Privacy Policy

1. Data Collection & Purpose

We collect personal information such as name, email, phone number, and address to facilitate church management and communication. We only collect data that is explicitly provided by you or your organization's administrators.

Legal basis: under Canada's PIPEDA and similar frameworks, processing is based on your knowledge and consent. Under the GDPR / UK-GDPR specifically, we rely on the distinct Article 6 bases set out in Section 4 below — consent is not our only basis, and which one applies depends on the specific data and purpose.

2. Transparency & Usage

Your data is used solely for the operations of the organization you are affiliated with. Temple does not sell, rent, or trade your personal information to third parties for marketing purposes.

• Member Directory: Shared only within your church community as per your privacy settings.
• Donations: Shared with payment processors (e.g., Stripe) and used for tax receipt generation.
• Communication: Used for broadcast emails or SMS sent by your church leaders.

We use the following third-party processors to operate Temple:

• Supabase (USA) — database and authentication hosting.
• Stripe (USA) — subscription and donation payment processing.
• Resend (USA) — transactional email delivery.
• Twilio (USA) — SMS messaging.
• Sentry (USA) — error monitoring; session replays mask text and block media by default.
• Google (Gemini) (USA) — optional AI features (chat assistant, CSV import assistance, donation-email parsing), where enabled.
• Vercel AI Gateway (USA), OpenAI (USA) and Mistral AI (France) — backup for the AI features above: if Google's models are unavailable, the same request is routed through Vercel's AI Gateway to an OpenAI or Mistral model instead.
• Google Maps (USA) — address autocomplete, where configured.
• Intuit QuickBooks / Xero (USA / New Zealand) — optional accounting sync, where a church connects these.
• Vercel (USA) — application hosting, content delivery, and privacy-oriented, cookieless usage analytics (page views and performance metrics; does not track you across other websites).

International transfers: Several processors above are located outside the UK/EEA. Where we transfer personal data of EEA data subjects to them, we rely on the EU Standard Contractual Clauses (Commission Implementing Decision (EU) 2021/914). For transfers of UK data subjects' data, we rely on the UK Information Commissioner's Office's International Data Transfer Agreement (IDTA), or the UK Addendum to the EU SCCs where a processor has already signed the EU clauses with us.

3. Data Portability & Deletion

You have the "Right to Portability" and the "Right to be Forgotten." If you have a Temple login, use your Settings > Privacy & Data dashboard. If you don't have a login — for example, you checked in as a visitor at a church using Temple — visit our Manage Your Data page and confirm your identity by email. Either way, you can:

• Download a machine-readable copy (JSON) of your data.
• Request the deletion of your account and anonymization of your profile.

Note: Financial transaction records (donations, tax receipts, pledges) must be retained for at least 7 years as required by the CRA (Canada) and IRS (USA). A deletion request anonymizes the identifying details on these records rather than deleting them outright.

Data retention periods:

• Financial records (transactions, tax receipts, pledges): retained for a minimum of 7 years as required by tax law — this is a floor, not an automatic deletion point; we do not purge these on a fixed schedule.
• Archived member profiles: deleted 30 days after being archived.
• Pastoral care notes: anonymized after 5 years.
• Communication logs (email/SMS history): anonymized after 3 years.
• Attendance records: retained while a member is active; deleted on a deletion request.

4. Security Measures

We employ Row Level Security (RLS) and industry-standard encryption to protect your data. Access is strictly controlled based on roles (Admin, Staff, Member) within your church.

Legal basis under GDPR / UK-GDPR: Art. 6(1)(a) consent, Art. 6(1)(c) legal obligation (financial record retention), and Art. 6(1)(f) legitimate interests (member directory management). Where we process children's health information (allergies, medical notes) for kids' ministry safeguarding, we rely on Art. 9(2)(a) — your explicit, separately-collected consent.