Privacy policy

Who we are

3Ci Notes (“we”) is a personal, non-commercial project run by a member of Capital City Church International (3Ci) in Pretoria, South Africa. It isn’t run by 3Ci, and nothing you do here is shared with the church. We’re responsible for the personal information described below under South Africa’s Protection of Personal Information Act (POPIA). You can reach us at 3cinotes@niddo.io.

What you type into the search

When you use “What are you going through?”, what you type is used to find teachings that speak to it, and for nothing else.

• It’s sent to Voyage AI, part of MongoDB, which turns it into numbers that can be compared with the teachings, and to Anthropic, whose AI model, Claude, picks a few teachings and writes a short reply. They handle it for us under their own terms.
• We don’t save it in our database, write it in our logs or connect it to you.
• Short searches of a few words, such as “anxiety”, may be kept in the server’s memory for up to an hour so the same search can be answered straight away. They aren’t linked to anyone and are never written to disk.
• If you start on the home page, your words are held in your browser’s session storage for a moment to carry them to the Find page, then removed. If your browser blocks that storage, the page holds them in memory instead. Either way, they never go into the page’s address.

What people share here can be deeply personal, touching on faith, health or relationships. By sending a search, you agree to it being handled this way, including by services outside South Africa. You don’t need names or details that identify you or anyone else to get good suggestions, so please leave them out.

Counting visits

We use Google Analytics, through Google Tag Manager, to see how many people visit, which pages they read and how they found the site, so we can tell whether it’s helping and what to improve. When you open a page, it records things like the page’s address and title, the site you came from, your device, browser and screen size, and your rough location, which Google works out from your IP address without storing the address. It sets cookies whose names start with “_ga” to recognise a returning visitor. They last up to two years unless you clear them.

• We’ve told Google not to use any of this for advertising.
• What you type into “What are you going through?” never goes into a page’s address, so Google Analytics never sees it.
• Searches in the Teachings search box, such as “prayer” or “Romans”, do appear in the address, so Google Analytics counts those.

To stop being counted, block cookies for this site or use Google’s opt-out add-on.

Keeping the search fair

Every AI search costs money, so there’s a limit on how many each visitor can do in 10 minutes, and on how many everyone can do in a day. To count yours, we store a keyed hash of your IP address: a scrambled code that can’t be turned back into the address. It’s deleted after 10 minutes. Wrong codes on the admin sign-in page are counted the same way.

Cookies and storage

The only cookies for visitors are Google Analytics’ ones, described above. One other cookie keeps the person who edits the site signed in, and it’s used on the admin pages alone. Apart from those, the only thing kept in your browser is the hand-off from the home page described above.

Videos, audio and images

• A video shows as a picture with a play button until you press play. Only then does the YouTube or Vimeo player load, using YouTube’s privacy-enhanced mode and Vimeo’s “do not track” setting. From then on they may set their own cookies, under their privacy policies: YouTube (Google) and Vimeo.
• Audio plays through this site from 3Ci’s website, so 3Ci’s server doesn’t see your connection. If you download a teaching, the file comes straight from 3ci.co.za.
• Artwork from 3Ci, YouTube and Vimeo is fetched by this site and served from here.
• Links to 3ci.co.za, YouTube, Vimeo and Apple Podcasts take you to sites with their own privacy policies.

Technical logs

Like almost every website, the company that hosts this site keeps standard technical logs, such as IP addresses, the pages asked for and the type of browser, for a short time. We use them only to fix problems and stop abuse. When a search goes wrong, our logs note the error, never what was typed.

Services we use

These services run parts of the site for us, and use information only to do that:

• Anthropic, for the search’s suggestions and reply (privacy policy)
• MongoDB, for the database and Voyage AI’s matching (privacy policy)
• Google, for Google Analytics and Tag Manager (privacy policy)
• The company that hosts the site, which keeps the technical logs above

Some of them are based outside South Africa, so information may be processed in other countries.

How long things are kept

• What you type: not kept by us, apart from short searches held in memory for up to an hour
• The scrambled code made from your IP address: 10 minutes
• Google Analytics: details of visits for up to 14 months, and overall totals after that
• Google Analytics cookies in your browser: up to two years, unless you clear them
• Technical logs: a short time, as set by our host
• The editor’s sign-in cookie: 7 days

Your rights

Under POPIA you can ask what personal information we hold about you, ask us to correct or delete it, and object to how it’s used. We keep almost nothing, and nothing linked to your name, so there’s usually nothing to find, but email 3cinotes@niddo.io and we’ll help. If you’re unhappy with how we’ve handled your information, you can complain to the Information Regulator.

Children

Anyone can use this site, and we don’t knowingly collect personal information from children. If you’re under 18, please leave personal details out of the search, and if you’re going through something hard, talk to a parent, a leader at 3Ci or another adult you trust.

Changes

If this policy changes, we’ll update it here and change the date at the top. How the site may be used is covered by the terms of use.