Privacy Policy
ChurchOS collects nothing personal, and this page explains exactly what that means under POPIA.
The short version
We collect nothing personal. There are no accounts, no cookies, and no identifiers of any kind. A cookie is a small file a website saves on your device to recognise you later, and this site does not use them. We do not know who you are, and we have built the site so that we never can.
This policy is written to align with the Protection of Personal Information Act, POPIA, which is South Africa’s privacy law. It is short because there is almost nothing to disclose.
What we count
We count exactly three things, and none of them is tied to a person.
- Page views, meaning how many times each page is opened.
- Which topics are read, so we know what to write more of.
- Taps through to a church’s own website, so we know the site is doing its job.
These are plain totals. They tell us that a page was read, never who read it.
Why we never collect belief
What you read on this site can say something deeply personal about you. Religious belief is special personal information under section 26 of POPIA, a category the law protects more strictly than ordinary information. The safest thing a website like this can do is never collect it, so we never do. Because we do not know who you are, nothing you read here can ever be connected to you.
Your network address
When your device asks for a page, it sends a network address, called an IP address, which is how the internet knows where to deliver the page. That address is used transiently to protect the site from abuse, for example to block floods of automated requests, and it is never stored.
Where the site is served from
The site is delivered by Cloudflare, a service that serves web pages quickly around the world, from servers outside South Africa. What travels through those servers is the page itself. No personal information about you is stored there, because none is collected anywhere.
Information Officer
POPIA asks every website to name an Information Officer, the person responsible for privacy questions.
Information Officer: Brendon Mapinda, mapindabrendon@gmail.com.
If you have a privacy question or complaint, write to that address. You may also contact the Information Regulator of South Africa, the public body that oversees POPIA.