Privacy Policy

1. Information We Collect

We collect the minimum information necessary to operate the service:

• Account information you provide: email, optional display name, hashed password.
• Children's profile information voluntarily provided by a parent or legal guardian: first name or nickname, age range, language preference. We do not require a child's full legal name or photograph.
• Reading and engagement data: which stories were opened, completion progress, favorites, and quiz interactions.
• Optional child voice recordings: by default, read-aloud recordings stay on the device temporarily and are deleted after use. If a parent or legal guardian enables cloud voice memories, voluntary prayer, verse read-aloud, and discussion recordings may be uploaded to the cloud growth archive for parent playback and management.
• Device information: operating system family, app version, and language locale. We do not collect precise GPS location.
• Payment receipts and transaction identifiers: we do not store full payment-card numbers. Payments are processed by Apple App Store, Google Play, or Stripe.

2. How We Use Information

We use information to:

• Provide, personalize, and improve the service.
• Sync reading progress and the Faith Garden across your devices.
• Process subscriptions and in-app purchases.
• Send important service announcements (e.g., subscription receipts, security notices).
• Use child profile settings to rank available stories.
• Detect and prevent fraud, abuse, and security incidents.

We do not use children's profile data for behavioral advertising. We do not sell personal information.

3. Information Sharing

This overview is not exhaustive. Depending on the feature and your choices, we may disclose information to recipients or engage processors as follows:

• Payment providers (Apple, Google, Stripe) — strictly what is necessary to process and verify transactions.
• Family Group participants — account holders in a particular Family Group when a parent opts in; they are recipients of that feature, not our processors. See Family Groups below.
• Cloud infrastructure, storage, email, push-notification, service-analytics, and diagnostic processors, including Sentry when configured — only as needed to host, deliver, analyze, secure, troubleshoot, or back up the service, under contract.
• Legal authorities — only when required by valid legal process and proportionate in scope.

See Detailed Data Handling and Installation Analytics and Crash Reports below for service analytics, diagnostics, and related processors.

We never sell, rent, or trade personal information.

4. Children's Privacy (COPPA / GDPR-K / PIPL)

FaithSow is designed for shared family use, with parent or legal-guardian oversight:

• A parent or legal-guardian account is required to register a child's profile.
• We collect only the minimum information necessary for the service.
• We do not display third-party behavioral advertising to children.
• Parents can review, edit, or delete a child's profile at any time in Settings. Deletion removes live access, while limited records may be retained as described below.
• Cloud storage of a child's voice recordings is off by default and requires parent or legal-guardian authorization before upload.
• Age and authorization rules vary. In the United States, COPPA generally concerns children under 13. In the EEA, the age for a child's own consent to information-society services varies by member state from 13 to 16; in the UK it is generally 13. Other lawful bases, parental-responsibility rules, and laws in China and elsewhere may apply. We handle requests according to the law applicable to the user and processing, rather than treating one age threshold as universal.

If you believe a child under the applicable age has provided us personal information without verifiable parental consent, please contact us at [email protected]; we will handle the deletion request under applicable law and the limited retention exceptions described below.

5. Data Security and Retention

We protect personal information using industry-standard safeguards: TLS in transit, encryption at rest for sensitive fields, hashed passwords (bcrypt or stronger), least-privilege access controls, and routine security review.

We retain account and service data while the account is active. After account deletion, direct identifiers are de-identified; remaining records are retained only as needed for transactions, refunds, disputes, fraud prevention, legal compliance, backup cycles, or other purposes described below. Retention varies by data category and applicable law.

No system is perfectly secure. We will notify affected users without undue delay in the event of a data breach affecting personal information, as required by applicable law.

6. Your Rights

Depending on where you live (GDPR, UK GDPR, CCPA/CPRA, PIPL, LGPD, and similar), you have the right to:

• Access the personal data we hold about you.
• Request correction of inaccurate data.
• Request deletion (subject to limited exceptions).
• Object to or restrict certain processing.
• Data portability in a machine-readable format.
• Withdraw consent at any time, without affecting prior lawful processing.
• Lodge a complaint with your local data-protection authority.

To exercise these rights, email [email protected]. We will respond within the timelines required by applicable law (typically 30 days).

7. Cookies and Tracking

Our website uses strictly necessary cookies for authentication and session management. Analytics cookies are optional and require your explicit consent on first visit; you can withdraw it at any time.

Our mobile app does not use browser cookies; authentication tokens are stored in the device's secure storage (Keychain on iOS, EncryptedSharedPreferences on Android).

8. Third-Party Services

We rely on these processors, each under contract:

• Apple App Store / Google Play / Stripe — payment processing and receipt validation.
• Sentry — crash and error reporting; see Detailed Data Handling for the identifiers and diagnostics that may be sent and the filtering we apply.
• S3-compatible object storage — story images, audio, and watermarked thumbnails.
• Transactional email delivery (e.g., for receipts, password resets).

Each provider operates under its own privacy policy. We encourage you to review them.

9. International Data Transfers

FaithSow operates globally; your data may be processed in regions where our cloud providers operate. For cross-border transfers from the EEA/UK or China, we rely on the European Commission's Standard Contractual Clauses or equivalent safeguards.

10. Changes to This Policy

We will notify users of material changes via in-app notice or email at least 30 days before they take effect, unless an earlier change is required by law. The latest version is always available at https://www.faithsow.com/privacy.

11. Detailed Data Handling

The service may process the following data, linked to the parent account or a child profile where applicable:

• Child profile and personalization data: nickname, age range, optional gender, avatar choice, language, and internal account/profile identifiers.
• Product interactions: reading and game progress, favorites, collected verses, quiz answers, completion events, and feature interactions used for sync, service analytics, and ranking available stories using child profile settings.
• Optional user content: emotion notes, action commitments, support or feedback text and optional contact email. Optional prayer, verse read-aloud, discussion, emotion, and action recordings are uploaded only when the parent chooses to save them to the cloud.
• Security and diagnostics: login time, IP address, login method, User-Agent, and, when feedback is submitted, platform, locale, and app version. These support authentication, fraud prevention, troubleshooting, and service security.
• A library search query is sent to our service to return results. The recent-search list shown in the app is stored only on the device and can be cleared there.

When a child profile or account is deleted, live Family Group and reading-history access is removed. Direct identifiers in the account and child profiles are de-identified where applicable, while restricted safety, consent, report, transaction, refund, dispute, fraud-prevention, legal-compliance, backup, and provider-identity records may be retained only as reasonably needed and subject to applicable law. Contact [email protected] to request access to or deletion of remaining personal content, subject to applicable exceptions.

We do not use this data to track you across apps or websites owned by other companies.

12. Family Groups

When a parent or guardian opts in, other members of that Family Group can see the group display name, family display name, selected child display nickname, recent reading footprints, and a read-only shared garden built from eligible visible reading activity for selected children. School, contact, and location are not separate shared fields, but information typed into shared names or nicknames can be visible to members.

Shared reading activity can include eligible history from before consent or joining and future records while the child participates. Recent times, completion counts, garden progress, and Bible story titles may reveal routines, activity, or religious beliefs. Other members receive the displayed information for this feature; they are not our processors.

Leaving a group, removal, dissolution, withdrawal of participation, child profile deletion, or account deletion removes the affected live Family Group and reading-history access and stops future authenticated service access for that information. Content already viewed, copied, cached, or captured in screenshots by a member cannot be recalled.

Safety actions may create restricted records for consent, withdrawal, reports, blocking, moderation, and administrative review. These records may retain displayed names, involved account or member references, and related safety context for fraud prevention, abuse handling, legal compliance, and service security. They do not provide live group or reading-history access.

Family Groups does not collect or share free-form posts, chat messages, private messages, photos, videos, audio messages, child posts, precise location, reading minutes, streaks, scores, prayers, reflections, or emotion entries through this feature.

13. Installation Analytics and Crash Reports

On first use, the mobile app generates a random installation UUID and stores it persistently on the device. When service analytics is enabled, we send that installation identifier with product-interaction events and app, operating-system, platform, and event-time information to understand feature use, operate and improve the service, and investigate reliability or abuse.

After sign-in, analytics events also include the FaithSow account ID, so the installation UUID and those events can be linked to an account and are not anonymous while linked. During account deletion, the service atomically sets both user_id and install_id to null on active-database rows for account-linked analytics, removing that active-database linkage. Protected backup copies may retain the prior values until they age out through the backup cycle. Unlinked analytics rows may be retained or further de-identified or deleted as reasonably needed for analytics, reliability, security, fraud prevention, and legal obligations. The local identifier normally remains until app data is cleared or the app is reinstalled.

If Sentry crash reporting is configured, it may receive crash and error events, account ID after sign-in, app version, build, platform, and diagnostic context. We disable Sentry's default PII collection and filter message, URL, and exception text for common tokens, credentials, and email addresses before sending, but a diagnostic event may still be linked to an account and is not promised to be anonymous. We and Sentry retain crash data only as reasonably needed for troubleshooting, reliability, security, and applicable legal obligations.