Your requests belong to you.

The controller responsible for processing your personal data is:

• ICF Zürich (association, UID CHE-107.344.636)
• Zürichstrasse 131, 8600 Dübendorf, Switzerland
• Email for privacy matters: [email protected]

Representative in the EU under Art. 27 GDPR: ICF Zürich Locations Deutschland e.V., Am Rotbach 21, 74523 Schwäbisch Hall, Germany, also reachable via [email protected].

This notice applies to the website selaprayer.app and to the sela app for iOS and Android, including the associated servers at admin.selaprayer.app. Linked third-party offerings – such as the ICF Zürich website, donation forms or sign-up forms at forms.icf.ch – are governed by their own privacy notices.

We process personal data under the Swiss Federal Act on Data Protection (FADP) and, if you are located in the EU or EEA, under the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

• We only collect data we actually need to run sela.
• We do not sell data or pass it on for advertising.
• We do not use any third-party analytics, tracking or advertising services. We evaluate usage statistics exclusively on our own servers – and for this purpose we record nothing linked to you from your journal or your private or shared Spaces.
• We store texts in private and shared Spaces, as well as your journal (text, images and voice notes), in encrypted form.
• We are open about which service providers are involved and where they are based.
• You decide in the app who can see your requests.

When you take photos, select images or record voice notes, your operating system asks you beforehand for permission to use the camera, photo library, microphone or speech recognition. You can withdraw these permissions at any time in your system settings. Voice notes in your journal are converted into text directly on your device when needed; for this we use your operating system's on-device speech recognition. If you enable the app lock, your device checks Face ID or Touch ID itself – we never receive biometric data.

So that sela also works without a connection, the app stores recently loaded content on your device. It is removed from the device when you sign out or delete your account.

Prayer requests are often about faith, health, family or other very personal circumstances. That is why we handle everything you write in sela with the greatest possible care.

We process your content only with your explicit consent (see section 6). You give it in the app on a separate screen (“Prayers are personal”) before you create an account. Without consent you cannot create an account, but you can still use sela in a smaller way: your prayers and journal entries are then stored only on your device, not on our servers. You cannot share anything, and we know neither your name nor your email address. This content is protected by your device alone; if you delete the app, it is gone. If you create an account later, sela asks whether you want to keep or delete it. You can withdraw your consent at any time with effect for the future by deleting your account in the app or by writing to us.

You decide who sees your content through the Space: a private Space is visible only to you, a shared Space only to its members, and a public Space can be found by all signed-in users, with its name, description, location and cover image. Only members can see the requests in it; anyone with the invitation link or code can join. Only you can see your journal. Members of a Space can read, quote or pass on content outside the app – we have no control over that. If you create a request for another person, only write what that person would be willing to share themselves.

We are precise about encryption, because the difference matters. The connection between the app and our servers is always encrypted. In addition, we encrypt the content of all private and shared Spaces and your entire journal, including images and voice notes, before it reaches the database – with a separate key per Space and per person. Images and videos you share in a Space are excluded from this, even in private Spaces; they are stored unencrypted in our media storage and can only be accessed via signed links. The same applies to profile pictures and to cover and background images of Spaces. Anyone who got hold of the database or a backup of it could not read the encrypted content.

We manage the keys on our servers. Our administration and moderation tools cannot display encrypted text, not even for administrators. Public Spaces are not stored encrypted; if you make a Space public, its content is decrypted.

selaprayer.app is a static website. We use no cookies, no web analytics and no advertising pixels. The fonts are served from our own server, not from Google Fonts.

When you open the site, technically necessary server logs are created by our host and the content delivery network in front of it: IP address, time, address requested, volume of data transferred, browser type and operating system. This data serves secure operation and is not combined with other data.

The “About” page embeds a YouTube video. We use YouTube's privacy-enhanced mode. Only when you start the video does your browser connect to Google, and Google then receives your IP address and information about your device. As long as you do not press play, no data is sent to Google.

The “Support financially” button leads to an ICF offering (give.icf.ch). Once you click it, ICF's privacy notice applies.

To keep violent, pornographic or otherwise unacceptable material out of sela, uploaded images and videos are screened automatically – including photos in your journal, before they are encrypted. Voice notes are not screened. We use Sightengine for this (Sightengine SAS, France). Only the image or video file itself is sent to Sightengine; your name, email address or the text of your request are not.

If the check flags something, the upload may be rejected or queued for manual review. This is not an automated decision with significant effect within the meaning of Art. 22 GDPR or Art. 21 FADP, because it concerns a single upload and you can always contact us if you think the assessment is wrong. We will then review the case by hand.

You can report people, requests, comments and Spaces, and you can block other people. For each report we store who reported what, the reason, your optional description and how we handled the report.

Reports are reviewed by a small number of authorised ICF Zürich moderators. They only see the reported text if it comes from a public Space; for private and shared Spaces they only see that something was reported, plus any image. Possible measures are: hiding content, removing a person from a Space, or suspending an account.

If an account is suspended for abuse, we store an irreversible hash of the email address or of the Google or Apple identifier, so that the same person cannot immediately create a new account.

The legal basis is our legitimate interest in protecting the community and enforcing the terms of use (Art. 6(1)(b) and (f) GDPR, Art. 31 FADP).

If you allow push notifications, your device generates a push token. We store that token along with device name, platform and time of last use so that we can notify you – for instance when someone prays for your request, mentions you, or your prayer reminder is due.

Delivery runs through the Expo Push Service and from there through Apple Push Notification service or Google's Firebase Cloud Messaging. These services receive the token and the message content. That is why we deliberately keep push message content brief. You can turn push notifications off at any time in the app or in your device settings.

We work with carefully selected service providers. All of them are contractually obliged to process data only on our instructions and for the stated purposes.

Within ICF, only a few individually authorised people have administrative access to the systems, and only as far as their role requires.

Our servers and our media storage are located in Germany. Germany and the other EU member states are recognised as providing adequate data protection under Annex 1 of the Swiss Data Protection Ordinance, so no additional safeguards are required for them.

Some providers are based in the USA (DigitalOcean, Cloudflare, Expo, Apple, Imgix, Mailgun, Laravel Forge). For those transfers we rely on the European Commission's Standard Contractual Clauses in the version recognised by the Swiss Federal Data Protection and Information Commissioner and, where providers are certified, on the EU-US and Swiss-US Data Privacy Framework. Technical measures such as transport encryption and access restrictions apply in addition.

We look at how sela is used – otherwise we wouldn't know whether what we build actually helps. This analysis runs exclusively on our own servers in Germany. No Mixpanel, no Google Analytics and no other analytics tool is integrated.

We record individual events such as registration, sign-in or account deletion; in public Spaces also events such as “prayed for a request” or “wrote a comment”; for the prayers and impulses in sela, which prayer or impulse you opened, how far you got, and whether you chose “Amen” or “later”; plus the app version and the minutes in which the app was active for you.

We deliberately record no events from private or shared Spaces. From your journal we only count without any link to you and rounded to the day – for example, how often a prayer leads to a journal entry. If you use the prayers without an account, we record the events without any personal reference. We never read content for statistics.

The events are linked to your account and deleted after 90 days, the activity minutes after 60 days. After that, only daily totals across all users remain, such as the number of active people per day – with no link to you. We do not build advertising profiles from this, make no automated decisions about you, and do not share the statistics.

We base this analysis on your explicit consent as well, which you give on the “Prayers are personal” screen (see section 6).

If you want to keep using sela but not be included in the statistics, an informal message to [email protected] is enough – we will then exclude your account. This will not put you at any disadvantage.

There is no advertising in sela, and we do not integrate any advertising SDKs. On the website we do not set any cookies that would require consent – which is why you don't see a cookie banner.

Within the limits of applicable law, you have the following rights:

• Access to whether and which data we process about you (Art. 25 FADP, Art. 15 GDPR)
• Rectification of inaccurate data (Art. 32 FADP, Art. 16 GDPR)
• Erasure of your data (Art. 32 FADP, Art. 17 GDPR)
• Restriction of processing (Art. 18 GDPR)
• Release or portability of your data in a common format (Art. 28 FADP, Art. 20 GDPR)
• Objection to processing we base on a legitimate interest (Art. 30 FADP, Art. 21 GDPR)
• Withdrawal of consent with effect for the future (Art. 6 para. 6 FADP, Art. 7(3) GDPR)

The fastest route is an email to [email protected]. We generally respond within 30 days. To protect you, we may need to verify your identity in case of doubt before providing information.

You can delete your account at any time directly in the app. This removes your profile, your profile picture and your content. If you would rather write to us, we will handle the deletion and confirm it to you.

You may also lodge a complaint with a supervisory authority: in Switzerland with the Federal Data Protection and Information Commissioner (FDPIC, Feldeggweg 1, 3003 Bern), in the EU with the data protection authority of your country of residence (Art. 77 GDPR).

• All connections between the app, the website and our servers are encrypted with TLS.
• Content of private and shared Spaces and your journal are additionally stored encrypted in the database, with a separate key per Space and per person – see section 4.
• Our administration interface cannot display encrypted content.
• Passwords are stored only as hashes.
• Access tokens are kept on your device in the secure system storage.
• Administrative access is limited to a few, individually named people. The servers can only be accessed with a personal SSH key; every sign-in is logged, and repeated failed attempts are blocked automatically. Our hosting provider accounts are protected with two-factor authentication.
• Servers and dependencies are updated regularly.

Despite every care, a residual risk cannot be ruled out entirely. Transmission over the internet can never be absolutely secure.

sela is intended for people aged 16 and over. Younger people may use the app only with the consent of a parent or guardian. If we learn that an account was created without the necessary consent, we delete it.

We update this notice as sela evolves or the legal situation changes. The version published on this page is authoritative. We will inform you of material changes in the app or by email; if the purposes for which we process prayer content change, we will ask for your consent again.

For any question about privacy at sela:

• ICF Zürich, Zürichstrasse 131, 8600 Dübendorf, Switzerland
• [email protected]
• Representative in the EU: ICF Zürich Locations Deutschland e.V., Am Rotbach 21, 74523 Schwäbisch Hall, Germany