This Privacy Policy explains what information Watson Theologica (“we,” “us”) collects when you use our application and website (the “Service”), how we use it, and the choices you have. We collect only what we need to run the Service — we do not sell your data, and we do not show ads.
1. Information We Collect
- Account information. When you sign up, our authentication provider, Clerk, collects your name, email address, and sign-in credentials. We receive your account identifier and profile basics from Clerk; we never see or store your password.
- Study activity. We log the questions you submit and the responses the Service generates, along with usage telemetry for each response (such as token counts, processing cost, and timestamps). We use these logs to operate the Service, enforce fair-use limits, diagnose problems, and improve response quality.
- Your study content. Your conversations are stored on our servers so they follow you across devices. While your account exists this content is yours: you can read or delete any of it at any time, and we store it to provide the Service to you. We use study activity — in de-identified form once an account is deleted — to improve the app. We never use it to train third-party AI models, and we share it only with the service providers listed below, as needed to run the Service.
- Billing information. Subscriptions and payments are handled by Clerk Billing and processed by Stripe. Your card number and payment credentials go directly to Stripe and never touch our servers. We receive only subscription status (your plan, trial state, and billing dates).
- Technical data. Like most web services, our infrastructure records basic request data (IP address, browser type, pages requested) in server logs used for security and debugging.
- Page-view counts on our public pages. On the homepage, pricing and policy pages we count visits with Vercel Web Analytics, which records the page, referrer, country and device type without cookies or any identifier that persists between visits. It is not loaded inside the signed-in app.
We use cookies only as needed to keep you signed in (session cookies set by Clerk). We do not use advertising or cross-site tracking cookies.
2. How We Use Information
- To provide the Service and generate responses to your questions.
- To manage your subscription, free trial, and fair-use allowances.
- To understand aggregate usage and improve the Service’s quality and cost-effectiveness.
- To respond to your support requests.
- To secure the Service and prevent abuse.
We do not sell or rent your personal information, and we do not use your study activity for advertising.
3. Service Providers
We share information with a small set of providers who process it on our behalf, only as needed to run the Service:
- Clerk — authentication and subscription billing.
- Stripe — payment processing.
- Anthropic — composing the written response. Your question, together with the source passages our own search has already selected, is sent to Anthropic’s API, which writes the connecting prose around those sources. Per Anthropic’s commercial terms, API inputs and outputs are not used to train their models.
- Voyage AI — search. Your question is sent to Voyage’s API to be converted into the numeric form our corpus search runs on. No conversation history is sent.
- Railway and Vercel — cloud hosting for our backend and website; Vercel also provides the cookie-free page-view counts described above.
We may also disclose information if required by law, or to protect the rights, safety, and property of Watson Theologica, our users, or the public.
4. Data Retention and Deletion
We retain account information for as long as your account exists. Study-activity logs are kept for as long as they are useful for supporting and improving the Service. When your account is deleted, these logs are stripped of any link to you and kept only in that de-identified form.
- Deleting content yourself. You can delete individual conversations directly in the app. Deletion takes effect immediately: the content is removed from our live database, and a brief content-free marker propagates the deletion to your other devices.
- If you cancel your subscription. Cancelling does not delete your content. We keep it so that everything is exactly where you left it if you resubscribe. You can delete any or all of it in the app, or request deletion by email, at any time.
- If you delete your account. Deleting your account automatically and permanently removes your conversations from our live systems, and severs the link between you and your study-activity logs, with no action needed from us. The questions and responses themselves are kept in de-identified form — no longer associated with you or your account — and are used to keep improving the app. Beyond that we retain only records we are required to keep (for example, billing records for tax and accounting, which live with Stripe and Clerk).
- Backups. We keep encrypted backups of our database for disaster recovery. Deleted content may persist in backups for up to 30 days, until they expire on our rolling schedule, after which it is gone permanently. Backups are never used to restore content you have deleted, except as an unavoidable side effect of recovering the whole database from a disaster.
5. Your Rights and Choices
You can access and update your account details from the account panel in the app, and cancel your subscription there at any time. You can also download a copy of everything we store against your account whenever you like — choose Download my data from the account menu. To ask us to correct or delete your data, email tom@watsontheologica.com. Depending on where you live, you may have additional rights under local privacy law (such as the GDPR in the European Union or the CCPA in California); we will honor valid requests in accordance with those laws.
6. Security
All traffic to the Service is encrypted in transit (HTTPS). Authentication is delegated to Clerk, payment handling to Stripe — both industry-standard, audited providers — and access to production data is restricted. No system is perfectly secure, but we design the Service so that the most sensitive data (passwords, card numbers) never reaches our infrastructure at all.
7. Children
The Service is not directed to children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from them. If you believe a child has provided us personal information, contact us and we will delete it.
8. Changes to This Policy
We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. If we make material changes, we will notify you by email or an in-app notice before they take effect. The “Last updated” date above reflects the current version.
9. Contact
Privacy questions or requests: tom@watsontheologica.com.