What we keep, and what we don't.

Plain language, because you should not need a lawyer to understand what happens to what you tell us.

• Your email address, so you can sign in and we can reach you.
• Your first name, last name, and time zone, so your counselor knows who they're meeting and when.
• A photo, only if you upload one. It is shown to the other person once you're matched, and to nobody else.
• The times you asked for, the sessions you've had, and whether each happened.
• The note you write when you book, if you write one. Your counselor reads it. We clear it a month after the request closes.
• A log of the emails we sent you, which we keep for ninety days.
• A private link to your own calendar feed, so your sessions can appear in your calendar app. It does not expire. Anyone holding that link can see the times of your sessions, so treat it as a password.
• Whether you ticked the box saying you're interested in the course, and when.
• If you tell the admins that something about a session concerned you, we keep what you wrote and who wrote it, so an admin can look into it. We do not delete these on a timer.
• When you ask for a sign-in link we note the email address you typed and the IP address you typed it from, so nobody can hammer the form. We count for an hour and delete the row a day later.

Your first name, your photo if you added one, your time zone, and the note you wrote. Nothing else about you, and nothing at all about anyone else they've met here.

When you say how a session went, what you write is stored with your counselor and the month, and with no link to you or to the session. The date is rounded to the day. Your counselor is never shown your answer: they see averages, rounded so that one answer is hard to pick out, and only once at least five different people have answered.

If you tick the box to let a comment be shared, an admin reads it and may put it on the front page. It appears as your words and the month, with no name attached, and we won't share it unless you ticked that box.

We should be straight with you about the limits of this. The people who run the site can read the database, so the words do not vanish. And a counselor who sees few people and follows those averages month to month can sometimes tell which way a new answer went, even though they are never shown it.

We send email through Resend, so your address and the message pass through them. Video calls happen on Jitsi's public service, which we don't control and which sees the room and your browser. Every page loads its typeface from Google Fonts, so Google sees your address whenever a page loads. Everything else stays on Cloudflare, where the site runs.

We don't sell anything to anyone, we don't run advertising, and there are no analytics or tracking scripts on this site. Once a month an instructor of the course and the people who run this site get a count of how things went: how many sessions, how many cancellations, how many new counselors. Counts, not names, except for the addresses of people who asked about taking the course themselves.

• Sign-in links stop working after they're used, and are deleted after a week. The links in other emails, the ones that confirm or cancel something, last as long as the thing they act on and are deleted a week after they expire.
• The note you wrote when booking is cleared a month after the request closes.
• The thing you wanted to carry is deleted the moment we email it back to you. If that email fails it waits up to a week, in case we can get it through by hand, and is deleted then whether or not we did.
• Email logs and internal counters are deleted after ninety days. The sign-in counters, the ones holding an email and an IP address, go after a day.

Write to hello@spiritualcounsel.ing and ask what we hold about you, or ask us to delete it. We'd rather do that than have you wonder.