Privacy Policy

Firestarters is a service operated by Aeriox, LLC (“Aeriox”, “we”, “us”). Firestarters collects the minimum needed to run the Service and keep it safe. We do not sell your data, and we run no advertising.

What we collect

• Account & profile: email, handle, display name, and what you choose to add (bio, avatar, city, country and, on the website, a ZIP or postal code). Signed-in members can see the city and country you add on your profile; your ZIP or postal code stays private.
• Country you connect from: when you sign in on the website, we note the country your IP address points to, privately, and use it only for safety (your protection tier, default post audience and location rounding) when you haven’t added a country yourself. It is never shown to other members.
• Age: a birth year at signup, used only to apply minor protections and enforce the 13+ requirement (we store an is-minor flag derived from it).
• Content you create: posts, testimonies, comments, prayers, reactions, direct messages, and who you connect with (friends and follows).
• Location (opt-in): used only when you choose a feature that needs it, and never required to use the Service. To show what’s near you (Nearby in the app, “Near me” on the website), your device’s current location is used to measure distances, which can mean sending it to our servers; we don’t store it. When you add your location to a post, a soulwinning record or a map moment, we store only a rounded, broad area; the app rounds it on your phone before sending it (see “Location & sensitive contexts” below). A ZIP or postal code on your profile, or one you enter for event alerts, is kept privately with the center point of its area, which we use to measure distances, for example to events near you; entering one for event alerts also sets the city on your profile to its town.
• Contacts (opt-in): if you choose to find friends from your contacts, we match using a one-way hashed version of contact emails. Your raw contacts are never uploaded to or stored on our servers.
• Camera & microphone (opt-in): used only when you capture photos, video, or audio in the app. We do not access your camera or microphone in the background. If you turn on saving to your phone, or tap Save, a copy goes to your phone’s photo library; that copy is yours, outside Firestarters, and isn’t removed if you delete a post or your account.
• Push notifications: when notifications are on for the app on your phone, we store your phone’s push token with your account so notifications can reach it. Signing out of the app on that phone deletes it.
• Crash reports: when the app or the website runs into an error, it sends a crash report to Sentry (see “Third parties we use” below) so we can fix the problem. Crash reports aren’t linked to your account.
• Usage & safety: basic activity needed to operate the feed, presence, notifications, and moderation, plus limited technical/device data for security and abuse prevention.
• Requests you send us: if you ask us to list a ministry, church or worship artist, or to give you a reserved handle, we keep what you send (the name, website and place, your role there and your message) with your account so our team can review it and follow up. You can see your own listing requests on the request page; they are in your data download and are deleted with your account.
• Ministry contacts: for the churches, ministries and worship artists listed on Firestarters, our team keeps the business contacts each one publishes (such as a public email address, contact form, phone number or Instagram account) and a record of our outreach to them, so we can invite them to claim their page. These are never shown on a page or a profile. A ministry can ask us to stop writing, or to delete its contacts, at support@firestarters.us.
• Ministry Portal records: if you help run a church, ministry or artist page, we keep a record each time you accept the Ministry Portal Agreement or confirm the rights to something you add for it, with your name and your role on its team. These records are the ministry’s proof of its rights, so we keep them after you delete your account, with your name and role as they were when you signed; your account is unlinked from them. A testimony’s rights record also names the person telling it, their age range and how they agreed to share it.
• Ministry content: videos, songs, testimonies and events you add for a church, ministry or artist belong to it, so they stay with it, without your name, if you leave its team or delete your account. Your data download lists what you added (the title, date and status of each) and the rights records you signed. The ministry’s owner can download the ministry’s own data, including its team’s names and roles and the rights records its team signed, but never anyone’s email address. If a ministry asks us to erase its content, we delete its videos, songs and testimonies and hide its page and its artist pages. We keep its events, anything our team took down (as the record of the takedown), and its rights records, consent records and copyright notices as legal records.
• Copyright notices: if you send us a copyright (DMCA) notice, or answer one with a counter-notice, we keep what you send (your name, postal address, phone, email, signature and statements) as a legal record, also after you delete your account. A notice we act on may be shared with the person who added the material, and a counter-notice, with its contact details, goes to the person who sent the notice, as the law provides. Notices you send while signed in, and your counter-notices, are in your data download.
• Children’s testimonies: when a ministry shares a child’s testimony, it records a parent’s or guardian’s consent, which only Firestarters staff can see. The record holds the parent’s or guardian’s name, their relationship to the child, their email or phone, the date they agreed, who on the ministry’s team recorded it and, if the ministry adds one, a photo of the signed release, and it is kept as evidence after the testimony is removed. The child is shown by first name only, with no school, hometown or place, and a parent can have it removed at any time.

How we use it

To operate the Service (show your content to your chosen audience, deliver messages and notifications, surface presence and map features you opt into), to keep the community safe (moderation, abuse prevention, child-safety obligations), to find and fix bugs, and to communicate with you. We do not use your data for advertising and we do not sell it.

How it’s stored

Your data is stored in our backend hosted on Supabase (Postgres database, authentication, and file storage), protected by access controls and row-level security. Data is retained while your account is active and deleted or anonymized after account deletion, except where we must retain limited records for legal or safety reasons.

Location & sensitive contexts

Location sharing is strictly opt-in. Because some members share from regions where practicing or spreading faith is dangerous, we coarsen or withhold location data by a persecution risk-tier: locations attached to posts, soulwinning records and map moments are rounded to broad areas, and data from the highest-risk regions is dropped entirely and never displayed on the map. Personal pins you add to the map on the website are placed near your town (about 11 km) and the address you look up to place one is not kept. Only if you tick “Show the exact spot”, in a country where sharing faith is open, does a pin show the exact place, to anyone viewing the map; from higher-risk countries pins are rounded further or refused, and members under 18, or whose age we don’t have yet, can’t use the exact spot. You can turn location off at any time in settings.

Contacts & hashed matching

If you use the “find friends” feature, contact email addresses are hashed on-device and only the hashes are compared against existing members to suggest connections. We never upload, store, or share your raw address book. This feature is optional and can be skipped.

Third parties we use

We share data only with service providers that help us operate the platform, acting on our instructions:

• Supabase — database, authentication, and file/media storage. Your password and the photos and videos you upload go straight from your device to Supabase.
• Vercel — hosts firestarters.us and runs its server code, including the parts the iPhone and Android apps call. Pages you open and most of what you send on the website (posts, comments, messages, searches and settings, including your device’s location if you search events with “Near me” on) pass through Vercel, which sees your IP address and browser details and keeps logs of those requests. It also prepares each push notification for delivery and serves your calendar feed if you subscribe to one. Vercel tells us which country you are connecting from, based on your IP address; we use it to open the map on your country, to show a one-time safety warning in high-risk countries, and to set your safety protections privately (see “Country you connect from” above).
• Expo — delivers push notifications to the apps, through Apple’s push service on iPhone and Google’s Firebase Cloud Messaging on Android, and runs the service the apps check for updates. When notifications are on, Expo receives your phone’s push token, a random ID for your copy of the app, and your IP address. For each notification it receives that token, the notification’s short text (which can name another member, a team or an event, but never includes message contents) and a link to what it is about. Each time the app opens it asks Expo for updates, so Expo sees your IP address, the app version and that random ID.
• Mapbox — draws the map at firestarters.us/map and on the app’s Map tab, and looks up places typed into the website: the map’s search box, the ZIP code on your profile or for event alerts, and the address when you add a pin. Your browser or phone contacts Mapbox directly, so Mapbox sees your IP address, what you type in those boxes on the website (every map search, even for an event or church name), and the part of the map you are viewing. On the website, Mapbox’s map code also keeps a random ID in your browser, replaced daily, and sends Mapbox usage and performance details such as your browser type and screen size. The app only loads map images from Mapbox; we never send Mapbox your name, account or location.
• Anthropic — its Claude models power AI event search on the website for signed-in members, and our staff’s research on public information about the ministries listed here. AI event search is on by default; turn it off in Settings under “AI event search” (or with the AI switch in the search bar) and your searches never reach Anthropic. When it is on and you search the events board or the map, we send Anthropic the words you typed and the public listings we are ranking for you: events, and places on the map (churches, ministries, groups, and pins members have shared), with their names, short descriptions, dates and towns. When we have a starting point, each listing also says how many miles away it is: from the town or ZIP code you searched for, otherwise from your saved profile location or your device’s location if you allowed it (events board), or from the centre of the map you are viewing (map). We never send your exact coordinates, name, email or account, but the distances can show roughly where you are. Signed-out visitors and the mobile app never use AI search. When our staff research a church, ministry or artist listed on Firestarters, we send Anthropic only that listing’s name, kind, public links and town and the number of events and songs it has here; Anthropic searches the public web for what the ministry has published. When our staff ask Claude to suggest edits to a letter they are writing to a ministry, we send Anthropic the opening they wrote, the ministry’s name and the public facts in the letter. No member data is sent.
• Resend — delivers our email: sign-up confirmations, sign-in links and password resets, the newsletter if you turn it on in Settings, and one-to-one letters our staff send to the published business contacts of churches, ministries and artists listed here. Resend receives the recipient’s email address and the message, including any one-time link in it.
• ImprovMX and Google — ImprovMX receives email sent to any firestarters.us address, such as support@firestarters.us, and forwards it, with the sender’s address, the message and any attachments, to our inbox, a Gmail account hosted by Google, which stores those messages.
• Apple & Google — if you choose “Sign in with Apple” or Google sign-in (on the website or in the app), they confirm who you are and share your email address with us (Apple may give us a private relay address that forwards our emails to you) and, depending on the service and your choices, your name and profile photo. Their push services (Apple’s for the iPhone app, Google’s Firebase Cloud Messaging for the Android app) carry each push notification to your phone, so they receive your phone’s push token and the notification. The apps also use your phone’s built-in location service, Apple’s on iPhone and Google’s on Android: a ZIP code you enter for event alerts, or a place you search on the Events tab that isn’t in our own list of US towns and ZIP codes, is sent to Apple or Google to find it, and when you choose to add your location to a post or soulwinning record, your phone’s exact position is sent to Apple or Google to name the town, before the app rounds it.
• Sentry — receives crash reports from the website and the apps, so we can find and fix what went wrong. A report holds the error and where in our code it happened, the app or browser version, the device model, operating system, language and time zone, and a short record of what the app or page did just before, such as the web addresses it last loaded. The website and the apps also tell Sentry when a visit or app session starts and whether it ended in a crash, so we can see how often crashes happen. We never give Sentry your name, email or account, and Sentry is set not to store your IP address.
• Stripe — processes event ticket payments when ticketing is enabled. We do not use Stripe, or any processor, for donations — Firestarters does not handle donation funds.

Some features load content straight from other companies. They receive your IP address and device details and handle them under their own privacy policies:

• Giphy — powers GIF search. What you type in the GIF search goes to Giphy (straight from your phone in the app, through our server on the website), and GIF previews and GIFs in posts load from Giphy’s servers.
• YouTube and Vimeo — play the videos embedded on the website and in the app (testimonies, films, music, organization pages and video strips). When a video, its player or a YouTube thumbnail loads, which can happen as soon as you open a page because some trailers play on their own, YouTube or Vimeo sees your IP address, browser details and which video it is, and may set its own cookies. If you are signed in to YouTube in that browser, YouTube can link those views to your account.
• Spotify — the song player on our Music pages and on artist and ministry pages. Nothing loads from Spotify until you press play. Then your browser connects to Spotify, which may set its own cookies (including a one-year identifier) and analytics under Spotify’s privacy policy.
• Other websites — when a post on the website links to another site, our server, not your browser, reads that page to build a preview, and saves a copy of the page’s picture and site icon in our storage. Your browser loads the preview from us, so that site doesn’t see you unless you open the link.
• Calendar apps — if you subscribe to your “My events” calendar, the calendar service you choose (for example Google Calendar) regularly downloads the events you follow. “Add to Google Calendar” sends that event’s details to Google.

We also disclose information where required by law or to protect safety. Suspected child sexual abuse material is reported to NCMEC and law enforcement. When we make that report, we keep the reported file and the uploader’s account details (email, username and display name) for at least a year afterwards, as the law requires, even if the account is deleted.

Children’s privacy

Firestarters is not intended for children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 13. Members identified as minors (13–17) receive additional protections, including restricted discoverability, tighter default privacy, and limits on certain interactions. If you believe a child under 13 has provided us personal information, contact us and we will delete it. Children under 13 can’t have an account. A ministry can share a child’s testimony only with a parent’s or guardian’s consent, as “Children’s testimonies” above describes.

Your rights & choices

You can edit your profile, control post visibility, block/mute others, and manage your location, contacts, camera, and microphone permissions at any time. You can download a copy of your data on the web (Settings → Download your data) or ask us for one, and on the website you can download the photos and videos you posted from each post’s menu (a copy you download is yours, like one saved to your phone, and isn’t removed if you delete the post or your account). You can delete your account and associated personal data directly in the app (Settings → Account → Delete account) or on the web; firestarters.us/delete-account explains every option and what is deleted and kept. Depending on where you live, you may have additional rights (access, correction, deletion, portability, objection); contact us to exercise them.

Contact

Privacy questions or requests: Aeriox, LLC — support@firestarters.us.