PRIVACY POLICY
Last updated: September 2026
Devotion is a Christian faith companion that provides Scripture-grounded guidance through personalised conversations. Your privacy matters to us. This policy explains what data we collect, how we use it, and your rights.
Your first name (optional, for personalisation). Your email address, if you link your account to email, Google, or Apple sign-in. Your display name and profile photo, if you set them. Faith background and denomination preferences. Reasons for using the app. Bible translation and focus preferences. Prayer journal entries. Chat messages you send. Sermon recordings you make with Sermon Companion, which uses your microphone, and the notes and reflection answers you add to them. Community content you post if you join a church: feed posts and comments, prayer wall posts, group discussions and group prayers, and direct messages. Photos you attach to a post or set as your profile picture. Your approximate location, only if you use Find a Church, to show nearby congregations.
Conversation responses from your spiritual guide. User memory: a summary of key themes from your past conversations (e.g., "struggling with anxiety", "praying for a family member"). This never includes names of third parties, medical details, financial information, or intimate details. Safety flags: if the guide detects crisis-level distress, a temporary flag is stored to provide heightened sensitivity in future conversations. These flags expire automatically after 30 days. Usage analytics (message counts, feature usage, streaks). Feedback on responses (thumbs up/down and optional text reports).
Your preferences and onboarding choices. Chat history and conversation sessions. Prayer journal entries. User memory summaries. Saved verses. Activity and streak data. When you are signed in, this data is also synced to your account on our servers so it can be restored if you switch phones or reinstall the app. The core text of your chat messages, prayers, and companion-memory summaries is stored encrypted on our servers.
Chat messages: your messages are sent to our backend server and processed to generate responses. Conversations are stored encrypted in your account, so your history follows you across devices, until you delete them or delete your account. Safety flags: stored per user ID on our server and automatically deleted after 30 days. Feedback reports: thumbs-down feedback and optional text reports are stored on our server so we can review and improve response quality. Sermon recordings: when you record a sermon, the audio is uploaded to our server, transcribed into text, and summarized by AI to give you a summary, the scriptures preached, and study questions. The audio is kept in private storage, never at a public link, so you can replay it. The transcript, summary, and your notes are stored encrypted. Recordings are kept until you delete them or delete your account.
Devotion is operated from Canada. The servers, database, and file storage that process and hold your data are located in the United States, provided by our infrastructure partners (Railway, Amazon Web Services, and Cloudflare).
To generate personalised, Scripture-grounded responses. To remember context across conversations (user memory). To detect crisis situations and provide appropriate resources. To improve the quality and safety of responses. To transcribe and summarize sermons you record. We do not sell your data to third parties. We do not use your data for advertising.
If you join a church in the App, some of what you post is shared with other people. Posts and comments in your church's community feed are visible to every member of that church, shown with your display name and profile photo. Small-group discussions and group prayers are visible to the members of that group and to your church's leaders. Prayer wall posts are visible to the whole church. You can post a prayer anonymously, which hides your name from other members and from church staff everywhere in the App and the church portal, although the church owner's full data export still contains the account behind it. You can instead send a prayer request privately, which delivers it only to your pastor or care team. Direct messages are visible to you and the person you are messaging. Your personal data is never shared with your church: conversations with your guide, your prayer journal, saved verses, companion memory, and sermons you record stay private to you.
You can report any post, comment, prayer, group message, or member from inside the App. You can also block another member, which hides your content from each other in both directions; blocked members are listed in your church profile under Safety, where you can unblock them at any time. Reports go to your church's leadership, who can hide, restore, or delete content, and content that receives multiple reports is hidden automatically pending review. New posts are screened for hate speech at the point of posting. You can delete your own posts at any time. Deleted content is removed for everyone, though copies may remain in encrypted backups for up to 30 days. The content and behaviour we prohibit are set out in our Terms of Service, which you accept when you create an account.
A church can connect Devotion to its church-management tool (such as Planning Center) or upload a spreadsheet of its people. For everyone on that list, we store their name, email address, phone number and campus, so the church can choose whom to invite. This includes people the church has not invited yet. We leave out anyone marked inactive, anyone the list marks as a child or gives a school grade, and anyone under 13. We do not import home addresses, birthdays, giving, attendance, households, notes or custom fields. Nobody is emailed until the church chooses to invite them. People the church never invites are deleted after 90 days, and people who are invited but never join are deleted after 180 days. People who were not invited are also removed sooner if the church deletes that import or disconnects Planning Center. From Planning Center a church can also bring in its public events and its groups: names, descriptions, meeting times and places, a contact email, how to join, and the names of each group's leaders. Who is in each group stays in Planning Center. A church can also link a calendar. We read whatever calendar address the church gives us, which may be a private address, and bring in its events, skipping any the calendar marks private or confidential. The church also gets a subscribe link that members can add to their own calendar app to see the church's published events.
A church can set up webhooks, which send details of certain events to destinations the church configures itself, such as Zapier, Make or its own server. When someone joins the church, the webhook carries their display name and member ID. When someone registers for an event, it carries their display name and how many people are coming. When a visitor fills in a connection card, it carries the visitor's name, email address and phone number (unless the visitor asked to keep them private), the kind of visit, their interests and how they would like to be contacted. When a sermon is published, it carries the sermon's title, speaker, series, scripture and links. Prayer requests, care notes and the notes on a visitor card are never sent. Once sent, the data is held by the destination the church chose, under that service's own terms and privacy policy. We keep a record of each delivery for 30 days.
The App signs you into a Firebase account (anonymous at first; you can link it to your email, Google, or Apple sign-in). Its identifier associates your data with your account across app launches and devices. It is not shared with third parties for advertising purposes.
We rely on the following third-party service providers, each governed by its own privacy policy. Anthropic and OpenAI: process chat messages, sermon content (including transcripts of sermons you record), and prayer text to generate AI responses. Groq: transcribes sermon audio into text, for sermons you record and for churches that use the sermon toolkit. Firebase (Google): authentication, push notification delivery (Firebase Cloud Messaging), and in-app analytics (which features are used; never the content of your messages, prayers, or journal). Stripe: billing for church plans, handled on our website. Cloudflare R2: storage of uploaded media such as sermon audio, images, and photos. Sermons you record are kept in private storage, never at a public link. Amazon Web Services (Amazon SES): delivery of transactional and notification emails. Sentry: error and crash monitoring. Google Places and YouTube APIs: church directory lookup and sermon content import. Planning Center: only if a church connects it, to bring in the people, events and groups described in section 4. RevenueCat: mobile subscription management. PostHog: product analytics and conversion measurement for our website, church portal and app, so we can see which pages and features are used and improve them (hosted in the United States). In the app, PostHog receives which features you use and your account ID, never the content of your messages, prayers, journal or recordings, and it does not record your screen. You can turn it off in Settings, Legal & Privacy. It stores a small identifier in cookies and your browser's local storage to count visits and recognise a returning visitor. It records session replays of visits to our website and church portal with all on-screen text and everything typed into forms hidden, so we see clicks and navigation but not what you read or enter. Church portal accounts are identified to PostHog by an account ID, never by email address. We do not sell your personal data. Apart from the service providers listed above, your data goes only to destinations your church sets up itself: if your church configures a webhook, the details described in section 4 are sent to the service it chose, such as Zapier or Make.
Delete your data: Reset Companion Memory in Settings erases the guide's memory of you from your device and our servers. You can delete individual chat sessions, prayer journal entries, and sermon recordings within the app. Export your data: Settings > Your Data > Export All My Data gives you everything we store about you as a file, free. Formatted prayer journal and saved-verses exports are available for Pro subscribers. Access your data: All data stored on your device is accessible within the app. Right to be forgotten: Settings > Your Data > Delete Account & Data permanently erases your account and all server-side data, no email required. Turn off usage analytics in the app: Settings, Legal & Privacy. You can also contact us at any time.
Devotion is intended for users aged 13 and older. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 13. If you believe a child under 13 has provided us with personal information, please contact us so we can take appropriate action.
Local data persists until you delete it or uninstall the app. Synced data (conversations, prayers, memory, progress) and sermon recordings with their transcripts and notes are retained in your account until you delete it in the app or delete your account, which erases all server-side data, including your uploaded photos and recorded audio. Safety flags expire and are deleted after 30 days. Feedback reports are retained for quality improvement purposes. People a church brings in from a spreadsheet or Planning Center are deleted after 90 days if the church never invites them, and after 180 days if they are invited but never join. Webhook delivery records are deleted after 30 days. One narrow exception: encrypted database backups are kept for up to 30 days for disaster recovery before rolling off.
Devotion is available worldwide. Regardless of where you access the App, you have the right to know what personal data we collect and how it is used, the right to request deletion of your personal data, the right to opt out of the sale of personal data (we do not sell your data), and the right to non-discrimination for exercising your privacy rights. If you are in the European Economic Area (EEA), you also have the right to data portability and the right to lodge a complaint with your local data protection authority. If you are a California resident, you have additional rights under the CCPA. To exercise any of these rights, contact us at the email below.
We may update this privacy policy from time to time. When we make significant changes, we will notify you through the App or by updating the "Last updated" date at the top of this page. Continued use of the App after changes are posted constitutes acceptance of the revised policy.
If you have questions about this privacy policy or your data, contact us at support@holydevotion.app