2026

This policy is part of the GivePeace Terms of Service between you and Give Peace Inc., a Delaware corporation ("GivePeace," "we," "us"). It is the complete, honest description of the one thing you are trusting us with most: how we decide that a member has passed away, and how their messages are then released to the people they chose.

We wrote this in plain language on purpose. GivePeace talks about death plainly because plainness here is kindness — nothing about this process should be hidden in vague wording. We wrote it to be understood without help, and the app explains the steps that happen there as they happen.

1. What This Policy Covers, and the Words It Uses

1.1 Scope. This policy describes the entire verification and release machine: how the process can begin, the waiting periods it must pass through, how death certificates are handled, the final notice we send before anything is ever released, what release actually does, and what happens if the process is ever started about a living person. Section 5 of the Terms of Service summarizes this process; this policy is the full account.

1.2 The words we use. These words mean the same thing here as everywhere on GivePeace:

(a) Member (or "you"): the account holder — the person who records messages and sets up their delivery. (b) Trustee: a person a member appoints for death notification and confirmation only. Section 2 explains the limits of this role. (c) Recipient: the person a member chooses to receive a specific message. (d) Armed message: a recorded message set to be released after the member passes away. (e) Release: our delivery process after death verification completes, including the 48-hour final call. (f) Claim: the act of a recipient retrieving a message left for them.

1.3 The principle behind everything. One rule shapes every step described below: releasing a living person's messages by mistake is the worst thing this Service could ever do — worse than any delay, worse than a delivery that comes months late. Every waiting period, every check-in, every human review exists because of that rule. Where we must choose between delivering quickly and being sure, we choose being sure. Delays are not a malfunction; they are the design.

2. How Verification Can Begin

2.1 Three ways in, and only three. A death verification process can begin in three ways: a trustee reports that you have passed away; your optional inactivity switch, if you armed it, runs its full course without a word from you; or a trustee uploads a death certificate. For everyone outside GivePeace, there is no other door. And none of these doors leads directly to release — each runs through the waiting periods in Section 3 and the final call in Section 5.

2.2 Trustee reports. A trustee is a person you chose, who is at least 18, and who took the role on knowingly. Naming someone gives them no authority by itself: a person becomes your trustee either by receiving our invitation, opening their unique link, and explicitly accepting, or — where a name and phone number you entered match an existing account — by your own confirmation of the automatic link we make. There is one more way in, and it belongs to members under 18: if you are 13 to 17 and you ask a parent or guardian to give consent so you can arm your messages, that parent becomes the trustee of your plan at the moment they verify themselves and consent, with no separate invitation. They can see that your plan exists and what state it is in; like every trustee, they can never see your recipients or your words (Section 2.3 states the one exception). The parent or guardian who gave that consent can withdraw it at any time, which turns your armed messages back into private drafts, and at 18 the plan becomes fully yours. A person who merely shares the email address or phone number you entered never automatically becomes your trustee, and an auto-linked trustee has no authority of any kind until you yourself confirm them. Invitations expire if they are not accepted, and declining is reversible while the invitation lasts; the Trustee & Recipient Terms state the period.

2.3 What a trustee is not. A trustee's only role is to tell us a person has passed away, and to confirm or contest what others have reported. A trustee is not a fiduciary, does not hold or inherit anything, and can never see who a member's recipients are, which messages exist, or what any message says, except the name of a person claiming a message, when we ask that member's primary trustee — the first trustee they named, unless they have chosen another — to approve that claim.

2.4 The inactivity switch. You may choose to arm an inactivity switch. If you do, and we then see no activity from you for approximately six months, we begin asking you directly — by push notification and email, and by text message if you have a verified phone number (see the SMS & Communications Terms) — to confirm you are alive. If you do not respond, a 60-day countdown begins. The switch is optional: it does nothing unless you arm it. One limit is deliberate, and we would rather tell you here than surprise you in the app: while you have messages waiting to be delivered, you cannot switch it off — that heartbeat is the only automatic check that would notice you had passed away before those messages went out. If you want it off, set those messages aside first. Setting a message aside keeps it exactly as it is, simply no longer waiting, and you can bring it back whenever you want; you never have to delete a goodbye to turn off a setting. If you deactivate your account you may still choose to pause the switch, once your phone has confirmed it is you. Choosing not to receive text messages is never treated as a sign that you have passed away; only your silence across every channel, and only if you armed the switch, moves this path forward.

2.5 Death certificates. A certificate can start a file about a reported death, but a certificate alone never completes verification and never accelerates release. Section 4 explains why, and exactly how certificates are handled.

2.6 If nothing begins it. If you named no trustees, never armed the inactivity switch, and no one uploads a certificate, the process may never start. That is a real limit of the Service, stated here because you deserve to plan around it: you are responsible for setting up the triggers that fit your life and for telling your trustees what you expect of them.

3. The Waiting Periods

3.1 Nothing releases instantly. There is no path through GivePeace by which your messages release the moment someone says you have passed away. Every report opens a waiting period. We call these deny windows, because their purpose is to give a living person every chance to deny the report.

3.2 How the windows work. The first trustee report opens a 60-day window. If a second trustee independently confirms, the window shortens to 30 days. If a third trustee independently confirms, it shortens to 14 days. Independence matters: these shorter trustee timelines exist only where multiple people, each with their own accepted trustee role, separately agree. (Section 4 describes the one other accelerant — a corroborated death certificate.)

3.3 A single trustee's word alone can never get past 30 days. If you have only one active trustee, that person's reports and confirmations can never shorten the waiting period below 30 days — no matter how many times they confirm. A reviewed death certificate changes this only under the corroboration rules in Section 4, and for a single-trustee account the only corroborating signal is your own inactivity countdown already running. One person's word is never a fast key to your messages.

3.4 The inactivity backstop. On the inactivity path alone — no trustee reports, no corroborated death certificate — release cannot occur earlier than 240 days from the last time we saw any activity from you.

3.5 You can stop everything, at every moment. Throughout every window, one confirmation from you that you are alive cancels the entire process and resets it completely. During the windows we keep checking in with you rather than waiting silently. And your account remains fully yours the whole time: while you are alive you can change or delete your messages, your recipients, and your trustees at every moment — including while a report about you is pending, during any waiting period, and during the 48-hour final call. No stage of this process ever locks a living member out of their own choices.

4. Death Certificates

4.1 Who can upload one. Only your trustees can upload a death certificate. Recipients cannot, and no one else outside GivePeace can either.

4.2 What we ask for. We ask for the standard certified copy that states the fact of death. We do not want, and do not ask for, the confidential version that lists cause of death — verifying that someone has passed away never requires knowing how. If a copy that includes cause-of-death information is uploaded anyway, we do not use that information in verification; we treat those portions as extra-sensitive and may redact or delete them, as our Consumer Health Data Privacy Policy describes.

4.3 A person reviews it. No machine decides. Every certificate is reviewed by a person on our team. No automated system and no AI reads, scans, or approves a certificate, and no algorithm ever decides on its own that you have passed away from a document. Certificates are stored apart from your messages in a restricted area; access to view one is limited and expires within minutes of being granted. How long certificates are kept is set out in our Privacy Policy.

4.4 A certificate alone never accelerates release. This is a deliberate policy, and we want you to understand the reasoning. In an era of cheap, convincing fakes, a death certificate is trivially forgeable — so a document alone is not proof enough to move your messages one day closer to release. A reviewed certificate accelerates the process only when independent signals already corroborate it: either your inactivity check-in countdown was already running, or at least two distinct trustees have independently reported your death. Where that corroboration exists, an approved certificate moves the process directly to the 48-hour final call described in Section 5. A certificate that is reviewed and approved but not corroborated is recorded, and it waits. It does not release anything, and it does not shorten anything.

4.5 You are told immediately. The moment anyone uploads a death certificate about you, we notify you — before we have even reviewed it. If you are alive to see that notice, one confirmation ends the matter.

4.6 What we never use. We do not check government death registries or death-index databases. We do not use health data, wearable devices, or medical records in verification, and we will not bolt them onto it — that is a promise about the sources we draw on (no medical records, no wearable or device health data, and no death registries or health databases), not a claim that your own proof-of-life responses fall outside the consumer-health-data laws; our Consumer Health Data Privacy Policy governs those. Verification rests on the signals described in this policy — people you chose, your own responsiveness, and human-reviewed documents — described here without exaggeration: they are strong, they are deliberately slow, and none of them is infallible.

5. The 48-Hour Final Call

5.1 Before every release, on every path in this policy. When any waiting period ends — trustee path or inactivity path, corroborated certificate or none — we still do not release your messages. First we send a final notice to every contact channel we have for you, by push notification and email, and by text message if you have a verified phone number (see the SMS & Communications Terms): your messages will be released in 48 hours unless you respond. Only if that window passes without a word from you do we deliver.

5.2 "I'm alive" always wins. At every stage — first report, mid-window, final call — your confirmation that you are alive cancels the entire process. You can give it from the link in any notice we send you, or from the banner that appears in the app whenever any countdown about you is running, including one a trustee started. Because that single tap is what stands between you and a release, your phone checks that it is really you first. If your phone cannot make that check, we accept your confirmation anyway. If you decline it, we tell you plainly that your check-in was not registered, and you can try again. And we check your alive status one last time at the very moment of release, so a confirmation from you can never lose a race against a scheduled delivery.

5.3 Our messages to you are never marketing. Our text messages are transactional only — codes, life-check confirmations, safety alerts about your account, and message-delivery notices. We do not send marketing texts, and messages sent when someone passes away never contain anything promotional.

5.4 Every emergency control works in one direction. Any pause, hold, or emergency stop built into the release pipeline can only defer a release — none of these controls can shorten a waiting period or skip the final call. And if our systems are interrupted mid-process, recovery never skips a check: a delivery resumes only where it had already cleared every check its path required — an interruption is never a shortcut.

6. Delays Are the Design

6.1 The asymmetry, stated plainly. A message delivered late is a wound; a living person's private words released to their family by mistake is a catastrophe — for them, and for every person who receives a false goodbye. We have built this process to make the second outcome as close to impossible as we can, and the price of that protection is time.

6.2 What this means honestly. Because we choose certainty over speed, this process can be slow, it can produce false negatives — failing to recognize a real death for a long time — and in some circumstances it may never conclude at all. We do not guarantee that death will be detected, or that verification will complete within any particular time after you pass away. By using GivePeace you acknowledge and accept this asymmetry: it is the foundation of the promise we make you, not a defect in it.

7. What Release Actually Does

7.1 Delivery to your designated recipients, and no one else. Release means one thing: the messages you armed are delivered to the recipients you designated for them, exactly as recorded in your Digital Legacy Designation Agreement. Release does not give anyone your account, does not publish anything you kept private, and does not deliver any message to a person you did not name.

7.2 Recipients prove who they are. Before a message unseals, we check that the person claiming it is the person you named, matching their identity against the details you gave us. When our checks cannot confidently match a claimant, the message unseals only if your primary trustee approves the claim. A claimant can never approve their own claim, and every approval is recorded.

7.3 Recipients of any age. A recipient under 18 — including a child under 13 — can always receive and view a message left for them. Receiving a loved one's words is never age-gated.

7.4 Release is quiet. Verification is not an announcement. When we confirm a death, nothing public happens: no memorial appears, no feed post is made, and your death status is not shown to anyone. Your family controls when and whether a memorial becomes visible; it appears only at their visibility step, never automatically because verification completed. Delivery itself is private — a recipient learns a message was left for them, your trustees are told only that the process has completed, and no one else is told anything.

7.5 Why release to your recipients is lawful. Federal law restricts when a service like ours may disclose the contents of stored communications. Delivering your message to the recipient you named rests on two of that law's exceptions at once: the recipient you designated is the message's intended recipient, and your Digital Legacy Designation Agreement records your consent, as the message's originator, to that disclosure (18 U.S.C. § 2702(b)(1), (b)(3)).

7.6 Everyone else goes through legal process. Requests from anyone other than a designated recipient — an executor, an estate lawyer, a family member, a court — are governed by our Legal Process & Estate Requests Policy. Your recorded designations, including any direction not to disclose, are the controlling record in that process.

7.7 Time capsules are a separate thing, and they do not wait for any of this. Not every message on GivePeace is armed for death. A time capsule is a message you schedule for a date you choose, and it arrives on that date. The process in this policy never touches it: the release pipeline cannot see a capsule and cannot send one, and no waiting period and no 48-hour final call applies to it. That cuts both ways, and you should know it before you schedule one — a capsule still arrives on its date even if you have passed away by then. The date is the only trigger; a capsule is never set to send "when I die." One thing does override that rule, and it is not death: while your account is deactivated, suspended, or inside a deletion grace period, a capsule that comes due is held rather than delivered — it goes out late if your account comes back, and if the deletion becomes permanent it is deleted with everything else and is never delivered (Terms of Service, Section 13.7).

7.8 Changing, cancelling, and stopping a capsule. For a short period after you seal a capsule you can still change it, as Section 5.10 of the Terms of Service describes, and you can cancel it in the app at any time while you are alive. After you pass away, your family or the representative of your estate can ask us to stop a capsule that has not yet been delivered, by writing to support@givepeace.co with the subject "Attn: Legal." We verify the death and their relationship to you before we act, and we record who asked and why; our Legal Process & Estate Requests Policy governs that request, in its Section 15.1.

8. Delivery Is Never Guaranteed

8.1 We work hard to deliver every message, and we cannot promise delivery or delivery timing. Delivery can fail or be delayed for reasons that include: no trustees were named and the inactivity switch was never armed (the process may never start); a trustee is unreachable or declines to act; a recipient has opted out of text messages; an email address or phone number has been deactivated, reassigned, or has stopped working; a private-relay email address stops forwarding; phone carriers or platforms fail to deliver a message (carriers are not liable for delayed or undelivered messages); a message is not claimed; or the service winds down under the commitments described in our Terms of Service. Delays are part of the design: we wait and re-check before releasing anything, because releasing a living person's messages by mistake is the one failure we refuse to risk.

8.2 What you can do about it. The strongest deliveries are the ones members set up well: name more than one trustee, tell them what you expect, keep your own contact details current, and keep your recipients' contact details current as their lives change. We will do our part with everything we have; the setup is yours.

9. Encryption, and Who Can Access Your Messages

9.1 Your videos and messages are encrypted in transit and at rest. Each account has its own encryption key, protected by a hardware-backed key management service, and every video is sealed with authenticated AES-256 encryption derived from that key, with an additional layer of server-side encryption on our storage. GivePeace holds and controls these keys — that is what makes it possible for us to deliver your messages after you pass away. It also means GivePeace is technically able to access encrypted messages, and can be required to produce them in response to valid legal process. GivePeace is not end-to-end encrypted.

9.2 Sealed messages are not reviewed. Your sealed private messages are not reviewed or accessed by our moderation processes. Access happens only where the law requires, as described in our Legal Process & Estate Requests Policy.

10. This Is Not a Will

10.1 Not a legal will, trust, or testamentary instrument. In the app we sometimes call your collection of sealed messages your "will." That word is used in its everyday, heartfelt sense — the things you want said and done — not its legal sense. GivePeace messages are not a legal will, a trust, or any other testamentary instrument. They do not dispose of property, appoint guardians, or override any legal document.

10.2 Messages cannot transfer property. A message that says "I leave my ring to Sarah" delivers your words to Sarah; it does not deliver the ring. Property passes under your legal will, your trust, or the law of your state — never under a GivePeace message. Please do not use your messages to try to make gifts or bequests: it will not work, and it can create painful false expectations for the people you love. If you want a legal will, see an attorney or a service built for that. We would genuinely rather you have both.

10.3 The Digital Legacy Designation Agreement is the controlling record. Who receives which message, and who serves as your trustee, is recorded in your Digital Legacy Designation Agreement — a separate agreement with its own acceptance, distinct from the Terms of Service. That agreement is the authoritative record of your directions, and you can modify or delete any direction in it at all times while you are alive, as Section 3.5 of this policy describes. Nothing in the Terms of Service or in this policy overrides a designation you recorded there. If you never designated a recipient for a message, that message is not delivered to anyone.

11. If You Are Wrongly Reported

11.1 One confirmation ends it, while the process is still running. If someone reports your death while you are alive, one confirmation from you that you are alive cancels the entire process — from the banner in the app, or from the link in any notice we send you. The report is discarded and the process resets completely — nothing carries over, and any later report starts again from the beginning, with a fresh full waiting period. There is one place where a tap is deliberately not enough: once we have actually recorded a death, the confirm is refused, because the person holding your phone might not be you. Section 11.5 is the road back from there, and it starts in the app too.

11.2 You lose nothing in the meantime. A pending report never limits your account. Your messages, recipients, trustees, and designations remain fully editable by you throughout, and nothing about the report is visible to anyone as a death announcement — no memorial appears, and your status is never shown as deceased while verification is pending or after you deny a report.

11.3 Consequences for false reports. Knowingly reporting the death of a living person is a serious violation of the Terms of Service. It may lead to immediate termination of the reporter's account, and it may carry legal consequences beyond GivePeace. Trustees agree to act honestly: to report a death only when they genuinely believe the person has passed away, and to answer truthfully when asked to confirm or contest a report. The waiting periods and corroboration rules in this policy exist precisely so that one dishonest or mistaken person cannot reach your messages.

11.4 Tell us. If you believe someone is misusing the reporting process against you, write to support@givepeace.co. We treat interference with the death-verification process as seriously as anything on the Service.

11.5 If we got it wrong after a release. Every waiting period in this policy exists so this never happens, and we still built the way back. If you are alive and your account has been marked otherwise, the app shows you a quiet notice offering help; tapping it reaches a person on our team, and you can also write to support@givepeace.co. This is what we do:

(a) We lock everything first. Your memorial comes down, and any message that was already released is locked so no one can open it again. (b) We verify you are you. A person on our team verifies directly with you that you are alive — never by a tap and never over text — because the same tap that could undo a death could be made by someone holding your phone. (c) We reverse the record. Released messages stay locked permanently, and the plain, unsealed copies that delivery created are deleted from our storage and from the network that served them; anyone who visits what is left sees a plain note that there was an error, that you are alive, and that everything has been withdrawn. (d) We tell you who saw what. We tell you honestly who opened your messages and when, because your private words reached people before you ever meant them to. (e) We put back what can be put back. Anyone who bought wildflowers is refunded to their card without having to ask, and the memorial record is archived rather than destroyed, in case the doubt ever resolves the other way. (f) Your plan comes back on. Your check-in clock starts again at day zero. (g) We tell the trustee privately. The trustee whose report caused it is told privately that their report was wrong; everyone else is told only that a mistake was corrected.

12. Deleting Your Account, and Death During Deletion

12.1 Deletion has a 30-day grace period. You can delete your account in the app. When you start deletion, your inactivity switch is paused first, and a 30-day grace period begins during which your account is deactivated but recoverable. After 30 days, deletion becomes permanent. The full details of deletion, and the short list of records that survive it, are in our Privacy Policy.

12.2 If you pass away during the grace period. If a member passes away during the 30-day grace period, the messages they had armed and confirmed for delivery when they began deletion still deliver, through a minimal delivery archive kept for exactly this purpose (Terms of Service, Section 13.3(a)); the rest of the deletion completes. Deleting your account is not a way to silently disarm what you deliberately set up — and if you do want your armed messages gone, deleting the messages themselves while you are alive removes them permanently.

12.3 Deleting a message is permanent. You can delete any unreleased message at any time while you are alive. Deleted means deleted: the encrypted video and its keys are removed, and no one — including us — can get it back.

12.4 A member who has passed away keeps their account. Once we have verified that a member has passed away, we preserve their account. We do not delete it on request; completing their deliveries and honoring the choices they made in life is the product they trusted us with.

13. If GivePeace Ever Winds Down

13.1 You are trusting us across decades, so this policy repeats, in brief, the binding commitment in Section 14 of the Terms of Service. If Give Peace Inc. ever ceases operating the Service: we will give you at least 90 days' advance notice; during that period you may export your unreleased videos and messages at no charge, elect to transfer your sealed messages and delivery schedule to a named successor custodian bound by terms no less protective (opt-in only, never automatic), or elect immediate deletion; deliveries already in flight for members who have passed away are completed before shutdown; and for everyone who makes no election, all encrypted messages and all encryption keys are permanently destroyed — destruction, not transfer or sale, is the default. These commitments bind any successor, assignee, or acquirer of the Service.

14. The Risk You Accept

14.1 This section restates, in plain words, the allocation of risk in Sections 18 and 19 of the Terms of Service. Determining that someone has passed away is inherently uncertain. The process described in this policy depends on trustee reports, your responses to check-ins, documents submitted by others, and signals that no one on earth can make perfectly certain. By using GivePeace you accept that an erroneous, delayed, or missed release is a risk of this design, and that the occurrence of such an event is not, by itself, a breach of the Terms by us. Deliberate delay is a designed safety feature of the Service, and you accept it as such.

14.2 Nothing in this policy limits any liability that cannot be limited under applicable law — including, where applicable, liability for fraud, gross negligence, willful misconduct, or death or personal injury caused by negligence. The full disclaimers, liability limits, and their exceptions are in Sections 18 and 19 of the Terms of Service, and they govern.

15. Related Documents

15.1 This policy works alongside the rest of the GivePeace legal suite:

(a) Terms of Service — the agreement this policy is part of, including the summary of this process in its Section 5 and the wind-down commitment in its Section 14. (b) Privacy Policy — what data we hold, how long we keep it (including death certificates), and what survives deletion. (c) Digital Legacy Designation Agreement — the controlling record of your recipients and trustees, with its own acceptance, editable at all times while you are alive. (d) Trustee & Recipient Terms — the terms trustees and recipients accept for their own roles, including reporting, certificate upload, and claiming. (e) Legal Process & Estate Requests Policy — how we handle requests from executors, estates, courts, and law enforcement. (f) SMS & Communications Terms — how our text messages work, including opt-out and carrier limitations. (g) Consumer Health Data Privacy Policy — the standalone policy covering the narrow health-data categories Washington and Nevada law defines, including information that appears on a death certificate.

16. Contact Us

Before you write to us, please check our Help page at givepeace.co/help. Most questions — about your account, your messages, trustees, delivery, purchases, and your rights — are answered there, and it is the same page our support team relies on.

Give Peace Inc. support@givepeace.co givepeace.co

If you believe you have been wrongly reported as deceased, act in the app first: while a countdown about you is still running, one confirmation there ends it on its own. If we have already recorded a death that did not happen, open the notice in the app offering help — it reaches a person on our team — and write to us here as well. Section 11.5 explains exactly what we do next. Legal notices: support@givepeace.co with "Attn: Legal" in the subject line.

Death Verification & Posthumous Release Policy v1.0 — Effective October 3, 2026