Privacy policy

What we store

When you use Deciple, we keep:

• Your account: your username, a scrambled copy of your password (made with Argon2id, so we cannot read it) and your account type (member, church, moderator or admin).
• Things you choose to add: an email address at sign-up (optional), a display name, a short bio and the look of your avatar.
• Your places: for homes and fellowships, only a rough point. Before saving, we snap the spot you picked to a grid about 1 km wide and move it by up to 300 m. The spot you picked is never saved. A church may choose to show its exact location, like any public church building.
• Chats with friends and groups: text, pictures, voice messages and files, so you can read them later. Pictures are re-saved on our server, which removes hidden details such as GPS location and camera model. Voice messages and other files are kept exactly as you send them, so remove personal details from documents before sending.
• Bible highlights and notes: private to you, unless you share a note into a chat.
• Community activity: feedback you send and your votes. We keep which option you chose so that you can only vote once, but nobody — not even admins — is shown who voted for what.
• Reports you send: what you reported and why.
• Signed-in devices: for each sign-in, the name of your browser and a shortened IP address with the last part removed (for example 203.0.113.0). We delete this within an hour after you sign out or the sign-in runs out.

What we do not store

• Your phone number. We never ask for it.
• Your real name. Use any username you like.
• The exact spot of your home or fellowship.
• What people say out loud in rooms, or private chats with people who are not your friends. These pass through our server to the people in the room and are never saved.
• Full IP addresses. Our server logs keep only a shortened address and are deleted after 7 days. Your full address is held for a short time in memory only, to stop people guessing passwords or flooding the site.
• Anything for advertising. We show no ads and never sell or share your data.

Who can see what

• Everyone, even without an account, can see public places on the map (without the owner's name) and read the Bible.
• People in the same room see your username, your avatar and what you say there.
• Your friends can see places you share with friends only, and can chat with you.
• Moderators and admins see reports. When a message is reported, they see it together with the five messages before and after it in that chat, so they understand what happened. They have no tool for browsing other chats.
• Admins can also see a member's email (if one was given), their signed-in devices (browser name and shortened IP address), their places and their moderation history. Admins read the feedback people send.
• The honest part: messages are stored on our server without end-to-end encryption. Anyone who controls the server — the Deciple team, or someone who breaks in or forces us — could read stored messages. End-to-end encryption is planned for a later version.

Other companies involved

• Cloudflare sits in front of deciple.com to protect it and make it faster. Like any network provider, it can see your IP address and which pages you open. We also use Cloudflare's visit counter, which sets no cookies and never sees what you write.
• OpenStreetMap supplies the map pictures and the place search. Our server fetches them for you, so OpenStreetMap never sees your IP address.
• Fonts, QR codes and everything else come from deciple.com itself. If you click a wallet's explorer link on the donation page, that website will see your visit.

We use no other services and no social media buttons.

Cookies and browser storage

We set one cookie, named deciple_sid, which keeps you signed in. Scripts on the page cannot read it.

Your browser also remembers a few settings on your device only: light or dark theme, where the map was, rooms you visited recently, announcements you closed, and your place and text size in the Bible. We never receive these. Clearing your browser data removes them.

How long we keep things

• Your account and what is in it: until you delete it.
• Chat messages: until they are deleted. “Delete for everyone” removes the text or file from our server.
• Signed-in device details: deleted within an hour after you sign out or the sign-in runs out.
• Server logs: 7 days.
• Backups: we keep copies of the database for 14 days so we can recover from accidents. Something you delete may stay in these copies until they are replaced.

Deleting your account

You can delete your account at any time: open My account, choose Delete my account and enter your password.

This removes at once: your profile, your places and their rooms, your sign-ins, the messages you sent, your one-to-one chats, your Bible notes and highlights, your votes, feedback and church requests, and your files. Groups you own are handed to another member, or deleted if nobody else is in them.

What stays: messages other people sent in groups, reports about content (with your name removed if you sent them), and a line in our admin log saying an account was deleted. Backups clear within 14 days. Your username becomes free for someone else to use.

To remove only your email address, write to [email protected].

Age

Deciple is for people aged 16 and over. If you believe someone younger has an account, please report it or write to us.

Changes and contact

If we change this policy, we will update this page and the date at the top, and announce big changes in the app.

Questions or requests about your data: write to [email protected].