Privacy Policy

Who we are

Paqad is an online platform that churches and similar organizations use to run their work: people and families, attendance, services, groups, follow-up and pastoral care. Paqad is provided by OmniCore Systems Consulting LTD, registered in England and Wales ("we", "us", "our").

This policy explains what personal data is processed when you use Paqad or read its public pages, who is responsible for it, how it is protected, and the rights you have. It follows the data protection law of the United Kingdom: the UK General Data Protection Regulation (UK GDPR) and the Data Protection Act 2018.

Who is responsible for your data

Organizations' records. Each organization that uses Paqad decides what it records about its people — members, visitors, first-time guests, children and families, volunteers and leaders — and why. For those records the organization is the controller. We process them on its behalf and only on its instructions, as its processor.

Accounts and the service itself. We are the controller of the account data of people who sign in to Paqad, and of the technical and security records we keep to run and protect the service.

If your question is about what an organization holds about you, please contact that organization first. If you contact us instead, we will pass your request to the organization and help it respond.

What we collect

Account data. Anyone can create an account, but an account gives access to nothing until an organization invites you to join it. To create one you give your name, your email address and a password, or you sign in with Google (see the next section). You can also sign in with a 6-digit code that we email to you, instead of a password. Our authentication service holds your sign-in details; the Paqad application itself never receives or stores your password. Paqad keeps your email address, your name, your preferred language, when you last signed in, and the organizations, roles and locations you have been given.

Records that organizations enter. Depending on which parts of Paqad an organization uses, these can include:

• names, contact details (telephone, WhatsApp, email and postal address), date of birth, gender and occupation;
• families and households, and how people are related to each other;
• membership status, stages such as baptism, and the location a person belongs to;
• attendance at services, small groups, ministries, training and events;
• first-time guests and new converts, who invited them, and follow-up tasks and contact attempts;
• people met through outreach, with the contact details they chose to give;
• small groups, their members and meetings, and the offering totals recorded for services and meetings;
• service plans and who serves in them, ministry teams, training enrolment and grades, and media tasks;
• children's check-in and pickup at services, and care notes about children (for example, an allergy);
• pastoral care cases, their notes and who they are assigned to;
• files the organization uploads, such as its logo, files it imports and documents attached to services;
• a record of who changed what and when (an audit trail).

Because these records are kept by churches, many of them can reveal a person's religious beliefs, and pastoral care notes and children's care notes can include information about health or family circumstances. These are special categories of personal data under UK GDPR, and they are protected accordingly (see "How we protect data").

Checking in at a service. If an organization offers a check-in code at its door, a visitor who uses it may type their name and telephone number. That text is seen only by the people taking attendance, and it is cleared once they have dealt with it.

Technical data. Our hosting provider records requests to the service — such as the address requested, the time and the network (IP) address — to deliver and protect it. To slow down repeated attempts (signing in, creating an account, checking in at a service and accepting an invitation) we count attempts per network address, account or check-in code. What we store with each count is a pseudonymised fingerprint (a one-way hash) of the address, account or code, and we delete these counts after about two days. Our own application logs are written to leave out passwords, tokens, cookies and email addresses.

Information from Google

If you choose "Continue with Google", Google asks your permission to share your basic profile with Paqad. We request only the standard sign-in permissions — openid, email and profile — which give us your name, your email address, whether Google has verified that address, and your profile picture. We do not request access to your Gmail, Google Drive, Google Calendar, contacts or any other Google data, and we never receive your Google password.

We use this information only to sign you in, to match you with the invitation sent to your email address, and to show your name in Paqad. Our authentication service keeps the sign-in record, which may include the tokens Google issues when you sign in; Paqad does not use them to access any of your Google data.

In particular:

• we do not sell information received from Google;
• we do not use it, or transfer it, for advertising, including personalized, retargeted or interest-based advertising;
• we do not transfer it to anyone else, except as needed to provide or improve the sign-in features you use, to comply with the law, or as part of a merger, acquisition or sale of assets after notice to you;
• we do not use it to determine credit-worthiness or for lending;
• we do not use it to develop, improve or train artificial intelligence or machine learning models;
• no person reads it unless you ask us to (for example, for support), it is needed for security purposes such as investigating abuse, or the law requires it.

Paqad's use and transfer of information received from Google APIs will adhere to the Google API Services User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements.

You can remove Paqad's access at any time in your Google Account, under third-party apps and services. You will then need another way to sign in.

To delete your account and the information received from Google, email privacy@paqad.online. We act on it within one month, the period UK GDPR allows.

How we use personal data

We use personal data to:

• provide Paqad to the organizations that use it and to their users;
• sign you in, keep you signed in and verify your email address;
• keep the service secure: limit repeated attempts, prevent misuse and investigate problems;
• answer your requests and give support;
• meet our legal obligations.

We do not sell personal data, use it for advertising or build marketing profiles. Paqad has no analytics or advertising trackers, and it does not send data to any artificial intelligence service.

Our legal bases

For the personal data we control, we rely on:

• contract — to provide your account and the service you or your organization asked for (Article 6(1)(b) UK GDPR);
• legitimate interests — to keep the service secure and working and to prevent misuse (Article 6(1)(f) UK GDPR), in ways that do not override your rights;
• legal obligation — where the law requires us to keep or disclose information (Article 6(1)(c) UK GDPR).

For the records an organization enters, the organization decides its own legal basis and is responsible for it. Where those records include special category data, such as religious belief or health, the organization must also meet a condition in Article 9 UK GDPR — for example, processing by a not-for-profit body with a religious aim in the course of its legitimate activities, about its members, former members or people in regular contact with it (Article 9(2)(d)), or the person's explicit consent (Article 9(2)(a)).

Who we share data with

We use these service providers (sub-processors) to run Paqad. Each acts on our instructions:

• Vercel — hosting and delivery of the application (United States);
• Neon — the database, the authentication service and file storage (Amazon Web Services, US East (Ohio) region, United States);
• Resend — delivery of the emails our authentication service sends, such as sign-in verification codes (United States);
• Google — sign-in, only if you choose to sign in with Google.

Inside an organization, what each user can see is decided by the organization's administrators through roles and permissions. We may also disclose information where the law requires it, to protect the rights, safety or security of people or of the service, or to a successor if the service is transferred, in which case this policy continues to apply.

We do not sell personal data to anyone.

International transfers

Our providers store and process data in the United States. When personal data is transferred from the United Kingdom to the United States, we rely on appropriate safeguards such as the UK International Data Transfer Addendum or the UK Extension to the EU-US Data Privacy Framework, as applicable to each provider. You can ask us for more information about these safeguards.

How long we keep data

• Account data is kept while your account exists. If you ask us to delete it, we delete or anonymise it, except anything we must keep for legal or security reasons. The record of what you did inside an organization, such as its audit trail, belongs to that organization.
• Organizations' records are kept for as long as the organization uses Paqad. The platform is designed to archive records rather than delete them, so that an organization's history stays complete; the organization decides what it keeps. When an organization stops using Paqad, it can export its records, and we then delete them or return them to it as agreed with it.
• Text typed at check-in stays until someone at the door deals with it, and is then cleared. There is no automatic expiry yet: text nobody deals with stays until someone does.
• Counts of attempts (signing in, creating an account, checking in, accepting an invitation) are deleted after about two days.
• Technical logs are kept by our hosting provider for a limited period and then deleted.
• Database history. Our database provider keeps a short history of the database so that it can be restored after a failure. Data removed from the live database remains in that history until it expires.

How we protect data

• every connection to Paqad is encrypted (HTTPS), browsers are told to use only secure connections, and the application reaches the database over an encrypted connection;
• each organization's records are kept apart inside the database itself by row-level security, so that one organization cannot read another's;
• inside an organization, access is limited by the roles, permissions and locations its administrators set, and it is checked on the server for every request;
• pastoral care notes are encrypted by the application before they are stored, with a key kept outside the database, and only people given pastoral permissions can see them;
• uploaded files are kept in private storage and are served only through the application, to people allowed to see them;
• important actions are recorded in an audit trail, and repeated sign-in attempts are limited.

No system is perfectly secure. If a breach affects personal data, we will tell the organizations affected and, where the law requires it, the Information Commissioner's Office and the people affected.

Cookies

Paqad uses only cookies that are strictly necessary for it to work. None is used for analytics or advertising, and no third-party tracking runs on Paqad. Because they are strictly necessary, they do not need your consent.

• Sign-in session — set by our authentication service to keep you signed in, with short-lived cookies that protect a sign-in with Google;
• NEXT_LOCALE — remembers the language you chose;
• active_organization — remembers which of your organizations you are working in;
• pending_verification_email — holds the email address being verified while you create an account, for up to 30 minutes.

Your rights

Under UK GDPR you have the right to:

• access the personal data held about you;
• have inaccurate data corrected;
• have data erased;
• restrict how it is used;
• object to its use, including use based on legitimate interests;
• receive data you provided in a portable form;
• withdraw your consent at any time, where use is based on consent.

To use these rights, write to privacy@paqad.online. We will reply within one month, as the law requires. For records an organization holds about you, please contact the organization first; we will help it respond.

To delete your account, including any information received from Google, email privacy@paqad.online. We act on it within one month, the period UK GDPR allows.

If you are unhappy with how your data is handled, you can complain to the Information Commissioner's Office (ico.org.uk). We would appreciate the chance to deal with your concern first.

Children

Organizations may keep records of children, for example as part of a family or for children's check-in. The organization is responsible for those records and for having the right basis for them, including a parent's or guardian's agreement where it is needed. Requests about a child's record should be made to the organization, normally by a parent or guardian.

Children under 13 may not have a Paqad account.

Changes to this policy

We may update this policy as Paqad changes or as the law requires. The date at the top shows when the current version took effect. If a change is significant, we will tell organizations before it takes effect.

Contact

OmniCore Systems Consulting LTD, registered in England and Wales. Email: privacy@paqad.online.