Privacy

Privacy center

Many people reading this have been surveilled, monitored, or punished for what they wrote down. So here is the plain accounting, without legal fog.

You can read every page of this site without an account, without signing in, and without telling us anything. Nothing on the reading side of Thorns & Light requires you to identify yourself.

An account is needed only to write in the community, to send a private prayer intention, or to keep a list of service opportunities. What follows describes what happens once you have one.

What is public

Community posts and comments that a moderator has approved, including the category and the date.
The display name you chose, unless you published that item as Anonymous.
The optional line about yourself on your profile.

What moderators can see

The account behind every post and comment, including anonymous ones, through server-side tools only.
Posts and comments awaiting review, declined, or removed.
Reports made about content, and the internal reason recorded for a moderation decision.
Private prayer intentions, and only those moderators specifically authorized for prayer.

What is never shared

Your email address is never shown to other members.
Private prayer intentions are never published anywhere, in any form.
Full prayer text is never placed in an email notification.
The account behind an anonymous post never appears in public queries, page markup, analytics, URLs, notifications, or anything sent to another person's browser.
Prayer text and intention content are never sent to analytics.
We do not sell anything about you, and there is nothing here to sell.

What we do not collect

Your precise location. A ZIP code used to search service opportunities is held only for that search unless you deliberately choose to save it.
Your home address, phone number, workplace, or parish.
Payment details. We do not process money at any point. Donation links go directly to an organization's own official site.
Anything about which pages you read while signed out beyond ordinary server logs.

Anonymous posting, precisely

Choosing Anonymous on a public post means the post carries the label Anonymous instead of your display name, and the database withholds the author from every public read. It is not a styling choice applied after the fact.

Moderators can still see the account. We tell you this before you submit, every time, because a community where nobody can be held to account becomes unsafe for the people it was built for. If that trade is not one you want to make, a private prayer intention is never published at all, and reading without writing is always an option.

What to leave out of what you write

Please do not include full names, exact addresses, phone numbers, workplaces, medical record details, identifying legal or court details, or information about another person without their consent. God does not need the details in order to hear you, and a search engine does not need them at all.

Removal, export, and leaving

You can request removal of anything you wrote, from your account page, without giving a reason.

Full account deletion and data export are not yet automated. Rather than show you a button that does nothing, we ask you to write to us through the contact page. A person will do it by hand.

If someone may be checking your device

Quick exit leaves this page immediately and opens a neutral search page. It cannot delete your browsing history: if someone may check your device, consider using a device they cannot access.

If it is not safe for this site to appear in your history, consider a device the other person cannot reach, such as a library computer or a friend's phone. Practical steps are gathered on the safety page.

The formal version of this, in the usual language, is on the privacy policy page. Where the two ever disagree, treat this page as what we actually intend.