Privacy Policy
The short version. Your prayer request is private unless you choose otherwise. Nothing appears on our public wall without your explicit choice and a review by our team. We keep your email even when your request is shown anonymously, so that we can respond to abuse and protect people. We never sell your information. You can ask us to delete anything, at any time, at 8449prayer@gmail.com.
This policy is currently published in English only. A Spanish translation is being prepared. If you need this explained in another language, write to us and we will help.
1. Who we are
844-9PRAYER, formerly known as 877-PRAYNOW, is a for-profit business. Its website is 8449prayer.com; our former address, 877praynow.com, now forwards here. Its company formation is in progress; until it is complete, the service is operated by its founders, who are the controller of the information described in this policy. We will add the registered company's name, state and address here as soon as formation is complete.
For anything to do with your information, write to 8449prayer@gmail.com. That address reaches the team responsible for privacy at 844-9PRAYER.
We are a for-profit business, not a registered charity. Payments and gifts to us are not tax-deductible.
2. What we collect
When you send a prayer request
- The name or preferred name you give us
- Your email address, if you provide one — required if you ask us to publish your request
- The language you pray in
- Your age band (18 or older, or 16 to 17)
- Your faith or denomination, only if you choose to give it — the field is optional
- The request itself, in your own words
- Your sharing choice: private, anonymous, or with your first name
- Technical information: IP address, approximate time, and general device information
When you create an account
- Your email address, and a password — which is stored by our sign-in provider in scrambled (hashed) form that we cannot read. If you sign in with Google instead, we receive your name and email address from Google, not your Google password.
- The display name you choose
- Your age group (16 to 17, or 18 and older). It cannot be changed later, and if you are under 18 anything you share publicly is anonymous.
- Your faith or denomination and your language, only if you choose to give them
- Your plan (Free or Premium), whether you are an approved prayer warrior, and your account status
- When you agreed to this policy, and which version you agreed to
- Technical sign-in information kept by our sign-in provider: when the account was created and last signed in, and the IP address used
When you apply to be a prayer warrior
Applications are stored in our database (Google Firebase) and reviewed by our admins. If you are approved before you have an account, we keep a note of your email so the badge is applied when you create one.
- Your full name, email address and country
- Your denomination, the languages you can pray in, and your home church if you give one
- A pastor or church leader as a reference, if you give one
- Your answer about why you want to serve, and your confirmations regarding age, the Apostles' Creed and confidentiality
When you visit the site
Our hosting provider, Netlify, receives the technical information any website receives in order to deliver and secure it: your IP address, browser and device type, the pages requested, and the time. Today we do not run visitor analytics of our own. In a later update, we will begin keeping our own visit records so that we can look into specific incidents of abuse and understand how the site is used. We will update this policy to describe those records before we start keeping them, and visitors in the UK and EU will be asked for consent first.
Our pages load their fonts, images and code from our own site. No visit is reported to Google, to an advertising network, or to any other third party by our pages.
When you use the prayer wall
- When you press "I prayed for this": a random identifier created in your browser, so we count one prayer per person rather than forty from the same person, together with a scrambled (one-way hashed) form of your IP address and the time
- If you are an approved prayer warrior and press "I prayed" on your prayer list: your account identifier, so each warrior counts once
- When you report a post: the reason and any note you write, the time, your IP address, and a scrambled form of your browser's random identifier. Our moderation team sees reports.
- We also keep short-lived counts per connection to stop automated abuse. These expire within hours.
- When you press "Amen": the same kind of random identifier (or your account, if signed in), so it counts once.
- When you comment: the name you give (or your account name and badge, if signed in) and your words are shown publicly with the post. We also keep your IP address and a scrambled form of your browser's identifier to deal with abuse. Comments with links, emails, phone numbers or crisis words are held for our team to read first. Only Prayer Warriors and staff may comment on requests from people aged 16–17.
- If you have signed in on a device, the wall recognises you so your prayers and comments count as yours. For that, your browser loads our sign-in code from our own site and talks to Google Firebase. Guests who have never signed in on the device do not load it.
- The Share buttons are plain links. Nothing from Facebook, X, WhatsApp or any other network loads on our pages; a network is contacted only if you choose to share there, and then under its own privacy policy.
The wall is loaded from our own address (8449prayer.com). Our host relays it to our database provider, Google Firebase; your browser does not contact Google to show the wall.
Your private request link
When you send a request, we give you a private link showing whether it has been shared and how many people and prayer warriors have prayed. Anyone who has the link can see that page, so keep it to yourself. We store only a scrambled form of the link, not the link itself.
When you write to us as a supporter or partner
- Your name, email address, organisation if given, and your message
3. Sensitive information, and why this section matters
Prayer requests are not ordinary data. What you write may reveal your religious beliefs, your health, your family circumstances, or a crisis you are living through. Under the UK and EU General Data Protection Regulation this is special category data and carries the strongest protections in law.
We handle it on the basis of your explicit consent, given when you choose how your request may be shared and send it to us. You can withdraw that consent at any time by writing to us, and we will remove the request.
We also process a limited amount of information on the basis of our legitimate interest in keeping people safe — specifically, keeping a record of who submitted what, so that abusive, threatening or fraudulent submissions can be traced and stopped.
4. What we do with it
- We pray. Our prayer team reads every request and prays over it.
- We review. Every request is checked by a moderator before it could appear anywhere public.
- We publish, only if you chose that. See section 5.
- We reply, if you left an email and asked us to.
- We count. We record that a prayer was prayed, so the person who asked can see it.
- We protect people. We use what we hold to identify and stop abuse.
We do not use your prayer request to advertise to you, and we do not build advertising profiles.
5. What appears in public, and what never does
Requests are private by default. A request appears on our public wall only when all of the following are true:
- You chose "share anonymously" or "share with my first name" when you submitted it
- A moderator has reviewed and approved it
- It has not been flagged as a crisis
If you chose anonymous, no name is shown. If you chose to share your first name, only your first name is shown — never your surname, email, location or contact details.
If you are 16 or 17, your request can be kept private or shared anonymously. It will never be published with your name.
Crisis requests are never published, whatever sharing option was selected. Where a request suggests someone may be in danger, it is routed to a named member of our team rather than to the public wall or the general prayer feed.
6. Anonymous does not mean unknown to us
We want to be direct about this, because it matters and because burying it would be wrong.
When a request is shown anonymously on our wall, it is anonymous to the public. It is not anonymous to us. We keep the email address and technical information associated with every submission, including anonymous ones.
We do this for one reason: a public wall where submissions cannot be traced is a public wall that will be used to abuse, threaten and defame people. Keeping that record is how we protect the people who read it and the people named in it. We do not use it for any other purpose, and access is limited to the moderators listed in section 8.
7. Who else sees your information
We never sell your information and we never pass it to anyone for their own marketing.
We use service providers who process information on our behalf, under contract and on our instructions:
- Netlify — website hosting and form delivery
- Google (Gmail) — our email
- Google Firebase — accounts, sign-in and our database. Firebase also sends the emails that verify your address and reset your password.
When the prayer wall launches, we may add Render (server connections). When Premium membership launches, we will name our payment processor here before we take any payment.
We may disclose information where the law requires it, or where we believe in good faith that disclosure is necessary to prevent serious harm to someone.
8. Who can see requests inside 844-9PRAYER
Full requests, including private ones and contact details, can be seen only by our moderation team. Approved prayer warriors see requests in order to pray over them and are bound by a written confidentiality undertaking given when they apply.
Warrior applications are reviewed by a designated member of our team.
9. Where your information is held
Our services are hosted in the United States. If you write to us from outside the United States, your information will be transferred to and stored there, where privacy laws differ from those in your country. Where required, we rely on your explicit consent and on standard contractual clauses with our providers for these transfers.
10. How long we keep it
We keep information only as long as it serves the purpose we collected it for, and then delete it. You can ask us to delete anything sooner.
| What | How long |
|---|---|
| Your account | While it is open. When you ask us to delete it, within 90 days. Records we must keep for safety (below) follow their own period. |
| Private prayer requests | If you have an account, while it is active and 90 days after. If sent without an account, 12 months. |
| Requests shown on the public wall | 12 months, then removed. Sooner if you ask. |
| Safeguarding and moderation records — who submitted what, reports, and our decisions | 7 years, with access restricted to our moderation team |
| Prayer warrior applications | While the person serves and 12 months after. Declined applications, 12 months. |
| Messages from supporters and partners | 24 months after our last contact |
| Visit records, once we begin keeping them | 24 months |
| Individual "I prayed" records | 24 months. The running totals are kept. |
| Reports on wall posts | 7 years, with the moderation records |
| Comments | While the post is on the wall and 12 months after. Removed comments are kept with the moderation records. |
11. Your rights
Wherever you live, you may ask us to:
- Tell you what we hold about you, and give you a copy
- Correct anything that is wrong
- Delete what we hold, including a request you would rather we no longer had
- Stop using your information in a particular way, or withdraw your consent
- Take your information to another service, where that applies
If you are in the UK or EU, you also have the right to complain to your data protection authority. If you are in California, you have rights under the CCPA and CPRA, including the right to know and the right to delete. We do not sell or share personal information as those terms are defined under California law.
If you have an account, you can edit your profile and ask for deletion yourself on your account page. Otherwise, or for anything else, write to 8449prayer@gmail.com. We will respond within 30 days. We will not ask you to justify a deletion request.
12. Children and young people
You must be at least 16 to send a prayer request or create an account, and at least 18 to serve as a prayer warrior. We do not knowingly collect information from anyone under 16. If you believe a child under 16 has sent us information, write to us and we will delete it.
13. What we store in your browser
We do not use advertising cookies or third-party tracking. We store a small amount of information in your own browser. Apart from the sign-in token and the prayer-wall identifier described below, none of it is sent to us:
- Your language choice, so the site opens the way you left it
- Your light or dark theme choice, if you change it from your device's setting
- If you sign in, a sign-in token from Firebase that keeps you signed in on that device until you sign out
If you use the prayer wall, we also store a random identifier, so we can count one prayer per person, and lists of the requests you have prayed for or reported, so the buttons look right when you come back. The identifier is sent with a prayer or report so it can be counted once; the lists never leave your browser.
You can clear these at any time in your browser settings. Nothing breaks if you do.
14. Security
We protect your information with encryption in transit, access controls limiting who on our team can see what, and server-side rules preventing requests from being read or altered by anyone who should not. No system is perfect, and we will not pretend otherwise. If a breach affects you, we will tell you.
15. If you are in crisis
Please do not wait for a prayer request to be answered. In the United States, call or text 988 for the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, free and at any hour; for Spanish, press 2 or text AYUDA to 988. Outside the United States, findahelpline.com lists verified helplines in over 175 countries. If someone is in immediate danger, call your local emergency number.
16. Changes
If we change this policy in a way that materially affects you, we will say so on this page and, where we hold your email, write to you. We will not apply a new use to information you already gave us without asking first.