Privacy Policy

What is stored on your device

Most of what you create in He Hears is saved in your browser's local storage, on your device, and never reaches a server of ours.

• Conversations you have while signed out — every message, kept until you delete it
• Verses you have saved, and any notes attached to them
• Your progress through reading plans
• Your chosen interface language and Bible translation
• Your confirmation that you are 13 or older

If you create an account

Reading the Bible, search, reading plans and the daily devotional all work without an account. The companion gives you one conversation message a day without an account; beyond that it asks you to create one, because a conversation costs real money to answer and a larger allowance has to be attached to something more solid than a browser. An account also carries your conversations, the verses you save and the settings you choose from one device to another.

Signing in is by email address and a password. There is no name, no phone number, and no profile, because none of those are needed to know that this is the same person returning. Your password is handled by Firebase and stored only as a cryptographic hash — we never see it, and neither does anyone else.

• Your email address — this is how you sign in, and the only identifying thing we hold
• Your conversations with the companion — every message, so a thread you began on one device is waiting on the next
• An account identifier generated for you, plus the date the account was created and the date you last signed in
• How many companion messages you have sent this week, kept only so the free allowance can be applied. It is a number and nothing else — not what you asked, not what was answered — and it is discarded when the week rolls over
• The verses you have saved, and any notes attached to them
• Your settings — interface language, Bible translation, light or dark mode, and your progress through reading plans

Where your conversations are kept

Signed out, they stay in your browser and reach no server of ours. Signed in, they are stored with your account, so a thread you began on your phone is there on your laptop and survives clearing your browser.

They are stored under your account identifier, and only you can read them. That is enforced by Firestore security rules, which Google checks on every single read and write before any data leaves the database — not by the screens in this app. Somebody else signing in on your device cannot open them, and we could not build a page that showed them to the wrong person by mistake.

They are never analysed, never used to train any model, and never shared. We do not read them in the course of running the service. Anyone holding administrative access to our Firebase project could technically open them; that access belongs to the operator of He Hears alone, and it is not used to browse what people write.

An earlier version of this policy said conversations would never leave your device, and asked you to hold us to it. This is us saying so plainly rather than changing it quietly: conversations are now kept with your account, you are told so when you sign in, and conversations already saved on your device are never moved into an account without asking you first.

What that means in practice

Conversations kept in your browser can be read by anyone who can use your device and open this site. Signing out empties the conversation list, because those conversations belong to the account rather than to the browser — on a shared or family device, sign out when you are finished.

Conversations kept only in your browser cannot be recovered by us. If you clear your browser data, use private browsing, or switch to another device, they are gone, and there is no copy on our side to restore. Conversations stored with your account are the opposite: they follow you to any device you sign in on, and they stay until you delete them or delete your account.

What is sent to Anthropic

He Hears does not write its replies. When you send a message to the companion, ask for a verse to be explained, or open a daily devotional, that request is sent to Anthropic, the company behind the Claude AI model, which generates the response and sends it back.

For a conversation, what is sent is the recent history of that conversation — so the reply makes sense in context — along with the Bible passages our own search selected, and the Bible translation you are reading. Nothing else is attached. Your email address and your account identifier are never sent, and there is no name or phone number to send — Anthropic receives the words and the Scripture, and nothing that identifies you.

Anthropic processes this text in order to produce the reply, under their own terms and privacy policy. If you would rather nothing you write leave your device, do not use the companion, the explain feature, or the daily devotional. Reading the Bible, searching it, saving verses, and following reading plans all work entirely on your device and send nothing.

Please treat the companion the way you would treat writing in a notebook that a service reads to answer you: it is a good place to bring what weighs on you, and not the place for passwords, financial details, or another person's private information.

What our servers store

No prayers, and nothing whatsoever about you if you have not created an account — there is no profile, and nothing to look you up by.

If you have created an account, we store exactly what is listed above and nothing further, using Firebase, a service operated by Google, as the processor, in a European region. We do not build a profile of you, we do not track what you read, and we do not analyse your saved verses.

The one piece of personal data our infrastructure handles is your IP address, and it is used for a single purpose: stopping one person or automated script from exhausting the AI service for everyone else, and from running up costs that would close the app.

Your IP address is used as a counting key in a rate-limiting store. It is not linked to your conversations, and it is not used to build a profile of you. These counters expire automatically, within one day. We keep no long-term log of them.

Under the GDPR we rely on legitimate interest for this (Article 6(1)(f)): protecting the service from abuse and keeping it financially viable for everyone. If you object to it, you can write to us at the address below, though it is worth knowing that without it the AI features could not be offered at all.

Cookies and tracking

He Hears sets no cookies. It runs no advertising pixels, no session recording, and no third-party tracking scripts of any kind — nothing in this page watches you or reports to anyone else. There is nothing here to consent to, which is why we do not show you a cookie banner.

We do count a few plain numbers on our own server, so we can tell whether the app is working and being used: how many replies were written each day, how many were refused because a daily allowance was spent, and how many failed, grouped by the kind of failure. These are counters and nothing more — a number goes up by one. They record no message, no title, no search, no verse, no email address, no account identifier, no IP address and no device information, so there is nothing in them that could be traced back to you or to anything you said. They are kept for forty days and then expire.

The local storage described above is not tracking. It holds only what you created, on your own device, so the app can show it back to you.

Sensitive information

Using an app like this one can reveal something about your religious beliefs, and what you write to the companion may touch on your health, your relationships, or your state of mind. Under European law that is a special category of personal data, and it deserves to be named rather than buried.

Where we can avoid holding it, we do: signed out, none of it reaches us at all. Where we cannot — a history that follows you between devices cannot also be absent from our servers — it is held under your account, readable only by you, and erased the moment you ask. Under Article 9(2)(a) of the GDPR we rely on your explicit consent for this, which is why signing in tells you plainly that your conversations will be stored, and why conversations already on your device are never taken into an account without asking. The same consent covers the transmission to Anthropic described above, which happens only when you choose to send a message. You can withdraw at any time by deleting your conversations, deleting your account, or simply not using those features.

Your rights, and how to use them

European and Israeli law gives you rights of access, correction, deletion, restriction, objection, and portability over your personal data. Because of how this app is built, most of them you can exercise instantly and without asking us.

• Access and portability — your data is already in your possession, in your own browser, and conversations stored with your account are shown to you in full whenever you sign in
• Deletion — "Delete the data in this browser" in the conversation menu clears this device; "Delete account" in Settings erases your account and every conversation stored with it. Both are immediate
• Deleting a single conversation — use the trash icon next to it in the conversation list
• For anything else, including a question about the IP-based rate limiting, write to us at the address below

Children

He Hears is intended for people aged 13 and over. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 13. If you believe a child under 13 has been using the app, please clear the site's data on their device, and if an account was created, delete it in Settings — between them, that removes what is on the device and what is held for the account.

Changes to this policy

If we change how any of this works, we will update this page and the date shown at the top of it. Material changes will be surfaced in the app rather than made quietly.

Contact

For any question about this policy, or to make a request about your data, write to privacy@hehears.net.