Privacy Policy

Last updated 10 August 2026

This policy explains what Via Catholic (“Via”, “we”) collects, why, and what you can do about it. It covers the Via iPhone app and this website.

Who is responsible for your data

Via Catholic is operated by Via Catholic, a sole proprietorship based in Texas, United States. For any privacy question, or to exercise any right described below, write to privacy@viacatholic.app. We answer at that address; it is not a formality.

What Via stores

On your iPhone, and nowhere else

• Saved conversations. Conversations you save from Ask or from a passage are stored in the app's local database on your device. They are not uploaded to us. Deleting the app deletes them.
• Cached readings and artwork, so the app works offline and opens quickly.
• Your app settings, such as your chosen Bible translation.

On Via's servers

• An account identifier. On first launch the app creates an anonymous account so it can talk to our servers securely. This is a random identifier. It is not linked to your name, your email, or your device's advertising identifier.
• Your email address, but only if you choose to create a permanent account. If you sign in with Apple and use Hide My Email, we only ever receive Apple's relay address.
• Preferences that have to follow your account: your liturgical region, your default Bible translation, and your time zone.
• Community content. Communities require a permanent account — an anonymous session cannot create one, join one, post, or appear in a member list. If you create an account and use them, we store your membership, your display name and avatar in that community, and the posts, comments, and reactions you write there.
• Usage counters. We count how many requests an account has made in a period, so we can apply fair-use limits and keep the service running. These are counts and timestamps. They do not include what you asked.
• Your subscription status, so the app knows whether Via Pro is active.

The questions you ask Via

This is the part most people care about, so we want to be exact.

When you ask Via something, your message is sent to our server, which forwards it to a third-party artificial-intelligence provider to generate the answer. The answer is streamed back to your phone.

We do not write the content of your questions or Via's answers to our database, and we do not put them in our logs. Our servers record only that a request happened, so that fair-use limits work.

Our AI providers are OpenAI and Anthropic. They process your message on our behalf under their business terms, which prohibit using it to train their models. They may retain it for a short period for security and abuse monitoring before deleting it. We have no other relationship with them on your behalf.

Please still use ordinary judgement. Via is a good place to bring a spiritual question and a poor place to type a credit card number, a password, or another person's private medical or legal information.

How Via is used, and how we measure it

We use PostHog to understand how the app is used: which screens people open, which features they reach, where they get stuck, and whether a new thing we built was worth building.

These events describe actions, not content. An event records that a reflection was opened, or that a question was asked — never the reflection, and never the question. Events are attached to a privacy-safe internal identifier rather than to your name or email.

When Via hits an unexpected error, PostHog also sends us a crash report: the type of error, and the path through the code that produced it. Those are code locations — which function called which — not the content of what you asked or wrote. We use them to find and fix the thing that broke.

We use PostHog because we would rather fix the parts of Via people actually struggle with than guess. If you would prefer not to be counted, write to privacy@viacatholic.app and we will exclude your account.

Advertising, and how people find Via

Via shows no advertising. There are no ads in the app, no advertising SDK inside it, and nothing you read, ask, or write in Via is used to target an ad at you.

We do advertise Via itself — on platforms such as Meta (Facebook and Instagram), TikTok, and search engines. We want to know which of those actually bring people to Via, so that we are not paying for the ones that do not. That measurement can work two ways, and the difference matters to you:

• Aggregate reporting. The ad platform, or Apple, tells us how many people installed Via after seeing a campaign. It is a count. It names nobody and is not joined to your Via account.
• Per-person attribution, meaning linking your Via install to the particular ad you tapped in another company's app or website. This is tracking in the sense Apple uses the word. If we ever switch it on, iOS will show you Apple's App Tracking Transparency prompt first, and we will only do it for people who choose Allow. Choosing Ask App Not to Track costs you nothing — every part of Via works identically either way.

Whichever is in use, the content of your questions, Via's answers, and anything you write in a community are never sent to an advertising platform.

What Via does not do

• We do not sell or rent personal information, and we never have.
• We do not show advertising inside Via, and we do not sell or hand your personal information to data brokers.
• We do not build a profile of you for marketing, and we do not sell or share our usage analytics with anyone.
• We do not log, store, or analyse the content of your questions, Via's answers, or anything you write in a community, for analytics or for any other purpose beyond delivering it.

Accounts and signing in

Via works anonymously. Creating an account is optional and exists so your communities, your Via Pro subscription, and your history survive getting a new phone.

You can create an account with Sign in with Apple, with Google, or with an email address and password. When you use Apple or Google, we receive a confirmation of your identity and your email address from them; we do not receive your password, and we do not post anything to those accounts. Passwords for Via accounts are handled by our authentication provider and are stored only in hashed form. We never see them.

Communities

Communities require a permanent Via account. This is deliberate: a private space for prayer works only if the people in it are accountable for what they say, and a throwaway anonymous session is not.

Communities are private and invite-only. What you post in a community is visible to the other members of that community. There is no public feed, and communities are not indexed by search engines.

Bear in mind that other members can read, screenshot, and remember what you write. Deleting your account removes your posts, but it cannot undo what another member has already seen.

Subscriptions and payment

Via Pro is sold through Apple's In-App Purchase. Apple processes the payment, not us. We never see your card number, your billing address, or your Apple Account credentials.

We use RevenueCat to keep track of whether a subscription is active. RevenueCat receives an identifier for your account and the purchase events Apple reports — started a trial, renewed, cancelled, refunded — and tells the app whether to unlock Pro. It does not receive your payment details either.

Companies that process data for us

We keep this list short on purpose.

• Supabase — our database, authentication, file storage, and server functions.
• OpenAI and Anthropic — generating answers, as described above.
• Apple — the App Store, subscriptions, and Sign in with Apple.
• RevenueCat — tracking subscription status.
• PostHog — product analytics, as described above.
• Google — only if you choose to sign in with Google.
• Cloudflare — serving this website.

Each acts as our processor and is permitted to use your data only to provide the service to us.

How long we keep things

• The content of your questions and Via's answers — not stored on our servers at all, so there is nothing to keep.
• Account data and community content — until you delete your account, at which point it is deleted with it.
• Short-term rate-limit records — these cover a window of minutes or hours and are deleted automatically once the window has passed.
• Daily and monthly usage counters — a count of how many requests an account made on a given day or in a given month. These are kept for the life of the account and are deleted when you delete your account.
• Analytics events — kept while they are useful for understanding how Via is used, and deleted on our analytics provider's schedule. They record actions, never the content of your questions or Via's answers, and are not used to build a profile of you.
• Support email — kept while we handle your request and for a reasonable period afterwards in case you write again.

Deleting your data

In the app, go to Profile and choose Delete Account. This permanently deletes your account, your saved conversations, your community profile, and your Via history. It cannot be undone.

If you created a community, it is deleted along with your account — including the posts other members wrote in it. There is no way to keep a community running once its creator has gone, so if it matters to the people in it, tell them before you delete.

Deleting your account does not cancel an Apple subscription. Cancel that in Settings → your name → Subscriptions first.

Your rights

Depending on where you live, you may have the right to see the personal data we hold about you, correct it, delete it, obtain a portable copy, object to or restrict how we use it, and complain to your data-protection regulator. If you are in the European Economic Area or the United Kingdom, our lawful bases are performing our contract with you (running the app), our legitimate interests (keeping the service secure and within its limits), and your consent where we ask for it.

If you are in California, we do not sell or share personal information as those terms are defined by the CCPA, and we will not discriminate against you for exercising any right.

To exercise any of these, write to privacy@viacatholic.app. We will respond within the time your law requires, and within 30 days at the latest.

A note on religious information

Some laws treat information about religious belief as a special category. Using Via reveals that you are interested in Catholic practice. We collect that only because you chose to use a Catholic app, we use it only to give you the app, and we never disclose it to anyone for any other purpose.

Where your data is held

Via's servers and service providers are located in the United States. If you use Via from outside the United States, your data will be transferred there. Where the law requires a transfer mechanism, we rely on the European Commission's Standard Contractual Clauses with our providers.

Children

Via is not directed to children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from them. If you believe a child has given us personal information, write to privacy@viacatholic.app and we will delete it.

Security

Traffic between the app and our servers is encrypted in transit. Access to our database is restricted by row-level security so that one account cannot read another's data, and administrative access is limited. No system is perfect, but we treat prayer and Scripture questions as the private things they are.

Changes to this policy

If we change this policy we will update the date at the top. If a change materially affects how we handle your data, we will tell you in the app before it takes effect.

Contact

Privacy questions: privacy@viacatholic.app
Everything else: support@viacatholic.app