How your journal is protected

Who can see it

Nobody but you. Not your pastor, not your church admins, not the leaders of the teams you serve on, not other members. Your church can see how you're wired — your gifts, passions, style and how you fit a team — because that's how they place you well. They cannot see a single word you write in your journal, your reflections, your private notes, your intents, or your verse history.

There is no setting a leader can flip to change that, and no admin screen anywhere in the product that displays journal text.

What it never affects

• No leader-facing score. Nothing you write feeds any engagement label, health status, coaching signal, or ranking your leaders can see. The code that produces those labels does not read your walk content at all.
• No AI training. Your journal text is never used to train or fine-tune any AI model, ours or anyone else's.
• No background AI reading. No background or scheduled job reads your journal with AI. Variety on My Walk comes from a curated verse bank and a deterministic picker — no model reads your words. If we ever offer an AI feature over your journal, it will only run when you tap a button asking for it.
• No human review. Nobody at Otech Labs reads journal entries — not for quality, not for moderation, not for analytics.
• No selling, ever. Journal content is never sold, never shared with advertisers, never handed to a third party for their own purposes.

One detail worth naming: when you save an entry, the app matches your words against a short curated word list (things like "tired" or "grateful") so it can phrase your own prompts in your own language. Only those matched words are kept, only on your own account, and only you ever see the result.

How it's protected

Two layers protect what you write.

Layer one, always on: your entries are stored encrypted in transit and at rest on managed cloud infrastructure. Access is limited to the small number of people who keep the app running, protected by strong authentication and authorization rules that scope every request to the person making it. No screen anywhere in the product displays journal text to anyone but you, and the commitments above are binding on us.

Layer two, your choice: turn on the journal lock in Settings to add full end-to-end encryption. You choose a passphrase we never receive, and your journal entries and private moment notes are encrypted on your own device before they leave it. When you turn it on, everything you've already written is encrypted too.

Two things worth saying plainly: if you lose both your passphrase and your one-time recovery code, your entries cannot be recovered. And routine database backups keep copies of anything written before you turned the lock on until those backups age out of our retention window.

Whether or not you turn the lock on, everything above stands: your journal is yours, it never reaches your church, and it never becomes a number anyone else sees.