Privacy Policy

Effective May 27, 2026 · Last updated May 27, 2026

1. Who we are and what this policy covers

This Privacy Policy describes how Voryn Software ("we," "us," or "our") collects, uses, and shares information when you use the Forge Study Bible mobile app, the macOS app, the website at forgestudybible.com, and related services (collectively, the "Service"). It applies to all users of the Service, including readers, family leaders, group members, pastors, and church leaders. If a feature of the Service has its own additional privacy notice, that notice will apply in addition to this policy.

2. Information we collect

2.1 Information you provide directly

• Account information. Your name (display name), email address, and password (stored as a salted hash by Supabase Auth). If you sign in with Apple, the unique Apple identifier and email relay we receive.
• Profile content. Optional profile photo, your selected church affiliation, and account preferences.
• Study content you create. Bookmarks, highlights, chapter and verse notes, journals, reflections (text and voice), personal study plans, memorization items and attempts, year-end review entries, and any other content you create or save in the Service.
• Prayer requests. The text of prayer requests you write, who they are for, status (active / answered / archived), and any answer notes. If you record a voice prayer, the audio file and its transcript.
• Family Worship content. Family name, scheduled time and timezone, recurrence preference, and information you enter about each family member (see Section 11 for the special rules that apply to data about children).
• Group and community content. Discipleship-group names, invite codes, group memberships, group chat messages, group prayer-board posts, journals you choose to share with a group, attendance check-ins, and reactions.
• Ask Forge conversations. The prompts you submit, the assistant's responses, and the full conversation history (unless you delete it).
• Audio recordings. Sermon and devotional recordings, prayer-voice recordings, and memorization recitations that you record in the app.
• Church and pastor inquiries. If you submit the church plan inquiry form or a pastor inquiry form, the name, email, phone, role, church name, estimated seats, and any free-text notes you include.
• Feedback. Anything you submit through the in-app feedback form, including optional screenshots.
• Moderation reports. Reports you submit about other users or content, including the reason and any detail you add.

2.2 Information collected automatically

• Reading and usage activity. Which books and chapters you read, when you completed them, your bookmarks and highlight counts, streaks, and other in-app actions needed to operate the Service.
• Subscription status. Whether you are on a free, trial, Forge+, or Forge Family plan; product identifier; trial start and expiration; renewal status; and the environment of the purchase (production or sandbox). Payment card details are handled by Apple and are not visible to us.
• Device and technical information. Device model, operating-system version, app version and build number, language and locale, and timezone. We do not collect precise geolocation.
• Push-notification tokens. The Apple Push Notification service ("APNs") device token, used to send notifications you have enabled (such as Family Worship reminders or trial-ending notices).
• Diagnostic and crash data. When the app crashes or hits a significant error, we receive a stack trace, the app version, the device model, the operating-system version, and your user identifier so we can fix the bug. This is processed by our error-monitoring provider (Sentry).
• Server logs. Our edge functions and APIs log request metadata (such as the function called, response status, timestamps, and tokenized cost data) to operate, secure, and bill the Service.

2.3 Information from other sources

• Apple App Store / Mac App Store. When you purchase, renew, or cancel a subscription, Apple sends us subscription status notifications. We do not receive your payment card or full Apple ID.
• Other family members. If you are added to a Family Worship group by a family leader, we receive the information that leader enters about you.

3. Sensitive and special-category data

Some of the information described above is treated as "sensitive" or "special-category" data under applicable laws, including:

• Information that reveals religious belief or practice (prayer requests, journals, reflections, your reading and study patterns, church affiliation). The whole purpose of Forge is to support Christian study, so by signing up you understand that you will be voluntarily providing this information.
• Voice recordings (sermon, devotional, prayer, and memorization audio) and the transcripts derived from them.
• Information about children entered by a parent or guardian as part of Family Worship (see Section 11).

We rely on your explicit consent — given when you create an account, opt into recording, or add a family member — as the lawful basis for processing this information in regions where consent is required (including the EEA, the UK, and US states that classify it as sensitive). You can withdraw that consent at any time by deleting the relevant content or your account.

4. How we use your information

• To provide and operate the Service, including syncing your content across your iOS, macOS, and web devices.
• To generate AI-assisted study content you request (commentary, Ask Forge, family plans, session extractions, memorization scoring, year-end reviews).
• To transcribe and analyze recordings you create.
• To send transactional and product communications (password resets, trial-ending notices, family reminders, group-activity notifications) using the preferences you set.
• To process subscriptions, free trials, and church-plan inquiries.
• To moderate content, enforce our Terms of Service, and keep the Service safe (including operating banned-word filtering, accepting reports, and acting on blocks).
• To monitor performance, debug crashes, and improve reliability.
• To produce de-identified or aggregated data we use to improve the Service (see Section 8).
• To comply with legal obligations, respond to lawful requests, and protect our rights and the rights of others.

5. AI features and the data we send to AI providers

Several features of the Service use third-party large-language-model and speech-to-text providers to generate responses for you. When you use these features, we send the necessary content to the provider as follows:

We instruct these providers to process your content only to return the requested response and not to retain it for model training, in accordance with the data-processing terms we have with them. AI-generated content is a study aid and may be incomplete, inaccurate, or unconventional; it should always be weighed against Scripture and discussed with your pastor or trusted teachers.

6. Service providers and subprocessors

We use the following service providers to operate the Service. We share with each provider only the information needed for it to perform its function, and we require contractual safeguards around that data.

We may change subprocessors from time to time; we will update this list when we do.

7. Sharing inside the Service (groups, families, churches)

Some content is shared with other users when you choose to share it:

• Discipleship groups. When you join a group, the other group members can see your display name, the messages you post in group chat, the prayer requests you post on the group prayer board, journals you choose to share with the group, your attendance check-ins, and your aggregate progress on group-assigned content (e.g., memory-verse leaderboards). Group leaders also see engagement and prayer-activity insights.
• Family Worship. Members of the same family group, and especially the family leader and co-leader, can see family members' names, ages, attendance, recorded responses, and prayer requests scoped to that family.
• Church directory. If you link your account to a church, other authenticated users who are linked to the same church may be able to see your display name and that you are a member of that church.
• Reports. If you are reported for violating our community guidelines, our moderation team can see the reported content, the report, and your account.

We do not sell your personal information, and we do not share it with third parties for their own advertising or marketing.

8. De-identified and aggregated data

We may create and use de-identified or aggregated data derived from how the Service is used — for example, total minutes spent in study sessions, the most-bookmarked passages across the user base, retention statistics, or AI-feature quality metrics. We use this data to operate, secure, evaluate, and improve the Service, to publish high-level statistics, and to develop new features.

"De-identified" means the data has been processed so it no longer identifies, and cannot reasonably be linked back to, an individual user, household, or device. We commit to maintaining the de-identified status of this data, not to attempt to re-identify it, and to require the same of anyone we share it with. De-identified and aggregated data is not "personal information" under this policy and may be retained and used after your account is deleted.

9. Use of your content to improve Forge and to train AI

We take a careful posture on artificial-intelligence training:

• Identifiable private content (your prayers, journals, reflections, voice recordings, chat messages, and Ask Forge conversations) is not used to train AI models — neither our own nor any third party's — except where you specifically opt in.
• We may use de-identified or aggregated data (as defined in Section 8) to evaluate model quality, fine-tune prompts and guardrails, and improve the Service.
• We may, separately, ask you to opt in to allow specific samples of your content to be used to improve Forge or to train models (for example, by giving thumbs-down feedback on an AI response and choosing to share that exchange). Your opt-in choice is recorded and you can revoke it at any time for future processing.
• We may use the public Scripture text and our own editorial content freely to train and tune the Service.

10. Data retention and deletion

We retain your information for as long as your account is active and for the periods necessary to operate the Service:

• Account data, study content, group memberships, prayer requests, journals, and recordings: kept until you delete them or delete your account.
• Subscription and billing records: retained as required for financial, tax, and audit purposes (typically up to seven years), even after account deletion.
• Apple subscription notifications: retained as part of our payment audit log; subscription identifiers may persist after account deletion to support refund and chargeback handling.
• Diagnostic and operational logs: retained for short periods, generally 30 to 90 days.
• AI-usage events: retained for 30 days for quota and abuse prevention, then deleted.
• Moderation reports and safety records: retained as needed for safety and legal purposes.
• De-identified and aggregated data: retained indefinitely as described in Section 8.

You can delete your account from Account → Profile → Delete Account, or by emailing us. Deletion removes your profile, study content, recordings, group memberships, and Family Worship participation. Some records described above are retained for the limited purposes stated, and de-identified or aggregated data survives deletion.

11. Children's privacy and Family Worship

Forge Study Bible is intended for users who are at least 13 years old. We do not knowingly allow children under 13 to create their own Forge accounts.

Family Worship is the one place where information about a child under 13 may be entered into the Service, and only by the child's parent or legal guardian. When a parent or guardian creates a child profile in Family Worship, we collect: the child's display name, birthdate, an optional avatar emoji selection, and (during use of Family Worship) the child's attendance, takeaway notes, and prayer requests if those are recorded by the family leader.

By creating a child profile, the parent or guardian confirms that they are the child's parent or legal guardian, that they have authority to provide this information, and that they consent to our collection and use of this information solely to operate Family Worship for that family. We do not require or knowingly collect any other personal information from children. We do not condition a child's participation in any activity on disclosing more information than is reasonably necessary. We do not use child profile information for marketing or to send communications to the child.

A parent or guardian may at any time review the information stored about their child, delete the child's profile, or contact us at hello@forgestudybible.com to request access, correction, or deletion of any child-related information.

If we learn that we have collected information from a child under 13 outside the Family Worship parent-attestation framework described above, we will delete that information promptly. To report a concern, contact hello@forgestudybible.com.

12. Your privacy rights

Depending on where you live, you may have the right to:

• Access the personal information we hold about you.
• Correct inaccurate information.
• Delete your information (subject to the limited retentions described in Section 10).
• Receive a portable copy of your information.
• Restrict or object to certain processing, including processing of sensitive data.
• Withdraw consent you previously provided, including consent for AI-training opt-ins.
• Not be discriminated against for exercising these rights.
• Appeal a denial of a privacy request, where required by your state's law.

We do not "sell" or "share" personal information for cross-context behavioral advertising, as those terms are defined under California, Colorado, Connecticut, and other US state privacy laws. We do not engage in profiling that produces legal or similarly significant effects about you.

To exercise any of these rights, contact hello@forgestudybible.com. We may need to verify your identity before responding. Authorized agents may submit requests with documented authority.

13. Security

We protect your information with measures including HTTPS encryption in transit, encryption at rest by our hosting providers, password hashing, row-level-security policies in our database, signed URLs for private audio, and least-privilege access for our team. No system is perfectly secure; if we become aware of a security incident affecting your information, we will notify you and applicable regulators as required by law.

14. International data transfers

The Service is operated from the United States, and your information is processed in the United States and other countries where our service providers operate. If you access the Service from outside the United States, you understand that your information will be transferred to and processed in jurisdictions that may have different data-protection laws. Where required, we rely on standard contractual clauses or other lawful transfer mechanisms.

15. Changes to this policy

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. If we make material changes, we will notify you in the app, by email, or by prominent notice on this page before the changes take effect. The "Effective" date at the top of this page indicates when the current version took effect.

16. Contact us

For privacy questions or to exercise your rights:
Voryn Software — Forge Study Bible
hello@forgestudybible.com