Privacy
Privacy notice
What this app collects, who else ever sees it, how long it is kept, and what you can require of us. Last updated 2 September 2026.
Who is responsible
Scripture Study is a small, invite-only project run by one administrator rather than a company. It is not incorporated, it takes no advertising, and it sells nothing. Under UK and EU data protection law the administrator of this instance is the data controller for everything described below.
If you have an account, the quickest route is Send feedback in the sidebar. It reaches the administrator with your account attached, so there is nothing to prove before your request can be acted on.
If you do not — you asked for access and never got one, you are a publisher, or you are writing on someone else’s behalf — use the contact page. It goes straight to the administrator, and the reply comes back to the address you give.
What is collected
What you give us
Your email address and name, to have an account at all. Whatever you write into the app: notes, highlights, bookmarks, the connections you draw between passages, the files you import along with anything you write about them and any cover image you add, your bio and profile picture, and any feedback you send — including a thumbs rating on a study-assistant answer, which is stored together with a copy of that answer and of the request that produced it, so a person can review what you saw. If you asked for access before you had an account, the email, name and message on that form — the address is sent one message asking it to confirm the request, and nothing further unless you confirm. If you write in through the contact page, the email, name and message on that form, held so the administrator can read and reply.
What the app records as you use it
Where you last stopped reading, your settings and reader toggles, your progress through the language courses answer by answer, and a line per study-assistant call recording the kind of study, which book of the Bible it concerned, how many of its Bible references checked out, and what it cost. Two things are counted with no account attached at all: how many times each screen of the app is opened each day, and a search term that found nothing in the Bible text, the dictionary, the concordance or the topical index — a single plain word or short phrase only, so that a name typed to find one of your own notes is never kept. Ordinary web server logs, kept by the host, include your IP address.
What is deliberately not collected
There is no analytics service, no tracking and no advertising anywhere in this app, and this app sets no third-party cookie. One thing does, and it is named rather than buried: playing a BibleProject video loads YouTube’s own player, which sets its cookies as it would on YouTube. That happens only when you press play, only on the video itself, and nothing about your account or your reading goes with it — the entry for Google in the table above says exactly what it can see. The two tallies described above — screens opened, and search terms that found nothing — are kept in the app’s own database, sent nowhere, and hold no account, address, session or order of events that could be joined back to a person. Nothing profiles you, nothing follows you to another site, and nothing is sold or shared for marketing. The questions you put to the study assistant are not stored — except inside a feedback report you choose to send, which keeps its copy so a person can review it. Your password is never seen in a form that could be handed over, and your card details never reach this app at all.
Why we are allowed to hold it
The lawful bases, in the language the law uses:
Performing our agreement with you
Your account, your content, and your settings. You asked for a Bible study app; it cannot hold your notes without holding your notes.
Legitimate interests
Keeping the instance secure and working, deciding access requests, answering what arrives through the contact page, tracking what AI calls cost so one account cannot spend the whole budget, and checking uploaded pictures and shared links automatically so that other readers are not shown something harmful. You can object to any of these — see your rights below.
Consent
Push reminders, sharing a note or a resource with other readers, and appearing on the supporters wall. Each is off until you turn it on, and withdrawing is the same switch in the other direction.
Legal obligation
Records of donations, which financial law requires to be kept for a period regardless of what either of us would prefer.
What the AI features send, and where
The part most worth reading closely, because it is the part where your own writing leaves this app.
The study assistant
Sends the passage you are studying and the kind of study you asked for. Your notes are never included. If you are reading a licensed translation, the passage is re-read from the public-domain Berean Standard Bible first, so no publisher’s wording is sent to a model. Answers are not attributed to you at the provider, and the question itself is not stored here afterwards.
Your imported library
This is the significant one. When you import a book or a document, the text extracted from it is sent in sections to an embedding model so that searching your library by meaning works, and — if you ask for suggested connections — to a language model that proposes links to passages. The original file is discarded after processing and the extracted text stays in your private, per-account storage, but the text itself does travel to those providers to be processed. If that is not what you want for a particular document, do not import it.
Automated checks
A profile picture you upload is shown to a vision model, as is the cover of a resource at the moment you submit it to the community library, and a link you attach to a passage has its title and text classified — all to catch material that should not be shown to other readers. A cover on a resource you keep private is not checked, because nobody else is shown it. These are automated decisions, and any of them can be wrong. Neither has a legal effect on you, and both are appealable: send feedback and a person will look.
What the providers do with it
These are commercial APIs used under terms that do not permit your content to be used to train their models. They do retain what is sent for a limited period to detect abuse of their own service — typically around thirty days — which is outside this app’s control and worth knowing before you import something sensitive.
Everyone else who touches it
The complete list. Each of these is a company doing one job for this app under its own contract; none of them is given your data to use for anything of their own.
Everything the app stores: your account, notes, highlights, bookmarks, library, learning progress, and settings. This is where the app lives.
Processes data in: United States (us-west-2)
Every request you make to the app, including the address of the page and your IP address, in ordinary server logs. AI requests pass through their gateway on the way to the model providers below.
Processes data in: United States and worldwide edge locations
The passage a study is about, the question implied by which button you pressed, a profile picture when you upload one, a resource's cover image when you submit that resource to the community library, and the title and text of a page you attach to a passage. Not your notes, and not your identity.
Processes data in: United States
The text extracted from resources you import, in sections, so that searching your library by meaning works. This is the largest amount of your own content that leaves the app.
Processes data in: United States
The search terms derived from the passage you are studying. Off by default and per-request.
Processes data in: United States
Which chapter was requested, under the administrator's key. Not who requested it — the app fetches on your behalf, so for the fetch itself these providers see the deployment, not you. API.Bible differs in one respect: its licence requires a small script of theirs to run in your browser and report that a passage of theirs was shown, and that report goes from your browser, so it carries what any request from a browser carries — your IP address and browser details. It carries nothing about your account and nothing about what you were reading beyond the passage itself. It runs only on screens showing an API.Bible translation.
Processes data in: United States
Your name, email, and payment details, which you give to Stripe directly. Card numbers never reach this app.
Processes data in: United States and Ireland
Your email address and the content of the notification — an access decision, a sharing decision, a password link.
Processes data in: Wherever that server is
Your IP address, and signals from your browser about how it behaved on those pages, in order to judge whether a person or a script is filling the form in. Nothing you have written and nothing about your account.
Processes data in: United States and worldwide edge locations
An anonymous subscription endpoint for your browser and the text of the reminder. Which browser vendor depends on the browser you used to subscribe.
Processes data in: Varies
Your IP address and browser details, and which page you were on. A chapter offering a video loads its thumbnail from YouTube as the page draws, so this happens before you press play as well as after. Pressing play loads YouTube's player, which sets its own cookies as it would on YouTube itself. Nothing about your account, your notes or anything else you have read is sent, and nothing you do in this app is reported back to it.
Processes data in: United States and worldwide edge locations
Your IP address and browser details, and which page you were on, when a poster loads from their own image servers. Nothing about your account. Their licence requires their artwork be shown from their servers rather than copied onto this one, which is why your browser fetches it rather than this app.
Processes data in: United States
Most of these are in the United States, so using this app means your data is transferred outside the UK and the EEA. Those transfers rely on the standard contractual clauses in each provider’s terms, and on the UK and EU adequacy decisions for the US where the provider is certified under the Data Privacy Framework.
How long it is kept
Your account and everything in it
Until you ask for it to be deleted. Nothing here expires on its own — it is yours until you say otherwise.
Cached chapters of licensed translations
A fortnight for the ESV, 28 days for API.Bible texts, and never more than a few hundred verses at a time. These are the publishers' limits, and the app holds itself inside them.
Study assistant answers
Up to 30 days in a shared cache, so that a passage someone has already asked about answers instantly. Keyed on the passage and the question, never on who asked.
The record of AI usage
A year, then removed: your daily allowance is counted from the current day alone, and nothing else needs the older lines. Each records that a call happened, what kind of study it was, which book of the Bible it concerned, whether it was answered from the shared cache, whether you asked for a fresh answer or let it search the web, how many of its Bible references checked out against the text, and what it cost — never the chapter or verse, and never what you asked.
Counts of screens opened
Indefinitely, because there is nothing personal in them: one number per screen per day, with no account, address or order of events attached. Anything in a page address that named one of your own things or something you looked up is dropped before the count is made.
Search terms that found nothing
Ninety days, then removed. The term alone, with no account attached, and only when it is a single plain word or a short phrase of plain letters — so a name typed to find one of your own notes is never kept.
Access requests that were never approved
Kept while the administrator is still deciding, and removable on request. If you asked for access and would rather not be on that list, say so and it goes. A request whose address is never confirmed is never shown to the administrator at all.
Messages sent through the contact page
Kept so there is a record of what was asked and what was done about it, and removable on request — write in and say so, and the message goes, along with any earlier ones from you.
Donation records
Kept for as long as the law requires financial records to be kept, which is longer than an account. Stripe holds its own copy under its own terms.
What you can require
Under UK and EU data protection law you have the rights below, and this app is built so that most of them are things you can simply do rather than things you have to ask for.
A copy of everything (access and portability)
Already yours, without asking: the last card on your profile downloads the complete archive in a machine-readable file, prepared while you wait.
Correction
Your name, bio, picture and email are editable on your profile. Anything else, ask.
Deletion
Ask, and your account and everything in it is deleted — normally within a few days, and within one month at the outside. Take your download first, because deletion is not reversible. You can also have the account disabled instead, which keeps your content and closes the door.
Objection and restriction
You can object to anything done on the basis of legitimate interests, and ask that processing be paused while a disagreement is sorted out.
Withdrawing consent
Un-share a note or a resource, turn off reminders, or take yourself off the supporters wall, at any time and without explanation. Un-sharing takes the item back from everyone immediately.
Complaining to a regulator
If you think this notice is not being honoured, you can complain to the UK Information Commissioner’s Office at ico.org.uk, or to your own country’s data protection authority. You are asked, but not required, to raise it here first.
Cookies and what sits on your device
There is no cookie banner on this app because there is nothing to consent to. The only cookies are the ones that keep you signed in, which are strictly necessary and exempt.
Installed as an app, it also keeps reference material on your device so that reading works offline: the chapters you have opened, and the dictionary, lexicon and cross-reference entries you have looked at. All of that is public-domain text that is the same for every reader — your notes, highlights, bookmarks and library are never stored this way. Signing out clears it. Worth knowing on a shared device: someone else could see which chapters have been read on it.
Children
Accounts are for readers aged 16 and over. Access is granted one person at a time by an administrator rather than by open sign-up, so this is a condition of being approved rather than a checkbox. If you believe a child has an account here, say so and it will be removed.
If something goes wrong
If reader data is exposed by a breach, the administrator will report it to the Information Commissioner’s Office within 72 hours of becoming aware where the law requires it, and will tell affected readers directly where the risk to them is high. You will hear it from us rather than from somewhere else.
Changes to this notice
Substantive changes are announced in the changelog like any other change to the app, and the date at the top of this page moves. Nothing is changed retroactively to cover something that already happened.
See also: terms of use and copyright and attribution.