✦ Privacy
Privacy, in plain English
What we collect, what we never do, and what happens to your spiritual conversations.
What we collect
When you create an account:
- — Email address (required for sign-in and account recovery)
- — Display name (required for use in shared studies)
- — Optional bio and areas of experience — only if you fill them in, used to help mentors understand who they're walking with
When you use the app:
- — Study content: the questions you ask, the AI answers you receive, the messages you send to other participants
- — Usage events: when you signed in, which threads you opened, which features you used (used for product improvement and reliability)
- — Device metadata: app version, OS version, basic device type (used for crash investigation and compatibility)
What we do not collect:
- ✓ Location data
- ✓ Contacts
- ✓ Photos or media beyond what you explicitly upload
- ✓ Browsing history outside Alongside
- ✓ Any data from third-party trackers (we do not use third-party trackers)
What we never do
Read your conversations recreationally.
No "let me see what people are talking about today." The admin tools don't have a browse view. This is by design — there is no casual read path built into the product.
Use your content to train AI models.
Not ours, not Anthropic's, not anyone's. The AI inside Alongside is configured for no data retention and no use of inputs for model training. We do not separately retain content for training purposes.
Sell your data.
Not now, not ever. This is a permanent commitment, not a marketing position that might change later.
Share your data with advertisers.
Alongside has no advertising partners and does not run ads. We do not provide analytics services with raw user content.
When we might access your content
Three cases only. In every case, the access is logged: who accessed it, what they accessed, when, and why.
You ask us to.
If you contact support with a question about a specific study — "the AI gave me a strange answer, can you help?" — that is you inviting us into the thread. We will look. We will help. The access is logged with your support request as the reason.
A bug requires it.
If you report a crash and the only way to diagnose it is to inspect your thread state at the time of the crash, we may do that. The access is logged with the bug reference as the reason. We do not access content for general quality monitoring or speculative debugging.
Legal or safety obligations.
If we receive a valid legal order compelling us to provide specific content, we will comply with the minimum scope required by law. If we have a credible reason to believe someone is in imminent physical danger, we may act on it and contact appropriate emergency services. Both categories are rare and we will resist overbroad requests.
In every case, the access log cannot be modified after the fact. Who, what, when, and why — recorded and sealed.
How we protect your data
Encryption at rest.
All data stored in Alongside's databases and file storage is encrypted. This is verified and enforced across all our infrastructure.
Encryption in transit.
All communication between your device and our servers is encrypted. We do not transmit your data in cleartext.
Authentication.
Passwords are managed by our authentication provider and never stored by us in any form. We cannot retrieve your password — only reset it.
No third-party trackers.
The complete list of services that touch your data: our core infrastructure provider, our AI inference provider, our email delivery provider, and our internal email. That is the entire list. No Google Analytics, no Mixpanel, no ad networks.
Your rights
Export everything.
You can request a copy of all the data we hold about you. We will provide it in a machine-readable format within 30 days.
Delete your account.
Account deletion is a hard delete within 30 days: your account identity is removed, your stored content is permanently deleted, and your study content is unrecoverable. The audit log entries about any prior access are preserved (they must be, to remain trustworthy), but no content is retained.
Correct your profile.
Profile information — display name, bio — can be edited from the app's settings. Anything else, email us at info@alongsidefaith.com .
Withdraw consent.
You can stop using Alongside at any time. Account deletion is the mechanism for withdrawing consent and removing all stored data.
✦ A note to pastors
We understand what it means when someone in your congregation opens up about grief, doubt, or a struggling marriage inside an app. We treat that seriously.
The privacy commitments on this page are operational rules we hold ourselves to — not marketing language. Every admin access to user content is logged. We don't browse. We don't train. We don't sell. The admin tool has no "see what users are talking about" view. There isn't one. That is a design decision, not an oversight.
If you want to see the full operational framework, or if you have questions about what happens to your congregation's data, ask us. info@alongsidefaith.com
This page summarizes our privacy practices in plain English. The full legal document is available at alongsidefaith.com/privacy-policy .