Privacy Policy

The short version

• We keep what you need us to keep to prepare your parts, and nothing for its own sake.
• There are no adverts, no analytics and no tracking. The app loads nothing from anyone else.
• Your writing goes to an AI model only when you ask for a draft or a change, and never with your name.
• We never sell your information, and nothing you write is used to train a model.
• You can delete your account, and everything in it, yourself, at any time.

What we keep

Your account: your name, email address and password (stored only as a one-way hash), and the things you set: your role, your congregation if you give it, your time zone, your theme, and your speaking pace.

Your work: your comments, prepared parts and talks, outlines you upload, notes on where and when you gave a talk, your conversations with the writing assistant and the changes it proposed, and the voice profile it builds from writing you choose to give it — including the text of past talks you upload (the text, not the file).

Rehearsals: how long each section took and how fast you spoke, so the app can tell you how long a part really runs.

Billing: whether you subscribe, its status and renewal date, the identifiers Stripe gives us, and a record that you agreed to the renewal terms, which version, and when. Never your card.

Usage: counts of how much AI drafting you have used this month, so the fair-use allowance can be applied.

Feedback you send: your message, the page you were on, your browser’s name, and a short technical trail to help find the problem — the last few requests the app made (addresses and timings, never their contents) and the last few errors in the page.

What we do not keep

• Your age. Sign-up asks for your birth month and year to check you are 13 or older, and keeps neither.
• Your card. Stripe takes payment on its own page.
• A log of your visits. Our servers do not record visitors’ IP addresses or keep a history of the pages you open.

Who else handles it

A few services do work for us. Each gets only what its job needs:

• DigitalOcean hosts the servers and the database, in Sydney, Australia.
• Anthropic runs the AI model. When you ask for a draft, a change or a voice profile, the relevant writing — your text, your voice samples and the publication material — is sent to it. Your name, email and account details are not. Anthropic’s commercial terms do not allow it to train its models on what we send.
• Stripe takes payments and manages subscriptions. It receives your email address and an account reference, and holds your payment details itself.
• Dropbox holds a copy of our nightly backups, encrypted before it leaves our server. Other copies are kept, also encrypted, on our server and on our own hardware in Australia.
• Telegram carries alerts to the phone of the person who runs YourWords. When you send feedback, the alert includes your first name, the page and what you wrote, so it can be read and answered quickly. Error alerts include the page and the error, not your writing.
• Fastmail sends our account emails: password resets and confirming your email address. It receives your email address and the message, and nothing else about you.

Anthropic, Stripe, Dropbox, Telegram and Fastmail may store or process information outside Australia, including in the United States. We choose services with strong security, but their own privacy policies govern what they do.

Bible verses and publication text are fetched from their official sources by reference only; nothing about you is sent with them.

On your device

YourWords uses one cookie, to keep you signed in. It is not a tracking cookie and is never shared.

So that the app works without a connection, it keeps a copy of your recent work and any edits waiting to be sent in your browser’s own storage. Signing out clears the copy of your work. Because we do no tracking, a browser’s “Do Not Track” setting changes nothing here.

How long we keep it

For as long as you have an account. When you delete it, your account and everything in it is removed from YourWords straight away, and the encrypted backups age out within 60 days. Stripe keeps its own record of past payments, as the law requires of it.

One thing stays, because consumer law asks for it: if you subscribed, the record that you agreed to the automatic renewal is kept for three years, reduced to Stripe’s reference for your payments, which wording you agreed to, the price and the date. It has no name, email or anything you wrote attached, and it is deleted when the three years are up.

Your choices

• You can see and edit almost everything above in the app itself.
• You can take any prepared part away as a document.
• You can delete your account and everything in it from Settings.
• You can ask us for a copy of everything we hold about you, or to correct it, at [email protected].

We follow the Australian Privacy Principles. If you are unhappy with how we have handled your information, tell us first and we will try to put it right; you can also complain to the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner.

Children

YourWords is not for children under 13, and sign-up refuses anyone younger. If you believe a child under 13 has an account, write to [email protected] and we will delete it.

Changes

If this policy changes in a way that matters — a new service handling your information, say — we will tell you in the app before it takes effect. The date at the top shows when it last changed.

Contact

Questions about your information, or a request for a copy of it, go to [email protected], or, if you have an account, through the Feedback item in the app’s menu, or Settings → Send feedback.