Privacy Policy

1.1 Information We Collect and Receive

In order for you to engage other members through the Site or the Services, or otherwise use our Site or Services, we may collect and process certain information to maximize the benefit you receive from our Services. Depending on your use of our Site and Services, this may include:

• Information you or your organization provides to us by creating your account, filling out your profile, entering information about yourself into the Torchable mobile app, and other forms on our Site or through our app. For example, your email, contact information, or any other information you may provide in any request, form, or communication from the Site or related to the Services;
• Information you provide to us by contacting us: Any personal information you may provide to us when you email or call us, such as name, organizations you work with, project details, email addresses, and any other details you provide.
• Login information, such as username that you may use in connection with our Services;
• Information about the ways people visit and interact with each other and with our Site, such as preferred communication methods, traffic analytics, and other statistics; and
• Information about your activity through our Services, including your device information (such as your IP address, the type of device, signal information, etc.).

We use personal information to run your church’s workspace, to provide the Services you and your church have asked for, to answer questions through Torchable AI (described in 2.2 below), to keep the systems your church has connected in sync, to bill for the Services, and to keep people safe. Section 2 sets out these purposes in full. Personal information does not include aggregate information from which individual identities have been removed.

1.2 Information from Children

Torrch does not knowingly solicit or collect personal information directly from anyone under 13 years of age, and children under 13 are not permitted to register for or use our Site or Services, including by subscribing to receive information from Torrch. Parents can contact our customer service department to access, change, or delete the personal information that has been submitted by a minor or child. If we become aware that a child under the age of 13 has registered for an account or has provided us with personal information directly, we will delete it.

These age requirements apply to people who create and hold accounts. The Services also store records about individuals of any age, including children, where a customer church or organization chooses to add them, for example when importing a membership directory. Those individuals are not account holders and have not agreed to this Privacy Policy or our Terms of Service. The customer organization is responsible for the basis on which it provides that information to us, including obtaining any parental consent required by law. A parent or guardian who wants to review, correct, or remove such a record should contact the church or organization that provided it.

1.3 Cookies and Tracers

Our Site uses cookies, which are small files your browser stores when a site asks it to. We use them to keep track of who we are talking to, and not for anything else. If you have an account, a cookie lets us recognize the browser you already signed in with, so you are not asked for your password on every page, and it holds your session while you work. If you use the Welcome Desk chat on a church’s website, a cookie keeps your place in that conversation even though you have no account; 1.5 below explains that one. We do not use advertising cookies, we do not use cookies to follow you to other websites, and we do not use an analytics or ad-tracking service to watch how you move around our Site.

1.4 Information from Systems Your Church Connects

An administrator at your church can connect the church’s own systems to Torchable. This is set up by the church, not by you, and in most cases you are not part of that decision. We think you should know what it means anyway.

When a church connects Planning Center, we receive a copy of the church’s people records. That can include names, contact details, household relationships, birthdates, and whether a person is recorded as a child. When a church connects a calendar, what we receive can include the email address of the person who organizes an event.

If you did not set this up and you have a question about your record, or you would like it corrected, your church holds that information and is the right place to start, because it can fix it at the source. You are also welcome to write to us at help@torrch.com and we will help.

1.5 The Welcome Desk Chat on a Church’s Website

Some churches add Torchable’s Welcome Desk to their public website: a chat box where anyone can ask a question. You do not need an account, and you do not need to be a member of that church.

Here is what happens when you use it. Your messages are saved. They are also sent to Anthropic, our AI provider, so the assistant can write a reply. Administrators at that church can read Welcome Desk conversations. If you ask to be contacted, or if the conversation suggests that someone may be at immediate risk, we email the church, and that email can include what you wrote.

The chat also sets a cookie in your browser so that it can tell your next message comes from the same visitor. That is what lets a conversation hold together instead of starting over every time you type. It lasts 30 days. It is not an advertising cookie and it does not follow you to other websites, but we would not call it anonymous: for as long as it is there, it ties your messages together as one person’s.

We store a scrambled form of your IP address rather than the address itself, together with the identifying text your browser sends about itself (its user agent). We use these to protect the chat from abuse. We would not call the scrambled form anonymous either. The same address always produces the same result, so it can still be used to tell one visitor from another, and because we do not mix in a secret of our own and there are only so many addresses it could have been, someone determined could work back to the original.

2.1 Why We Use Your Information

Torrch may use the personal information you provide for the following purposes:

• To allow you to log into and access your account or profile;
• To help you connect with other members with similar employment, volunteer, or other interests;
• To improve our Services and your experience;
• To provide customer service and our support services;
• To keep your information secure, and to be able to verify your identity and contact information;
• To alert you about updated information and other news and services from Torrch;
• To contact you in response to requests or any other communications submitted by you regarding your profile, your connections, or other aspects of our networking platform;
• To run your church’s workspace and the tools its staff and volunteers use;
• To answer questions through Torchable AI, which is described in 2.2 below;
• To keep the systems your church has connected to Torchable in sync;
• To bill your church for the Services and to measure its usage against its plan;
• To keep people safe, including responding when it looks like someone may be about to be hurt.

2.2 Torchable AI

Torchable AI is the assistant built into Torchable. You can ask it a question in plain language, and it answers using your church’s own information. To do that we have to send your conversation to an AI provider, so here is exactly what that involves.

• Your conversation goes to Anthropic. Anthropic, PBC makes the Claude models we use, and your messages are sent there so a reply can be written. Each time you send a message, the whole conversation so far goes with it, not just your newest message. That is how the assistant remembers what you were talking about.
• What it looks up goes too. The assistant can look things up on your church’s behalf, and whatever it finds is sent to Anthropic as part of answering you. That can include your church’s documents, sermon transcripts, bulletins, calendar events, the content of your church’s own website, and, where your church has connected Planning Center, member and group records.
• Search uses Google. To make all of that searchable, we use Google’s Vertex AI to turn text into numeric representations that can be matched against one another. What you type into a search and the church content being prepared for search both go to Google for that purpose.

We do not use these conversations to train AI models, and our AI providers have committed, in their agreements with us, not to train on them either. We want to be precise about that rather than reassuring: it is a contractual commitment, not a setting we have switched on inside their systems.

Anthropic and Google are listed, along with everyone else who handles information for us, on our sub-processors page. We keep that page current, which is why we point you to it instead of repeating the list here.

3.1 What Other People Can See

Your profile is visible to people who share an active organization with you, so that members of the same church can find and contact one another. It is not visible to everyone who uses Torchable. Torchable also includes controls for hiding parts of your profile from other members, and those controls are available today. Even so, you should not share any information which is sensitive or that you otherwise do not want others to be able to view.

Our public church directory is a separate thing, and two different rules apply there. Your own member profile appears in it only if you turned that on yourself, and our database will refuse to publish it otherwise, so it cannot happen through an administrator’s mistake. Separately, a church can list its staff and leaders on its own page in that directory. The church decides who appears and what it says about them, which can include a name, role, photo, and short biography, and it can list someone who has no Torchable account at all.

So if you have been listed that way and you would like it changed or taken down, the church holds that page and can edit it directly, which is the quickest route. You are also welcome to write to us at help@torrch.com, and you do not need an account to ask.

Torrch will never sell or rent any of your personal information, and we will never share your personal information publicly without your consent. We may share your information with certain trusted third-party vendors to help us provide, improve, promote, or protect your information, our Site, and Services. For example, we may partner with other companies to provide data security services. Whenever we share data with third-party services, we require that they use your information only for the purposes we’ve authorized, and that they protect your personal information at least to the same standards we do. You can see who those companies are, what each one does, and what it can see, on our sub-processors page.

We also reserve the right to disclose personal information when it is reasonably necessary to connect with other users of our social platform, protect Torrch’s legal rights and property, and to comply with the law or law enforcement. Otherwise, your personal information is never shared with any individual or other organization.

3.2 Pastoral Conversations and Crisis Alerts

When you talk with Torchable AI, that conversation is yours. An administrator at your church cannot read it.

There is one exception, and it exists because we would rather sit with an awkward false alarm than miss someone who is about to be hurt. When you use Torchable AI on the Torchable website, or the Welcome Desk chat a church has added to its own website, every message you send is checked by an automatic word-matching rule for signs that someone may be in danger. When a message matches, that message is copied into a queue your church’s leaders can see, and those leaders are emailed straight away.

Two honest things about that check. It is deliberately cautious, so it will sometimes match when there is no emergency at all, for example when you are working through a difficult passage of scripture or passing along something you read in the news. And your church’s leaders cannot turn these notifications off.

The notification email itself does not contain what you wrote. It says that something needs attention and links to the record, which a leader has to sign in to read.

The information you provide us will improve our ability to help you make connections, communicate, and coordinate with others through our Services. Accordingly, we take the security of your personal information seriously, and follow industry-standard practices to protect the data we collect and process. Torrch has therefore put in place commercially reasonable physical, electronic, and managerial procedures to safeguard and secure the personal information that Torrch collects. Access to personal information will be restricted to our authorized personnel who require the information as part of their duties to make our network function. In addition, access will be limited to only that information that is strictly necessary for the performance of those duties.

Remember, the safety and security of your information also depends on you. You must protect the security and confidentiality of the user name and password for your profile and account. No transmission over the internet is completely secure, so Torrch cannot guarantee its absolute security.

Some information deserves more than good practice, so we encrypt it inside the database itself. Conversations with Torchable AI, messages between members, Welcome Desk conversations, bulletin posts, personal notes, and crisis records are all stored encrypted. In practice that means someone who walked off with a copy of our database file would not be able to read them.

Encryption has real edges, though, and you should know where they are. To let you search your church’s content, we keep a second, searchable copy of some of it, and that copy is not encrypted. When a visitor leaves their contact details through the Welcome Desk, those details are stored without encryption. And answering a question means decrypting the content first, which is how it reaches our AI provider as described in 2.2. Encryption protects your information while it is sitting still. It does not make it invisible to the parts of Torchable that have to use it.

Because Torrch is a US-based company, your information may be collected and processed in the United States. Additionally, the information you provide to us may be transferred to, and stored in, one or more countries other than where you currently reside. For example, if our Services utilize servers or third-party service providers are located in a country other than yours. These countries may have different data protection laws that are similar to your current residence. However, if we transfer your information in this way, we will put in place appropriate protection to make sure your personal data remains adequately protected and is treated in line with this Privacy Policy.

Data protection law in Europe requires a “lawful basis” for collecting and retaining personal information from residents of the European Economic Area. Our lawful bases include:

• Providing you with the services you have requested: We need your personal data to comply with our contractual obligation to provide you with our Services, and assist with any questions you may have. Without your information, it would be impossible to connect you with others with similar interests.
• Consent: we may ask your consent to process, store, and share your personal information as part of our Services.
• Legal compliance: Sometimes the law says we need to collect and use your data.
• Legitimate interests: This is a term in data protection law that allows us to process your personal information if we have a fair reason to use your data, and only if we do so in ways which do not hurt your interests and rights. We sometimes require your data to pursue our legitimate interests in running our business, including for delivering our Services, fraud prevention, quality assurance, and marketing purposes, as long as our use of your data does not materially impact your rights, freedom or interests. This allows us to improve and develop the quality of the online experience we offer all our users.

We try to keep email communications to a minimum, and give you the ability to opt in to any communications regarding networking opportunities, news, or marketing communications we send. For example, we may send you emails relating to opportunities for expanding your social, faith, volunteer, and/or business network. You may also elect to receive certain marketing emails, in accordance with your preferences, and from which you may opt out at any time. If we have sent you a promotional email or mobile device notification, you may send us a return email or mobile device communication asking to be omitted from future communications. You may also opt out by logging into the Site and adjusting your preferences in your account information, or by sending us an email at help@torrch.com stating your request. This opt out does not apply to information provided to Torrch to create or maintain your membership as part of our Services, service experience, or other communications regarding your registration, correction of data, change of password, or other administrative needs.

We hold your personal information for as long as your church’s account is active, because that is what makes the Services work, and after that until someone asks us to remove it. How long we need any particular information depends on what it is and why we have it. We also keep some information because the law requires it or because we need it to run our business, such as billing records and security audit logs.

We would rather be straightforward with you than tidy, so we will say plainly what this Policy does not promise. It does not set a retention period, and we do not delete information automatically once a set amount of time has passed. Removing information is something we do when it is asked for, in the ways described in Section 9.

Members that reside in certain countries, such as the EU, are afforded certain rights regarding their personal information. Except where an exception or exemption applies, these rights may include the ability to access, correct, and/or request deletion of your personal information. While these rights are not globally applicable, our customers are entitled to access the personal information that we hold about them. You can review the personal data you have provided us by accessing your account profile through our Site. To ensure that your personal information is accurate, complete, and up to date, update your account through the Site or mobile app, or contact us through the email address below regarding any errors or updates affecting the personal information that we may hold.

How you delete an account depends on where you use Torchable. If you are a member using the Torchable Connect app, on the web or on your phone, you can delete your account yourself from your account settings. The church administration product does not have a self-serve delete today, so if that is where you work, email us at help@torrch.com and we will take care of it. Either way, it helps to know what deleting does: it removes your login and detaches your name from things you posted, and it is not an erasure of everything. Some records are kept on purpose, including security audit logs.

Many of the people whose information we hold never created an account, and we do not want that to leave you without a way in. Perhaps your details reached us because your church added them, or because they appear on a church’s public page, or because you used a Welcome Desk chat on a church’s website. You can still ask us about any of it. Where a church gave us the information, that church holds those records and is usually the faster place to start, because it can correct them at the source. You are also welcome to write to us at help@torrch.com. We will help either way, and you do not need an account to ask.

You may also send us an email at help@torrch.com to request access to, correct, or delete any personal information that we hold about you. To protect your privacy and security, Torrch may take reasonable steps to verify your identity before granting access to, correcting, or deleting data. We will generally respond to your request for information within thirty (30) days, unless, for reasons beyond our control, a longer response time is necessary, in which case, you will be advised accordingly. Please note that we may retain certain information as required by law or as necessary for our legitimate business purposes.

If you have questions or comments about this Privacy Policy, or if you have any questions regarding your personal information in connection with our networking platform and services, we invite you to contact us at help@torrch.com. We will reply as quickly as possible and inform you of the steps, if any, that have been or will be taken in order to address your concern or implement your suggestion.

Torrch strives to satisfy our members’ privacy concerns. However, if you have contacted Torrch about your issue and are still unhappy with our response, and if you are also a resident of the European Economic Area, subject to applicable law, you may also have the right to object to Torrch’s use of your personal information, and to lodge a complaint with your local data protection authority.

This Privacy Policy is effective from August 17, 2021. We may update Privacy Policy from time to time. If we do, we’ll let you know about any material changes, either by notifying you on the Site or by sending you an email. Any updates to Privacy Policy will not apply retroactively. If you keep using our Site or Services after a change, that means you accept Privacy Policy.