Berea — Privacy Policy
Berea is built to keep your spiritual life private. There is no profile and no analytics of any kind. No account is required: install the app and everything you create stays on your device, fully offline.
Some things do leave your device, and only ever because you turned them on: optional sync if you sign in, and four optional features that send data to be processed. Each is described in full below. This policy explains exactly what stays put and what moves.
The short version
- No account is required. Without one, nothing you create ever leaves your device.
- We never ask for your name or email. If you sign in, your account is the anonymous identifier your provider gives us — nothing else.
- We run no analytics, no advertising, no trackers, and no third-party SDKs.
- The full Bible text ships inside the app, so reading and searching never touch the network.
- If you sign in, your library syncs to your own private storage on our servers so your devices match. Sermon audio never does.
- Four optional features send data for processing. All are off by default, and three of the four need Premium. Neither we nor our processors keep it.
- You can delete your account and everything we hold, from inside the app, at any time.
Information we collect
We ask you for nothing. There is no sign-up form, no name, no email address, and no profile.
If you choose to sign in to sync your library across devices, Apple gives us an opaque identifier for you — a string of characters unique to Berea. We store that identifier and the date the account was created, and nothing else about you. We deliberately do not store your email address, and the app does not ask your provider for it, so we have no way to contact or identify you outside the app.
What is stored on your device
The following is saved locally using Apple's on-device storage (SwiftData):
- Sermons you capture — title, speaker, date, duration, transcript, your notes, and any generated summary, key points, questions, or quiz
- Your chat conversations and messages
- Verse highlights, notes, and bookmarks
- Reading plan progress
- Your settings and preferences
If you never sign in, that is the whole story — none of it is uploaded to us.
If you have iCloud Backup enabled, your app data may be included in your personal Apple device backup. That backup is handled entirely by Apple under your iCloud settings and its own encryption — not by us, and we cannot read it.
Sync, if you sign in Optional
Berea works fully offline with no account. Signing in is optional, free, and exists for one reason: so your library appears on more than one device.
What is sent: once you sign in, the items listed above sync to storage on our servers that is private to your account — your sermons and their transcripts, notes, highlights, bookmarks, reading-plan progress, speakers, and chat history. Sermon audio is never uploaded; only the text is.
What we can see: we hold your content so we can hand it back to your other devices. It is not advertised against, not analysed, not used to train anything, and never sold or shared. Only your signed-in devices can read it.
We treat this as sensitive, because it is. What you underline and which sermons you keep is a record of your faith, and the law in some places calls that a special category of personal data. We would rather say so plainly than file it under "user content" and move on. It is why there is no analytics in this app, why an account is optional rather than required, and why Delete Account really deletes.
Where it lives: on Cloudflare's network, which we use as our hosting provider.
Deleting it: Settings → Delete Account removes your content from our servers and destroys the account, from inside the app. Deleted content is gone immediately; the record that the account existed is purged within 90 days. Signing in again afterwards creates a brand-new account rather than restoring the old one. You can also just sign out, which leaves your device's copy untouched.
Microphone and audio
Berea uses the microphone only while you are actively recording with Follow Along, and only after you grant permission. Audio recordings are never written to disk and never stored — sound is turned into text as you go, and only the text is kept. You can revoke microphone access at any time in iOS Settings.
Optional features that use the network
All four features below are off by default and can be turned off at any time in Settings. The first three also require a Premium subscription; Spot allusions is free.
One exception is worth stating plainly: a small number of iPhones cannot run the on-device AI model at all. On those devices, a Premium subscriber's chat and sermon notes are served by the cloud automatically — otherwise the features would simply be dead. If you are not a subscriber, or your device runs the on-device model, this does not apply to you.
Enhanced accuracy — sermon transcription Off by default
Sermon transcription runs on your device by default. If you turn on Enhanced accuracy, audio is streamed live over an encrypted connection to our relay server, which passes it to Deepgram, a speech-recognition provider, and returns the text to your device.
What is sent: the audio captured while you are recording.What is kept by us: nothing. Our relay holds no storage and writes nothing to disk; audio passes straight through and the transcript is saved only on your device.
Deepgram's handling of the audio it receives is governed by its own privacy policy and terms, which we do not control.
Deeper Answers — cloud chat Off by default
Questions about Scripture are answered by the Gloo AI platform, a faith-aligned service, reached through our proxy server over an encrypted connection. Nothing on your phone answers them: a small on-device model is not reliable enough on matters of faith, and we would rather give no answer than a confidently wrong one. With Deeper Answers off, you can still search the Bible and your own sermons, which never leaves your device.
What is sent: the messages in the conversation you are having — what you typed and the replies so far. Your sermon library is not sent. The cloud engine is never given a way to read your sermons.
What is kept by us: nothing. Our proxy stores no messages and keeps no logs of their content.
Gloo's own terms say your content is not used to train models unless you give separate explicit permission, which is off by default. They do not publish how long they keep it, so we cannot tell you a number — only that we do not keep it, and that their handling is governed by their privacy policy and terms, which we do not control. Gloo may also pass the question to an underlying model provider to answer it.
Better sermon notes Off by default
Your sermon's study notes — the big idea, key points, and application questions — are written on your device by default. If you turn on Better sermon notes, they are written by the Gloo AI platform instead, reached through our proxy server over an encrypted connection, which makes them fuller and more specific.
What is sent: the text of that sermon's transcript, in segments, so the notes can be written from it. The recording is never sent — audio never leaves your device, and only the sermon you are opening is sent, not your library.
What is kept by us: nothing. Our proxy stores no transcripts and keeps no logs of their content.
As with chat, Gloo's terms say your content is not used to train models unless you give separate explicit permission, off by default; they do not publish how long they keep it; and their handling is governed by their own privacy policy and terms, which we do not control. A whole sermon is more than a chat message, so this is the one to weigh if that uncertainty matters to you — the transcript stays on your device with the switch off.
Spot allusions Off by default
Preachers often echo a passage without naming it — "as far as the east is from the west" is Psalm 103, said without the reference. Finding those means comparing the sentence against the Bible by meaning rather than by words, which needs a model too large to ship inside the app. If you turn on Spot allusions, sentences that look like an echo are sent over an encrypted connection to our proxy server, which passes them to OpenAI's embeddings service and returns a numeric representation we match locally. This feature is free and does not require Premium.
What is sent: individual sentences from the live transcript, and only those containing a word that suggests an echo — not the whole transcript, and not sentences that fail that test. Sermon audio is never sent, and the matching against Scripture happens on your device.
What is kept by us: nothing. Our proxy stores no sentences and keeps no logs of their content. OpenAI does keep a copy for up to 30 days to check its service is not being abused, and deletes it after that. It states that data sent through its API is not used to train its models.
Because a sermon is someone else's speech, this one is worth a deliberate choice: leave it off and every sentence stays on your device.
Recording other people
A sermon recording captures someone else's voice and words. You are responsible for recording only where you are permitted to, and for respecting your church's wishes and any applicable local law about recording. Berea keeps what you capture on your device; what you choose to do with it afterwards is up to you.
No tracking or analytics
Berea contains no analytics SDKs, no advertising, no third-party trackers, and no crash-reporting services. It uses no cookies and no device identifiers. We do not profile you, and we have no ability to observe how you use the app.
Bible text
The Bible translations in Berea are bundled inside the app. Reading, searching, and looking up passages happen entirely offline and are never logged or transmitted.
Subscriptions
Premium subscriptions are processed by Apple through the App Store using Apple's In-App Purchase system. We never see or receive your payment details. Purchase and subscription data is handled by Apple under Apple's Privacy Policy. The app only reads Apple's on-device entitlement to know whether Premium is active.
Notifications
If you opt in to reminders, they are scheduled locally on your device. No reminder content leaves your device.
Children's privacy
Berea collects no personal information from anyone, including children. We never ask for a name, an email address, or any other personal detail, and an account — which holds only an anonymous identifier — is never required to use the app.
Deleting your data
Individual sermons, highlights, notes, and conversations can be deleted inside the app at any time. Deleting the app removes everything stored on that device, permanently.
If you never signed in, that is everything — we hold no copy, so there is nothing to request from us. If you did sign in, use Settings → Delete Accountto erase what we hold and destroy the account; it takes effect immediately, and the record that the account existed is purged within 90 days. Deleting the app alone does not delete a synced copy, so delete the account first if you want it gone.
Changes to this policy
If this policy changes, we will update this page and revise the date above.
Contact
Questions about this policy? Email [email protected].
This policy applies to the Berea iOS app.