Privacy notice

Which of us is responsible for your data

Sanctavo plays two different roles, and almost everything else follows from which one applies to you.

• Sanctavo for churches. The church is the controller, it decides that its service is translated, in which languages, and who may read the result. We are its processor and act on its instructions. If you attended a service, the church is who to ask about your data; its details are shown on the page you joined from.
• Sanctavo One. You have an account with us directly, so we are the controller.
• This website, and support. We are the controller.

Who we are

Barmak Shayan (sole proprietorship / Einzelunternehmen)
1220 Vienna, Austria, GISA 40044200
Privacy contact: [email protected]

Contact details are on the Imprint.

If you listened to a translated service

You are anonymous to us. Joining a service needs no account, no login, no name and no email. We do not build a profile of you, and we cannot tell that the person who listened last Sunday is the person who listened this Sunday.

What exists is a connection record holding the language you chose and the times you joined and left. It identifies nobody. If you ask us for a copy of your data as a listener, we have nothing to give you, and building a way to identify you in order to answer would make your privacy worse rather than better.

If you chose to send a prayer request or a response card, that is different: you gave that deliberately, it goes to the church, and the church decides what happens to it.

If you speak at a service

Your voice is processed in real time to produce the translation. It is not stored unless your church switches recording on for that particular service; recording is off by default at every level. A transcript of what you said, and of each translation, is stored, by default for 30 days. Your church may set a shorter period, or keep an individual service longer — at most twelve months after it took place.

Who else sees it

Making a live translation work means sending the audio to specialist providers. The complete, current list, what each one receives, the endpoint we call, the region it processes in, and the transfer basis, is at /subprocessors. It is generated from our running configuration rather than written by hand, so it cannot quietly go out of date.

We are not going to tell you that everything stays in the EU, because it does not. Sanctavo stores your recordings, transcripts and generated content on infrastructure in Frankfurt, Germany. Live audio and content may be processed by the AI providers and in the locations listed in the register. Where a provider offers a European endpoint, the register names it and says whether we are using it.

Artificial intelligence

Everything Sanctavo produces, the translated voice, the subtitles, the transcript and every written summary or article, is produced by AI. It can be wrong, and names, numbers and scripture references are the most likely to be wrong. Anything published to you carries a notice saying so, on the page and on the cover of any document you download.

Nothing written by AI is published to a congregation until a person at the church has read it and approved it, and we record who approved it and when. More at /ai-transparency.

How long we keep things

• Transcripts, translations and generated material, 30 days by default. The church may set a shorter period, or extend an individual service — each extension sets a new fixed date, and no service is kept past twelve months after it took place.
• Audio, where recording was enabled: the same period as the transcripts of that service.
• Questions asked through Ask the Sermon, comments, prayer requests and other things listeners submit: 30 days. Extending a service does not extend these.
• A service the church deleted, destroyed after a 7-day recovery window, or immediately on request.
• Security records, 90 days.
• Backups, 14 days on the server, plus up to 30 days in the off-site storage provider's version history (encrypted before it leaves the server, not restorable into the service). Personal data can therefore persist in backup form for up to 44 days after deletion from the live system.
• Accounting records (minutes and amounts, no content), 7 years, required by Austrian law.

Your rights

Access, rectification, erasure, restriction, portability, objection, and withdrawal of consent. You may also complain to a supervisory authority, in Austria, the Datenschutzbehörde.

Where to send a request: if it concerns a church service, send it to that church, whose details are on the page you joined from. They are the controller and we are not permitted to answer for them. For Sanctavo One, this website or support, write to us. We answer within one month.

Cookies

No advertising cookies, no analytics cookies, no third-party tracking. What exists is strictly necessary: a session cookie when a church administrator signs in, and, during the pre-launch period, a cookie recording that a valid access code was entered.

Visits to this website

We count visits to four of our own pages: the home page, the Sanctavo One page, and the two registration pages. Not this one, and not the other legal pages. It runs on our own server, and the measurement never leaves it: there is no analytics company involved, which is why you will not find one in our sub-processor list.

We also count four things people do: pressing a “Book a free demo” button, opening one of the pricing plans, sending the demo form, and completing a registration. What is recorded is that it happened and which plan or which button — never who. Your name, your email, your church and anything you typed into a form are not part of it and are never sent.

It sets no cookie and gives you no identifier, so nothing follows you to another website or from one visit to the next. What we keep is the page you looked at, the site that linked you, your rough country, and whether you were on a phone or a computer.

This does not run on the pages you use during a service. If you joined a service through a QR code or a link, that page is not measured at all — nothing about your attendance, your language or your listening is counted here.

Because there is no cookie and no identifier, this needs no consent banner. The legal basis is our legitimate interest in knowing whether our own website works (Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR).