Privacy

What Bible Trails keeps about you, why, and for how long. Players who only join a game never create an account.

No ads, no tracking or analytics cookies, and no trackers from other companies.
Hosting needs an account. To make one you give an email address, a display name and a password. We keep your email address, your name, a salted hash of your password (never the password itself) and when you signed up. To have your account deleted, email support@ankorallc.com and we will remove it.
Your subscription: which plan you chose, whether it is paid through Stripe or PayPal, the provider's customer and subscription ids, its status and the end of the current paid period. On a Family or Friend Pack plan we also keep who belongs to whose plan, and the invite links that were sent (stored only as a one-way code, valid for 7 days).
Payments are handled by Stripe or PayPal. You type your card number or PayPal login on their pages, never on ours, so Bible Trails never sees or stores it. Your email address is shared with Stripe at checkout so the form is filled in for you.
One necessary cookie, called __Host-bt_session, keeps you signed in for up to 30 days. It does nothing else, and signing out removes it. To give each person one free trial, we also keep one-way hashes (scrambled codes that cannot be turned back into the original) of the account, the card and the PayPal account that have had a trial. They hold no readable details, and they are kept even after an account is deleted, so a trial cannot be used twice.
Players who only join with a room code are not accounts, and none of the account information above is kept about them.
Names and scores live in the server's memory while a room is open, and the room forgets them when it closes. Two things last longer: the visitor log described below, which keeps the names typed on each device to join a game, and a recap of a night that someone chooses to share with the share button at the end. A recap keeps only the date and time, whether it was day or evening, the language, the number of games, the scores with their animals, the scriptures that were read, one “Talk about it” prompt, and first names only if the host chose to add them. It is kept for 30 days under a private link that search engines do not list, and then deleted.
Your browser remembers your name, animal, level and display preferences on your own device so you can rejoin quickly, along with the list you save for “Bring my family” and your Practice progress. The host screen also remembers which questions it has shown, so new ones come first next time. While a tab is open, it also keeps a short note that your visit has started, so the visit is counted once. Each phone also keeps a code it made up for itself and sends it to every room it joins, so a host can remove that phone from the room; the room forgets it when it closes. Clearing site data removes all of this.
Drawings in Sketch & Seek are only sent to the people in your room and are never stored.
To see which games and questions work well, we keep anonymous totals by day: how many games were started, finished or left early; which game, level and question language; how many players were in a game (in groups such as 4–6); how long games last on average; and, for each question, how often it was shown, answered and answered correctly, and which answer choice was picked. These totals hold nothing about people: no names, no room codes, no device or network addresses, no typed answers, and nothing more exact than the day. We also keep anonymous visit totals by day: pages viewed, the site that sent you, an estimated country from your time zone, device type and visit length, a campaign tag from the link, and which pages lead to which. For these totals your network address and browser are used only in memory, for one day, to count each visitor once; the totals themselves keep no address and use no cookies.
Besides these totals, we keep a visitor log that is not anonymous. For each device and browser it keeps: the network address (IP address); browser and device details, such as the system (iOS, Android and so on) and its version, the browser, the phone model, the screen size, whether the site is installed as an app and whether dark mode is on; the time zone and the country it points to; the language of the browser; the pages viewed; the site that linked here and any campaign tag in the link; when the first and last visits were, how many there were and how long they lasted; and the names typed on that device to join a game, with the time and the room code. So a child's name and the device's IP address can be kept. Each record is deleted 30 days after that device's last visit, and the log holds at most 5,000 records (the oldest go first).
We keep this log to see how the site is used and to keep it safe, for example to spot misuse. Only the site owner can see it, on an admin page that needs a password. It is never shown to other visitors or on game screens, and it is not sold or shared with anyone. If your browser sends “Do Not Track” or “Global Privacy Control”, nothing is added to it.
To have your record removed sooner, email support@ankorallc.com with the subject “Bible Trails”. Tell us roughly when you visited and any name you used to join a game, so we can find it.