Privacy

What we hold, and what we will never publish

This page is not a legal notice and it was not written by lawyers. It is a plain description of what this software does with what you give it, written by the people who built it. When the software changes, this page changes with it.

The short account: the Church asks for an email address, because that is how a Guide writes back to you. Everything else is yours to offer or to keep. Nothing is sold, nothing is passed to anyone else, and nothing about your path is published.

What is stored

Every field, named

This is the whole list. There is nothing held about a member that is not on it.

Your email address The one thing the Church asks for. It is how a Guide writes back to you, and it is how you sign in.

The name you choose A display name, and initials if you want them. Neither has to be the name on your documents. If you give no name at all, the part of your address before the @ stands in until you change it.

Your standing Where you are on the path: Public, Inquirer, Full Member, Initiate, Sanctuary Keeper, Ecclesium. Standing governs what you may see, and nothing else.

Your sphere One of the six, and only if you tell us. It is how you are connected to the nearest circle.

What you choose to show A short biography, pronouns, an image, and a visibility setting you hold yourself. Members-only is the setting you begin with, and you may narrow it further.

Your passphrase Kept only as a one-way hash, which means nobody at the Church can read it. An Inquirer never needs one at all, because reading asks nothing of you.

A sign-in link Kept as a hash, usable once, and expired seven days after it is issued whether it is used or not.

When you arrived The day you affirmed, and the day you were last here, so a Guide knows whether to write again rather than guessing.

What is never published

The path is not a public record

Your progress along the path — the lessons you have walked, the stage you stand in, the rite you have petitioned — is visible to you and to your Guide. It is not on your profile and it is not in the directory. The column that holds it is marked in the schema itself as never public, so that a future editor cannot make it public by accident.

A held space is never recorded and never indexed. What is said in a circle of grief, or in a circle of practice, stays in that circle: there is no recording, no transcript, and no search engine reaches it.

No image, recording or word of a member is published without a consent recorded against that file — with the name of the person who gave it and the date they gave it. A file whose consent is not recorded cannot be placed on a page. That is a condition of the software, and not a policy someone has to remember.

Why there is a record

A restorative process needs something truthful to stand on

The Æthery keeps an audit log: who did what in the Console, to which thing, when, and from which network address. It records changes rather than reading — a page published, a standing altered, a post held, a report closed — and its detail line sometimes carries the thing that was changed, such as the address on an affirmation.

It exists for one reason. The restorative ladder — confession, accountability circle, restitution, and possible reintegration — cannot be walked on memory. When a harm is raised, the circle has to be able to see what happened and in what order, and nobody in that room should have to take anyone’s word for it.

Only those who hold the members capability may read it. It is not a feed, it is not shown to anyone else, and it is never used to measure a person’s devotion. A record that can be quietly edited is not a record, so it is not edited.

What we never do

Four refusals

Never sold Nothing about you is sold, rented, traded, or given to anyone in exchange for anything at all.

Never shared Nothing is passed to another organisation, and there is no third party inside this website to pass it to.

Nothing from elsewhere This site loads no font, script, image or measurement from any other server. There is no analytics, there are no tracking pixels, and there is no advertising — and the software refuses anything from anywhere else rather than trusting us to behave.

One cookie A session, so that you stay signed in and so that a form cannot be sent to the Æthery from somewhere else. It carries no identity of its own, and it ends when you sign out or close the browser.

Withdrawing

You may withdraw at any time, for any reason

Say so — to your Guide, to a Keeper, or to the Office — and it is done. There is no exit interview, no offer to keep you, and no conversation you have to survive first.

What happens: your membership is archived, your name leaves the directory, your spaces close, your path is closed where it stands, and the Church stops writing to you. If you ask for what you wrote in a space to be taken down, it is taken down. If you would rather it stay for the people it was written for, it stays, and a Keeper takes your name off it.

Two things remain, and we would rather say so now than surprise you later. The fact that a withdrawal happened stays in the audit log, because a record that can be erased is not a record. And where an offering was made, the offering stays in the accounts, because a Church has to be able to account for what it was given.

Affirming costs nothing, and withdrawing costs nothing. That is the whole of the arrangement.

Asking

If any of this is unclear, ask

Write to admin@churchofaether.org and a person will answer — what is held about you, where it sits, who can see it, and how to have it changed or ended.

If you would like to read the rest of the standing between us, the Community Agreement says what we ask of one another and what happens when a harm is raised.