Privacy Policy

What we collect

Account details: your email address, your name, and a password. Passwords are stored hashed (bcrypt); we never hold the original. Church and invitation code are optional.

If you sign in with Google: your email address, name and profile picture, from Google. IBSTH asks Google for three permissions only, openid, email and profile. It has no access to Gmail, contacts or Drive, and cannot obtain any.

The sign-up survey, which is optional and can be skipped: church name, your role in it, your experience with inductive Bible study, and what you hope to get from the app.

Your activity: chapters read, bookmarks, highlights, notes, reading plan progress, devotion completion, and the IBS study sessions you work through along with the observations and applications you write in them.

Technical data: a login session cookie and ordinary server request logs.

What we do not collect

No payment information. Everything in IBSTH is free and we never ask for a payment method.

No location, no contacts, and nothing about other apps on your device.

No advertising tracking. There is no third-party ad network and no behavioural analytics package in this app.

Where your information goes

AI features: the observations, questions and applications you write are sent for processing to the Azure OpenAI infrastructure operated by LC Lab, Inc. This data is not reused for model training.

The Bible text sent alongside your writing to any AI provider is always the public-domain KJV. Copyrighted translations such as NIV, NLT, NASB, ESV and Korean translations are never sent to an AI provider under any circumstance. This is a term of our agreements with the Bible copyright holders.

Scripture usage reporting: when a licensed translation is displayed, a view is reported to API.Bible (fums.api.bible). What is sent is a randomly generated device identifier and session identifier, and nothing else. No email address, no name, no account id. This reporting is required by our agreements with the Bible copyright holders.

Email: password reset messages, and only those, are delivered through SendGrid. We send no other mail.

Audio and images: Bible narration, maps and illustrations are served from bs.ubf.org, and English dictionary pronunciation from new.pabit.app.

IBSTH does not sell or rent your information.

Cookies and browser storage

A session cookie keeps you signed in. Without it, signing in does not persist.

Browser local storage holds display preferences only: light or dark theme, font size, the chapter you were last reading, the translation you chose, the narration voice, and similar settings. These stay in your browser and are not sent to the server.

Keeping and deleting your data

Account details and study records are kept for as long as the account exists.

To delete your account, write to info@ibsth.org. Deletion removes the account together with its study records and cannot be undone.

An administrator may suspend or delete an account that abuses the service.

Children

IBSTH is intended for a general audience and does not knowingly collect information from children under 13. If we learn that we have, we delete it.

Changes

If this policy changes, the date at the top of this page changes with it. We will say so in the app when the change is significant.