Privacy Policy

App Data Collection

The Biblical Tools mobile app does not collect personal data. We do not require you to create an account, provide your name, email address, or any identifying information to use the app.

• No account or registration required
• No advertising tracking or behavioral analytics in the app
• No device fingerprinting or unique identifiers collected
• No data is sold, rented, or shared with third parties for marketing

Member Accounts & Study Data

BiblicalTools.org offers an optional member account, at no cost, for features like the community feed, private messaging, and the study dashboard. Creating an account is never required to read the Bible, use the study tools, or access any teaching resources.

When you create a member account, we collect your email address (for sign-in and account recovery) and a username you choose. If you sign in, the following is stored securely on our servers (hosted with Supabase, our database provider) so it stays with you across your devices:

• Your journal, only if you choose “Keep in my account” — private to your account. Journal entries are never shown to other members and are never published anywhere on the site. The standard setting is “On this device only”: the journal stays in your browser and is not sent to us. You can change this, and remove the account copy, at any time from the journal on your dashboard.
• Study progress — reading activity, study points and levels, memorized verses, quiz results, and reading-plan progress.
• Your profile — username, avatar, and any bio you choose to write.
• Community content you choose to share — posts, comments, prayer requests, and answered-prayer testimonies. These are visible to other signed-in members, along with your username and avatar.
• Private messages — visible only to you and the member you are messaging.

Push notifications (optional): If you choose to enable browser notifications, we store a delivery address for your device so we can send them. Disabling notifications in your browser removes it. We never send notifications you have not opted into.

Your data is yours. You can download everything we store for you at any time from Account → Export Your Data, and you can delete your account and all associated data from the same page. We do not sell member data or share it with third parties for marketing.

Website Analytics & Advertising

The BiblicalTools.org website uses cookies and similar technologies to understand how visitors interact with our site and to measure the effectiveness of our advertising through the Google Ad Grants program. Specifically, the website uses:

• Google Analytics: We use Google Analytics to collect anonymized data about site traffic, page views, and user behavior. This helps us understand which resources are most useful and how to improve our site. Google Analytics may use cookies to distinguish unique visitors.
• Google Ads Conversion Tracking: As a participant in the Google Ad Grants program for nonprofits, we use Google Ads conversion tracking to measure how effectively our search ads direct visitors to our Bible study resources. This may involve cookies placed by Google when you click on one of our ads.
• Google Tag Manager: We use Google Tag Manager to manage the analytics and advertising tags described above.

The data collected through these tools may include your IP address, browser type, device information, pages visited, referring URL, and interactions with our site. This data is used to improve our website, measure the reach of our ministry, and inform our Google Ads campaigns. We do not sell your data, and we do not share it with third parties for their own marketing purposes. Where data is shared with Google as described in this section, Google acts as a data processor on our behalf under the Google Ads Data Processing Terms.

Managing Cookies: You can control or disable cookies through your browser settings. You may also opt out of Google Analytics tracking by installing the Google Analytics Opt-out Browser Add-on. To learn more about how Google uses data from partner sites, visit Google's privacy & terms page.

Audience Data for Advertising: We may use data collected through Google Analytics to create audience lists (such as lists of past website visitors) for use in our Google Ads search campaigns. These audience lists help us better reach people who have already shown interest in our Bible study resources. As a Google Ad Grants recipient, these audiences are used for search advertising only — we do not run display or video remarketing campaigns.

Conversion Counting: When you complete an action on our website, such as sending a contact message or signing up, our Google Ads tag records that the action happened, but only after your message or signup has gone through. This lets us count how well our ads lead people to our Bible study resources. We do not send your name, email address, phone number or any other personal identifier, hashed or otherwise, to Google with these counts. On every page, before any Google tag loads, our site sets Google’s “ad user data” consent to denied by default, which tells Google’s tags not to send personal information for advertising. Our Google Ads campaigns are geographically targeted to the United States only.

Site Activity Counts — usage data, not personal data: To understand how our website, apps and Roku channel are used, and to improve them, we keep anonymous usage totals. Here is exactly what that involves.

• When: while a page is open in front of you (up to 30 minutes after your last scroll, tap or key press) or its audio or video is playing, even in a background tab, a small script of our own sends a short signal about every 30 seconds and when something changes. The Biblical Tools apps and our Roku channel do the same in versions that include this feature.
• What it contains: the part of the site or app in use (from a fixed list, never the page address); whether reading, audio or video is active and for how many seconds, including audio playing in a background tab; device type, general operating system and browser, and a rough screen-size group; how you arrived (search, social media, email, this site, another site or directly), worked out in your browser from the referring site’s name only; your country, which our host works out when the signal arrives; the app version and, on Roku, the kind of device (stick, box or TV); two random codes (one per browser tab or app session, one per browser or device, replaced after 30 minutes of inactivity and every night); and counts of actions from fixed lists: pages viewed; searches in the Bible Reader, the site search and the guide, whether they found anything, and clicks on a result; study-chat conversations and messages; downloads and prints by kind of document; shares and copies (never what was shared or copied); plays asked for and started, how much of a recording was played (a quarter, half, three quarters or nine tenths), waits for loading and playback errors; songs or chapters played to the end; how far down a page you scrolled; homepage card clicks and the kind of page or site a link leads to (never its address); which Bible Reader tools are used; activities started and finished in the Resource Library (never your answers or score); page errors by kind (never the message); and the answer chosen to “How did you hear about us?” when you sign up for our newsletter.
• What it never contains: your name, email, account, IP address, the device’s built-in or advertising identifier, the address of the page you came from, the passage you are reading, anything you search for or type, your answers or scores, your chat messages, or any Pilgrim step, health or location data. We do not store your IP address. Pages for prayer requests, OpenEars, your account and this privacy page are not counted at all.
• Anonymous device code: to count how many different devices use the website over a week or a month, the script also makes one random code the first time it runs and keeps it in your browser’s local storage (the Biblical Tools apps and our Roku channel will do the same in their next versions). It is not your device’s built-in identifier or an advertising identifier, it is never linked to your name, email, account or IP address, and we store only a scrambled (salted hash) form of it, deleted after about 400 days without use. Clearing this site’s data in your browser removes it, and the choices below also stop it.
• Where visits come from — usage data, not personal data: to understand how people find the site, including through AI assistants and search engines, and to improve it, the script notes on the first page of a visit one label for the site that sent you, from a fixed list: ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Copilot, Gemini, Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, another site, or none (direct). If the link carried one of our own tags (for example a link from our listing in an AI tool), it notes which of our tags it was. Only that label is sent, together with the part of our site where the visit began, whether the visit went further (30 seconds of activity, a second page, playing a recording, a download or pressing Ask Sparrow), whether it reached the Bible Reader, and how many times Ask Sparrow was pressed (never the question). We never receive the address of the page you came from, anything after the “?” in the link, or anything you asked an AI tool, and we build no profile of you. Your browser keeps the label and these yes/no notes in its local storage until your next visit replaces them. After reading our tags, the script removes them from the address bar so they are not kept in bookmarks or shared links; it does this even when a Global Privacy Control or Do Not Track signal has switched counting off, and then nothing is sent. Tags on our Google Ads links are left in place. Each visit is noted on our side only for the current day (cleared after midnight, Pacific time) so that it is counted once; daily totals by label and part of the site are kept for up to 400 days, and our view shows any total under 5 as “under 5”.
• Finding a gathering or a person — usage data, not personal data: to learn whether people who want to take part can find a gathering or reach a person, and to improve those paths, the script counts presses on a few fixed kinds of link and form: joining the Friday Seminar or the Sunday Bible Study, adding one to a calendar or watching it on YouTube (from our pages or from a link in a Sparrow answer), reaching the “Your First Friday” or “Your First Sunday” section, sending a question for the Sunday forum, opening OpenEars, tapping our phone number, and sending the contact or prayer form. Only the kind of press is counted. The count never includes what you wrote, your name, your email address or your phone number. The visit notes in the item above also record, as yes or no, whether the visit reached a gathering and whether it reached a person. Daily totals are kept for up to 400 days, and our view shows any total under 5 as “under 5”.
• How long: each live entry is deleted about 10 minutes after the last signal; the list of random codes used to count each browser or device once a day is cleared after midnight (Pacific time); five-minute totals are kept for 7 days and daily totals for up to 400 days. Our view shows countries that have fewer than 3 browsers or devices in a day combined, and only our own team can see it.
• Your choice: if your browser sends a Global Privacy Control or Do Not Track signal, the website script sends nothing; in versions of the Biblical Tools apps that include this feature, you can turn it off in Settings > Share anonymous usage data; if Limit Ad Tracking is on for your Roku device, the channel sends nothing. The Quiet Hour stream is not counted by this script; our stream server counts its connections separately.

Local Storage

Certain features save data locally on your device. When you use the app or the website without signing in to a member account, this data is never transmitted to our servers or any third party.

Data stored locally includes:

• Bible study chat history
• Bible reading progress and bookmarks
• Step counter and fitness tracking data
• Food and nutrition logs
• Personal notes
• Sleep hours you enter, and nights read from Health Connect or Apple Health if you allow it
• Fasting start and end times, and any private note you add

Biblical Tools does not upload Pilgrim’s health and wellness data to iCloud, to our servers, or to any account.

You can clear this data at any time by uninstalling the app or clearing app data through your device settings.

If you sign in to a member account on the website, your study progress is also synced to your account as described in Member Accounts & Study Data — local storage then acts as an offline copy so those features keep working without a connection. Your journal stays in local storage on your device only, unless you choose “Keep in my account”; it is stored under your member ID, so another member signing in on the same browser does not see it.

Third-Party AI Services

The Bible study chat feature uses an AI service (Claude, provided by Anthropic) to generate responses to your questions. When you send a message in the chat:

• Only the text of your conversation is sent to the AI service
• No personal identifiers are included (no name, email, device ID, or account info)
• No location data is sent
• No device information is transmitted

These AI providers have their own privacy policies. We encourage you to review them if you have concerns about how conversation text is handled on their end.

The sparrow guide’s “Ask Sparrow” button works the same way. When you press it, the question you typed and the address of the page you are on are sent to Anthropic, whose Claude model writes the answer, together with the titles and descriptions of matching site resources, so that it can point you to them. To find those resources by meaning, the question alone is also sent to Voyage AI, which turns it into a list of numbers that we compare with the site’s resources. Nothing is sent until you press the button; the ordinary search never leaves your browser. We do not keep your question. Under its API terms Anthropic does not use your question to train its models. We have opted out of Voyage AI using it for training, and under its terms Voyage AI deletes it once it has been processed. The Bible Reader’s search by meaning sends the words you search for to Voyage AI in the same way, and nowhere else.

If you ask a follow-up, your last few questions on this page and Sparrow’s answers to them are sent to Anthropic together with the new question so that it can be understood in context (Voyage AI receives the earlier questions, not the answers). BiblicalTools does not keep them as a conversation history: they live only in the page you have open and are gone when you leave the page or press “New topic”. Anthropic’s and Voyage AI’s data-handling terms described above apply to them in the same way as to the question itself. Questions about what is playing on the Quiet Hour are answered from the station’s own schedule and records, which hold no information about listeners.

Sparrow and the Bible Reader’s study chat can hand a question to each other. When Sparrow points you to a passage, it can carry your question in the link, after the “#” sign. Browsers do not send that part of a link to our server, and the Reader removes it from the address before any analytics loads, so our analytics never receives it; the question is placed in the study chat’s box and is not sent until you send it. When you choose “Ask Sparrow” in the study chat, your question is sent to Anthropic and Voyage AI to answer it, as described above.

We also count, by month, how many Ask Sparrow questions fall into about two dozen broad topic areas, such as grief or Hebrew study, and whether the site had something to offer, so we know what to add. We do not keep the questions themselves.

Audio Streaming

Audio Bible narration is streamed directly from our servers at biblicaltools.org. Standard web server logs (IP address, timestamp, file requested) may be recorded as part of normal server operation, but this data is not associated with any personal profile and is not used for tracking purposes.

No user account data or identifiers are collected during audio playback.

App Permissions

The app may request the following device permissions:

• Activity / Step Counter: Used to count steps using your device's motion sensors. Step data is stored locally on your device only and is never transmitted.
• Location (optional): If granted, location is used only to determine your local timezone for accurate day-boundary tracking (e.g., midnight rollover for daily step counts). No location coordinates are stored or transmitted to any server.
• Health Connect (Android) and Apple Health (iPhone) — optional: If you turn this on in Pilgrim’s Settings, Pilgrim reads two kinds of data: your daily step count and your sleep sessions. It uses them only to move you along Pilgrim’s Scripture journey and to show your nights on the Rest screen. Pilgrim never writes to Health Connect or Apple Health. This data stays on your device. It is never sent to our servers or to anyone else, never sold, and never used for advertising. You can stop it any time by turning the switch off in Pilgrim, or by removing Biblical Tools in Health Connect or in the Health app (Sharing → Apps). Our use of information received from Health Connect follows the Health Connect Permissions policy, including its Limited Use requirements.

All permissions are optional where possible. Denying a permission will disable only the feature that relies on it.

Children's Privacy

The Biblical Tools app is not directed at children under the age of 13. We do not knowingly collect any personal information from children under 13. If you believe a child under 13 has provided personal information through the app, please contact us and we will promptly address it.

Changes to This Policy

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. When we do, we will post the revised policy on this page and update the effective date at the top. We encourage you to review this page periodically.

Continued use of the app after changes are posted constitutes acceptance of the updated policy.

Contact Us

If you have questions or concerns about this Privacy Policy or the Biblical Tools app, please contact us:

• Email: info@bibleministriesinternational.org
• Mail: Bible Ministries International, 1119 S. Mission Road #188, Fallbrook, CA 92028
• Website: biblicaltools.org