Privacy Policy

The short version

• You can browse the whole site without an account and without telling us anything about yourself.
• We do not sell personal information, and we never have.
• There are no advertising networks, no cross-site trackers and no advertising cookies on this site.
• We do not store visitors’ IP addresses in our analytics.
• A prayer request you ask for is public by design; a prayer you write for somebody else is not published anywhere.

What we collect

Nothing is required to look. Reading the map, a church page, a city page or the prayer wall needs no account and no personal information.

If you create an account, we hold your email address, the name you choose to display, and anything else you choose to add to your profile. Sign-in is handled by Supabase, our database and authentication provider; we never see or store your password.

Things you write. Prayer requests, comments, community posts, church corrections and church ownership claims are stored with your account, or — if you pray as a guest — with the first and last name you give at the time. Where a piece of writing is published and where it is kept private is described under “Prayer requests” below.

How pages are used. For each page view we record the path, the site you arrived from, any campaign tag in the link, an anonymous identifier for that browser tab, whether you are on a phone, tablet or desktop, and whether the request came from a search engine’s crawler. That is the whole list. We do not record your IP address, we do not set an analytics cookie, and nothing in that record identifies you.

The one IP address we keep. If your church signs a partnership agreement on this site, the signer’s name, email address, typed signature, the time and the IP address of the device that signed are stored with the signed document, because that record is what makes an electronic signature stand up. Nowhere else is an address written down: elsewhere it is held in memory for a moment, to stop one source flooding the site with automated submissions, and then discarded — and in the short “is this church still here?” prompt it is scrambled one-way first, so what we store cannot be turned back into an address.

Preferences kept on your device. Your map style, the city network you last visited, and which tips you have dismissed are stored in your browser and never sent to us as a profile.

Information about churches

Church records are information about organisations, not about private individuals: names, addresses, service times, denominations, websites and public contact details, drawn from OpenStreetMap, the Overture Maps Foundation, an older import from Google Places, records entered by our own team, and corrections from the churches themselves. The details on a church page — a website, a service time, a phone number — are usually read from the church’s own public website, and sometimes from public search results. How each field is sourced and verified is set out on our data and methodology page.

We do not want personal information in those records. Where a church’s public listing includes a named individual’s private details, or where a church’s published calendar includes a personal event, write to us and we will remove it.

YouTube data

The Church Map uses YouTube API Services to show which churches are broadcasting a service right now, and to record the history of a congregation’s streamed services on its page.

By using The Church Map you are agreeing to be bound by the YouTube Terms of Service. Google’s own handling of data is described in the Google Privacy Policy.

What we access. Publicly available information about a church’s own YouTube channel and its videos: video and channel identifiers, titles, descriptions, thumbnails, publish and broadcast times, durations, view counts, and whether a broadcast is live, upcoming or finished. Our access is read-only. We never upload, edit, rate, comment on or delete anything on YouTube.

We never ask for your YouTube account. The Church Map does not offer YouTube sign-in and holds no visitor’s YouTube credentials or private account data. Our requests are made with our own API key, not on any visitor’s behalf. Because we never obtain access to your Google account, there is nothing for you to revoke — but you can review and remove any application’s access to your Google account at any time at Google’s security settings page.

What we store, and for how long. We keep a record of each broadcast so a church page can show when that congregation gathers and how long its services run. Every resolved channel is re-checked on a weekly cycle, and broadcasts that could still change status are re-checked far more often than that. If a video is deleted or made private, we stop being able to see it and record that fact rather than continuing to display it as though it were still there.

We do not host video. No video is downloaded, copied or re-hosted. Playback happens in YouTube’s own embedded player or by following a link to youtube.com, and YouTube’s terms and privacy policy govern what happens once you press play. We do not use YouTube data for advertising, and we do not sell it or pass it to anyone else.

Prayer requests

A request you make is meant to be seen. When you ask for prayer, that request can appear on the prayer wall, on the map, on the prayer page and on a church page, so that strangers can pray for you. It shows your first name and last initial, or no name at all if you ask anonymously. An anonymous request is read by a moderator first; a request from a signed-in account may appear right away. Sometimes a request is passed privately to a church instead of being published.

A prayer you write for someone is not. Words written while praying for a stranger’s request are published nowhere on this site. A moderator reads them, and if the person who asked chose to hear from those praying, the prayer is emailed to that one person and to nobody else.

Where a prayer was prayed from. The prayer wall draws a line of light from the place a prayer was prayed to the church that received it, and that feed is public. If your browser has already given this site permission to know your location, those coordinates travel with the prayer and are part of that feed. The site never asks you for the permission — it uses only one you have already granted — and if you have not granted it, the prayer is recorded with no location at all. Your device also keeps a random id so the wall can tell your own light from everyone else’s; it is tied to no account, name or email address.

Your email address is never published. We use it only for what you asked for, every message includes a link to stop them, and if you want something removed after the fact, ask us and we will remove it.

Who else handles this data

We use a small number of service providers, each for a single job:

• Supabase — database and sign-in.
• Railway — application hosting.
• Cloudflare — domain and content delivery.
• Mapbox — the map itself.
• Resend — sending email, such as a prayer request to a church.
• OpenAI — suggesting steps when someone builds a guided prayer journey.
• Google and YouTube — the fonts the site loads, and the broadcast information described above.

None of these is given your information for their own purposes, and none of them is an advertising network.

Your choices

You can ask us what we hold about you, ask for it to be corrected, or ask for your account and everything attached to it to be deleted. Write to [email protected] and we will act on it. You do not need to give a reason, and we will not ask you to justify the request.

The site is not directed at children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect information from them.

Changes to this policy

If this policy changes we will update the date at the top of the page. Where the change is significant — a new kind of information collected, or a new recipient — we will say so on the page rather than leaving you to spot the difference.

Contact

The Church Map · 2279 New Town Dr NE, Grand Rapids, Michigan 49525, United States · [email protected]

See also our terms of service.