Privacy Policy

Amen Circle (amencircle.com) is operated by IPHREN LTD (trading as IHS Technology, company no. 12398659), registered at Iphren Ltd, 124 City Road, London, England, EC1V 2NX. We are the data controller for the personal data described in this policy. You can contact us at hello@ihs.technology.

• Account data — your email address and display name.
• Passkey metadata — a public key and device information used to sign you in. Your biometrics (fingerprint, face) never leave your device and are never sent to us.
• Prayer requests — the free-text requests you write. Because prayer content can reveal your religious beliefs, this is special category data under UK GDPR Article 9, and we only process it with your explicit consent.
• Circle membership — which circles you belong to and which requests are assigned to you.
• Cookies — cookies that keep you signed in and remember your language choice (see section 5).
• Access logs — our hosting provider (AWS) records IP addresses and request metadata in server logs for security and troubleshooting.

• Providing the service (account, circles, assignments): performance of a contract — UK GDPR Article 6(1)(b).
• Prayer request content: your explicit consent — Article 9(2)(a) — which you give at registration and can withdraw at any time by deleting your requests or your account.
• Security logging: our legitimate interest in keeping the service secure — Article 6(1)(f).

We use Amazon Web Services as our processor: the application and its database run on an AWS server in the eu-west-2 (London) region, SES sends transactional email, and CloudFront carries traffic between you and the server — its edge locations may handle data in transit outside the UK, but your data is stored only in London. We do not sell or share your data with anyone else, and there is no advertising or analytics tracking on this site.

We set two first-party cookies: amen-circle-session, which is strictly necessary to keep you signed in, and locale, which remembers your language choice. The session cookie is httpOnly, uses SameSite=Lax, lasts up to 30 days, and contains no tracking identifiers. The language cookie uses SameSite=Lax, lasts up to one year, and is not used for tracking. Because these cookies are necessary to provide the service you request or remember your preferences, no cookie consent banner is required under PECR. We use no analytics or third-party cookies of any kind.

All prayer request content is encrypted at rest (AES-256-GCM), in addition to disk-level encryption on our server. Sign-in uses passkeys, so we never store passwords. Sign-in and recovery links are single-use, short-lived, and stored only as hashes.

• Account data is kept until you delete your account, at which point it is deleted immediately.
• Prayer requests are deleted when you delete them, leave a circle, a circle is deleted, or you delete your account.
• Expired sign-in and recovery links are purged automatically.
• Server access logs are retained for 30 days.
• Encrypted database backups are kept for up to 30 days. Data you delete is removed from the live database immediately and ages out of backups within that window.

Under UK GDPR you have the right to:

• Access and portability — download everything we hold about you from Settings → Download my data.
• Erasure — delete your account (and all your data) from Settings → Delete account.
• Rectification — correct your details by contacting us.
• Withdraw consent — at any time, by deleting your requests or your account. Withdrawal doesn't affect processing that happened before.
• Restriction and objection — contact us at hello@ihs.technology.
• Complain — to the Information Commissioner's Office at ico.org.uk.

Amen Circle is for adults only. You must be 18 or older to create an account.

If we make material changes we will update this page and the "last updated" date above, and where appropriate ask for your consent again.