Privacy at The Berea

• Delivering the site. The Berea is hosted by Vercel, which processes technical information about each request — such as your IP address, browser type and the page requested — to deliver pages and protect the site from abuse. Vercel may keep request logs for a limited time under its own policies.
• Visit statistics. We use Vercel Web Analytics to understand which pages are read. It does not set cookies. Vercel uses request details to produce aggregate counts; we see totals such as pages viewed, referring sites, countries, and device and browser types — not who you are.
• Settings kept on your device. Your theme, the audience you chose, and trivia best scores are stored only in your browser. Your translation choices are stored in two cookies, translations and readerTranslation, for up to one year, and are sent to our server so pages can show the translations you picked. You can clear these at any time in your browser settings.

• Account details: your email address, the name you give, and your password, which we store only as a one-way hash.
• What you save: notes, bookmarks, highlights, and progress through studies and reading plans. These are tied to your account and are not shown to other visitors.
• Staying signed in: a session cookie keeps you signed in; a session ends after about seven days without use. Each session record includes the IP address and browser type from which it began.
• Email from us: only about your account — a password-reset link when you ask for one (it works once and expires after an hour; using it signs you out on every device), or a link to confirm your address. Email is sent through Resend.

To operate The Berea: showing you what you saved, keeping you signed in, protecting accounts (for example, by limiting repeated sign-in attempts), diagnosing problems, and understanding overall use of the site. We do not sell or rent personal information or use it for advertising.

• Through the site's admin page, the administrator can see a list of accounts: name, email address, sign-up date, and how many bookmarks, notes and highlights each has — not their contents.
• Through the database itself, the administrator has technical access to everything described above, including the text of notes. That access is used only to operate and repair the site, investigate abuse, or carry out a request you make.
• Service providers process information on our behalf: Vercel (hosting and visit statistics), Aiven (database hosting), Resend (automated email such as password resets), and Google (Gmail), which hosts our contact mailbox. Bible text is supplied by bible.helloao.org; our server requests it without sending information about you.

Our database and the servers that run The Berea are located in the United States. Pages may be delivered to you from Vercel's servers in other countries.

• Account details and saved items are kept until the account is deleted.
• Records of the account emails we have sent you (used to stop repeated sends) are kept with your account and deleted with it.
• Session records, including IP address and browser type, may currently be kept until the account is deleted.
• Our database provider keeps encrypted backups. Information that has been deleted may remain in those backups until they are replaced under the provider's backup schedule.
• We aim to delete correspondence about a privacy request within 12 months after the request is resolved, unless we need it longer for a legal obligation or an ongoing matter.
• Settings stored in your browser stay until you clear them.

• You can use The Berea without an account.
• You can delete your account and everything saved with it yourself, at any time, from My Study → Delete my account. You'll be asked for your password. Deletion removes your account details, saved items, progress and every signed-in session; information already in our provider's backups may remain until those backups are replaced.
• You can also ask for a copy of what your account has saved, or ask us to delete your account, by writing to asktheberea@gmail.com. We aim to respond within 30 days, or sooner where the law requires. To protect your account, we confirm every request with the email address on the account before acting, and we send copies only to that address.

The Berea is not directed at children under 13, and accounts are not intended for them. If we learn that an account belongs to a child under 13, we will delete it.

If we change this policy, we will update the date at the top of this page. Questions about this policy or your information: asktheberea@gmail.com.

About The Berea