What we keep, and for how long

Reading the site

There are no accounts, no advertising and no analytics or tracking scripts, and nothing on the page is loaded from another company.

Like almost every web server, ours keeps a standard access log for security and troubleshooting: the address a request came from, the page asked for, the time and the browser type. Those logs are deleted after 14 days.

Your browser may remember two small preferences on your own device: the language you chose, and whether you closed a notice. The language you choose is also kept in a small cookie that holds only "en" or "pt", so the home address can open the site in that language.

If you arrive at the home address without having chosen a language, we go by your browser's language settings. Only when those say nothing useful do we check whether your connection appears to come from Brazil, and nothing more precise than that. The answer is used for that one visit and is not stored.

What a prayer request contains

Only what you type into the form: a first name, or no name if you choose to post anonymously, a category, the request itself and the language of the page you wrote it on. We do not ask for a surname, an email address, a phone number or an account.

Please do not include details that could identify you or anyone else. The form will ask you to remove phone numbers, email addresses, street addresses, document or account numbers, and links before a request can be sent.

Who reads it, and what becomes public

Every request is read by a person at EmberKeeper, signed in to a private moderation area, before it can appear on the wall. Nothing is published automatically, and some requests are not published at all. When a request suggests someone may be in danger, the person who wrote it is shown where to find immediate help.

If a request is published, the wall shows the first name (or "Anonymous"), the category, the words as you wrote them, the date, and how many people have said they prayed. Your words are not translated or rewritten.

If a request includes something that identifies someone, such as a surname or an address, the moderator may remove just those words before publishing, and never changes anything else. The original wording is kept privately only until the request is deleted or expires. Requests are not sent to any outside service for screening or translation. They do not appear in search engines through our sitemap, in the site search, or in any feed, and they have no pages of their own.

Your private link

After you send a request you receive a private link. It is the only way to mark the request as answered, add a short update or delete it. We store only a scrambled fingerprint of the link, not the link itself, so we cannot look it up or send it to you again.

The link is also remembered in the browser you used, on your device only. If you lose it, the request will still be removed automatically at the end of the periods below.

When you delete a request it leaves the wall at once, and its words and name are erased from our database straight away. A bare record with no text is kept for 30 days so the moderation history stays accurate.

How long it is kept

Nothing on the Prayer Wall is kept forever. Requests are deleted automatically:

• Waiting to be read: 30 days after it was sent.
• Not published: 7 days after that decision.
• Published: 90 days after publication, or 90 days after it was marked answered if that is later.
• Deleted: words and name erased at once; the empty record goes after 30 days.

Preventing abuse without tracking you

To stop the form being flooded, we count how many requests come from the same connection in an hour and in a day. The address itself is never stored: it is turned into a one-way code that changes every day, and those records are deleted after 48 hours. Calls to the Prayer Wall are left out of the server access log.

So that "I prayed for this" counts each visitor once, your browser keeps a random identifier in a cookie that is only sent back to the Prayer Wall. It is not linked to your name, your requests or anything else, and it expires after a year.

While the wall is new, some of the requests on it were written by EmberKeeper to start it off. They are never counted as requests from visitors, and they step aside as real requests are published. We keep daily totals, such as how many requests were sent or how many prayers were counted, to understand whether the wall is serving people well. Those totals contain no text and no identifiers. A moderation history, which records which moderator took which decision and when but never the words of a request, is kept for 180 days.