Privacy Policy

Shepherd is a pastoral meeting tracker operated by Nova Family Church ("we", "us"). We provide a mobile app, web dashboard, and Telegram bot that help youth pastors record meetings with the young people in their care.

Contact: averseinc@gmail.com

• Pastor account data — name, email, Telegram ID, church, role, password hash.
• Young-person records — names, date of birth, grade, parent/guardian contact details, safeguarding notes, and pastoral engagement stage. Collected by pastors on behalf of the church.
• Meeting content — date, time, attendees, and notes that pastors record after pastoral catch-ups.
• Device and log data — IP address, device model, OS version, crash reports, and request logs retained for security and debugging.

• To operate the meeting tracker and surface reminders to pastors.
• To generate aggregate engagement reports for church leadership.
• To send Telegram reminders for upcoming scheduled meetings.
• To investigate abuse, meet safeguarding obligations, and keep the service secure.

We do not sell your data, use it for advertising, or share it with third parties for marketing.

Data is stored in Supabase (PostgreSQL) in an Australian region, with row-level security enforcing that pastors only see records for their own church. Application hosting is provided by Vercel. Error monitoring is provided by Sentry. Telegram messaging transits Telegram's infrastructure per their privacy policy.

• Pastors see young-person records for their assigned caseload and their church.
• Admin pastors see all records for their church.
• Nova Family Church administrators and a small number of Shepherd maintainers may access data to provide support or investigate safeguarding concerns.

Shepherd is used by churches to record notes about young people, including minors. Records are created and controlled by the church, which acts as the data controller for those records. If you are a parent or guardian and wish to review, correct, or delete records about your child, contact the pastor at your church or email us.

You can request to:

• Access the personal data we hold about you.
• Correct inaccurate data.
• Delete your account and associated records, subject to any safeguarding retention obligations.
• Withdraw consent or object to processing.

Email averseinc@gmail.com to exercise any of these rights. We respond within 30 days.

Active pastoral records are kept for as long as the young person is part of the church community. Deleted records are soft-deleted and removed from backups within 90 days. Crash and access logs are retained for up to 90 days.

All traffic is encrypted with TLS. Passwords are hashed with bcrypt. Supabase row-level security restricts data access by pastor identity. Safeguarding notes have additional access controls.

The Shepherd iOS app does not collect data from children directly. Only approved pastors can sign in. The app has no advertising, no third-party tracking, no social features, and no user-generated content shared between users outside their own church.

We may update this policy. Material changes will be announced to active pastors via the app and by email before they take effect.

Questions or requests: averseinc@gmail.com