Privacy

Your email address, to sign you in, to tell you when a journey is ready, and to send you your journal if you ask. When you email yourself your journal, we note the time (never the journal) so we can limit it to 3 a day.

Your journey choices: length, time each day, where you are with God, which part of the Bible, and your daily rhythm. We use these to build your journey.

The two optional questions, your question for God and what's going on in your life. They are used once, to help choose the passages for your journey. If you choose Suggest a focus for me, your question (only that one) is also read once to suggest a few places in the Bible to start; nothing from that is saved except the time you asked, so Cairn can limit how often it's used. After your journey is planned, only you can see them (under View Journey Plan in the journey's settings), they are never used again, and you can delete them any time.

Your journeys and progress: each day's readings and notes, and which days you've marked done.

Daily reminders, if you turn them on: the time and dates you choose, your time zone, and the notification address your phone gives us, so reminders reach it. Reminders can also come by email, to your sign-in address. Turn a reminder off, block notifications for Cairn in your phone's settings, or tap “Stop email reminders” in any reminder email, and they stop.

Printing a journey: when you print seven days of a journey with the Bible passages included, the passages are fetched for that file and not kept by Cairn. A printed journey never includes anyone's journal.

Verses you highlight: which verses you marked, and any note you write on them. We keep the verse's reference (like James 1:3), never the Bible text itself. Notes are private like your journal: only you can read them, and they are never shown to AI. In a group journey you can choose to share your highlights: the group then sees how many people highlighted each verse, never who, and never your notes. Your organization sees only its most highlighted verses, counted across its groups.

If you share a journey: the name you choose to show, that you're 18 or older, who's on the journey with you, and the email address you sent an invitation to. The person you share with sees your name, the journey, and nothing else of yours unless you both turn on sharing your journal (see below). Your private answers are never shown to them.

Your journal entries. Only you can read them. They are never shown to AI, and never used for anything else. That includes research and improving Cairn.

• Store the Bible text itself. It's fetched fresh each time you read, and not kept.
• Send your journal to AI, or to anyone else. The only time it leaves Cairn is when you ask us to email it to your own address.
• Sell or rent your information, show ads, or use advertising or analytics trackers.
• Use what you share for research. If that ever changes, we'll ask you first, separately.

A few services do specific jobs for us. Each gets only what that job needs:

• Anthropic (Claude) writes your journey. It receives your journey choices and, only while planning, your two optional answers (your question alone, if you ask it to suggest a focus). Then it receives the plan and each day's Bible passage to write the day. It never receives your journal. Under Anthropic's commercial terms, what we send isn't used to train its AI.
• Supabase hosts our database and sign-in. It stores the information described above.
• Vercel hosts the app. Like most websites, it keeps short-lived technical logs, which can include your IP address.
• Inngest runs the background work of building a journey. It handles the plan and each day's readings, never your optional answers or journal.
• Resend delivers our emails: your sign-in links, “journey ready” notes, which include your journey's title, invitations you send (your name, the journey's title, and your note), and, only if you ask for it, your journal as a PDF sent to your own address.
• AO Lab's Free Use Bible API provides the Scripture text (the Berean Standard Bible) and its recordings. Cairn asks it for the passages you read from Cairn's own server, so it never sees your name, email, or account, and no tracking script runs for it. When you choose Listen, your phone plays the recording straight from AO Lab, which sees your IP address, as any website does. Your choice of reader is kept only on your device.
• Sentry tells us when something breaks. Reports are cleaned first: no journal text, answers, email addresses, or IP addresses.
• Google, only if you choose “Continue with Google” to sign in.
• Apple, Google, or your browser's notification service delivers daily reminders, if you turn them on. A reminder says only the day and its passage (for example, “Day 3 · Philippians 1:3–11”), never your journey's title, your answers, or your journal. It can appear on your lock screen.
• Reminder emails, if you choose them, are sent by Resend like Cairn's other emails. They show the journey's title, where you are on it, the day's passage reference, and its journal question, never your journal or your answers.

If a journey needs a person to check it before it's ready, a reviewer can see that journey's plan and days, but never your optional answers, your journal, or your email address.

You can invite one person, 18 or older, to walk through a journey with you. You each keep your own progress and your own journal. Your entries are shown to them only when two switches are both on: the journey owner's Shared Journal switch, and your own share my entries switch. Either of you can turn yours off at any time. You can also keep any single entry private: then no one else sees it, whatever the switches say, and the conversation on it is hidden until you share it again.

If your place on someone's journey ends (you leave, they remove you, or they delete the journey), you can still save your own entries as a PDF for 7 days. After that, your entries on that journey are deleted. The same goes if the owner deletes their account.

When an entry is shared, you can each react to it and write comments under it. Only the two of you see them, and they disappear again if either switch is turned off. Comments (never journal entries) are checked against a short list of words, by code and never by AI. A comment that matches waits for a person at Cairn before the other person sees it.

You can report the other person's entry, a comment, or the person. A report goes to a small group of people who review Cairn, with a copy of what you reported as it read then. That copy is the only way they ever see a journal entry. They may remove a comment, hide an entry from the other person, or pause someone's sharing, and they email the person to say so. Resolved reports are deleted after 180 days. What's asked of everyone on a shared journey is in Walking Together.

A church or ministry can set up an organization on Cairn and give Leader seats to its small-group leaders. A leader can start a group journey for up to 12 people, who join by the group's link or an invitation. Journals work the same way as on a shared journey: your entries are shown to the group only when the leader's Shared Journalswitch and your own share my entries switch are both on, and sharing is never expected. Any single entry can be kept private, as on a shared journey.

The leader may write a short note about the group when they set it up. It helps choose the passages, only the leader can see it, and the leader can delete it in the journey's settings.

Highlights work like journals, with their own switch: when the leader's Shared Journal switch and your own share my highlights switch are both on, the group sees how many people highlighted each verse. It never sees who highlighted it, or any note. The same switch also counts your highlights in your organization's totals: it sees the verses its groups of 4 or more highlighted most, only where at least 3 people highlighted a verse, and never names, notes, or which group.

The organization can read each group journey's plan and the content Cairn wrote for it (the same for everyone in the group), with Cairn's own discussion questions. It never sees the leader's note about the group, the icebreaker, gathering details, or the questions a leader wrote. Beyond that, the organization sees group totals only: what each group is reading, who leads it, which books of the Bible its groups are reading, and the words their journeys' themes share (single words, never sentences). For groups of 4 or more people, it also sees how many read that week, the average days read, verses read, and, once a journey ends, how many read its last day. It sees each leader's group journeys, how many days they read on them that week, and, on Weekly journeys, how many gatherings were skipped or given a date (never when or where), which leaders agree to when they accept a seat. An organization never sees anyone's journal, shared or not, anything people write (not even how much), or anyone's personal journeys or private answers.

We keep your journeys, progress, and journal until you delete them or your account. When you delete something, it's removed right away. Backup copies may take a little longer to disappear.

• A journal entry: clear its text, and it's deleted.
• A journey: open its Settings, then Manage My Journey, and choose Delete journey, or swipe it left on the home page. Its journal, progress, and anything you shared go with it.
• A copy of your journal: open the journey's Settings, then Export My Journal, to save it as a PDF or email it to yourself. Anyone with that file can read it. If you choose to give it to an AI tool, that's between you and that tool; Cairn never does it for you.
• A highlight or its note: tap the verse while reading and choose Remove highlight or Edit note.
• What you shared: open the journey's Settings, then View Journey Plan, and choose Delete these answers.
• Everything: go to My Account and choose Delete my account.

You can also write to us at privacy@cairn.bible with any question, or to ask what we hold about you.

Everything travels over an encrypted connection and is stored encrypted by our database provider. Our database only lets you, when signed in, read your own journeys and journal.

We want to be honest about one thing. Your journal isn't separately encrypted inside Cairn, so the people who run the database could technically reach it. We don't read journals, and the part of Cairn that talks to AI is blocked from them entirely.

Cairn is for adults, 18 and older. Using Cairn also means agreeing to its Terms of Use.

Cairn is a pilot, and this note may change as we learn. If it changes in a way that affects what you've shared, we'll tell you before it takes effect.

Questions: privacy@cairn.bible