Terms of Service

These Terms are the agreement between you and PrayerSpace. They are short on purpose, written in plain language, and every promise in them is one the application actually keeps. The Privacy Policy explains what happens to your information; these Terms explain what each of us undertakes.

1. Who we are and what these Terms cover

PrayerSpace (prayerspace.ca, and the installable web app served from the same address) is operated by its owner, a private individual based in St. John's, Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada, on a non-commercial basis. It is a personal initiative of a member of a Salvation Army congregation. It is not an official service of, nor endorsed by, The Salvation Army, and nothing on the site speaks for that organisation.

By creating an account or using the service you agree to these Terms and to the Privacy Policy, which together form the whole agreement between us. If you do not agree, do not use the service.

These Terms are written in English and also available in French. If the two versions disagree, the English version prevails.

For anything about these Terms, write to no-reply@prayerspace.ca. We answer within 30 days.

2. Eligibility and your account

• You must be at least 16 years old.
• Give accurate details and keep them accurate. You may hold one account, and each e-mail address can be used for one account. Addresses are normalised, so Gmail dot and “+tag” variants count as the same address.
• You must verify your e-mail address before you can sign in; the verification link expires after one hour.
• If you set a password it must be at least 8 characters with an upper-case letter, a lower-case letter, a digit and a symbol. Keep it to yourself; do not share your account. Tell us at once if you believe someone else has used it.
• If you use Sign in with Google, Google's own terms apply to that sign-in, and you can delete your PrayerSpace account without touching your Google account.
• Sessions expire after 7 days. We e-mail you when your account is used from a device or country we have not seen recently. Those security e-mails, together with verification, password-reset and sign-in links, are part of operating your account and cannot be switched off while the account exists. We send nothing else.

3. The service

• PrayerSpace is free of charge. There is no paid tier, no advertising and no sale of anything.
• It gives you a private prayer journal, a prayer list, and daily devotional content (a doctrine, a Scripture passage, a hymn and a quotation chosen for each day).
• It is a private space. There is no sharing, no community, no messaging and no way for another user to see anything you write.
• It is not counselling, pastoral care, medical, psychological, legal or financial advice, and it is not a substitute for a church, a minister or a professional. If you are in crisis, contact local emergency services.
• We may change, add or remove features at any time. Material changes that affect your rights are handled under §12.
• We run the service with reasonable care but make no availability or support commitment. Maintenance may interrupt it without notice.

4. Your content

• Everything you write is yours. We claim no ownership of it.
• You give us only the permission the service needs to work: to store your content in encrypted form, back it up (backups rotate after 7 days), show it to you, and hand it back to you through “Download my data”. Nothing more.
• We do not read, analyse, share, sell or feed your content to any AI system (Privacy Policy §3.2). No administrator can open your journal through the application.
• You are responsible for what you write. The one prohibition is content whose mere possession or storage is unlawful in Canada. Because nobody else can see your content, there are no other content rules.
• The application enforces technical limits. If a save exceeds a limit it is refused with a message; nothing is ever silently cut.

5. Acceptable use

You agree not to:

• access or try to access another person's account, our systems, or data that is not yours;
• probe, scan or test the service for weaknesses, scrape it, create accounts automatically, or circumvent rate limits, authentication or encryption;
• upload malware or anything designed to interfere with the service or with other users;
• impersonate anyone, or misrepresent your connection with any person or organisation;
• use the devotional content beyond your own personal, non-commercial devotion (§7);
• reverse-engineer the service except where the law lets you regardless of these Terms;
• use the service if you are under 16, or create an account for someone who is.

If you find a security problem, tell us at the contact address instead of exploiting it. We will treat a good-faith report as exactly that.

6. Encryption, backups and data loss

• Your journal and prayer list are always encrypted before they are stored. By default the server holds the key so you can use the service from any device.
• You can turn on end-to-end encryption. Then the key is derived from a passphrase only you know, and we store ciphertext we cannot read. If you lose both your passphrase and your recovery key, your encrypted entries are permanently lost. Nobody, including us, can recover them. By enabling the feature you accept this, as the enrolment screen asks you to confirm. The recovery key is shown once; keeping it safe is your responsibility.
• Writing you had not saved when a page closed is kept on that device only, in plain text unless end-to-end encryption is on (Privacy Policy §3.6). It never reaches us until you save it.
• Database backups are kept by our provider for 7 days on a rolling basis. They are for disaster recovery, not an archive of your writing.
• “Download my data” on your account page gives you everything in a machine-readable file. You are responsible for keeping your own copy of anything you cannot afford to lose. We recommend exporting regularly and before deleting your account.
• To the extent the law allows, we are not liable for loss caused by a lost passphrase or recovery key, a device you did not secure, a draft that never reached us, or your own deletion of an entry or account.

7. Devotional content and intellectual property

• Scripture is quoted from the NET Bible® (New English Translation), copyright © 1996–2017 by Biblical Studies Press, L.L.C., netbible.com, retrieved through API.Bible and reproduced with attribution under its licence terms. The NET Bible® text is not ours and may not be copied from the service beyond what its own licence allows.
• Doctrines, quotations and hymns. The eleven doctrines of The Salvation Army, excerpts from the Handbook of Doctrine, hymns and historical quotations are reproduced for personal devotional use. Rights in those works remain with their respective holders; we claim none. If you hold rights in material shown on the service and believe it is used improperly, write to the contact address and we will correct or remove it.
• The PrayerSpace name, design and software belong to the owner. You may use the service and read the devotional content for your own personal, non-commercial devotion. You may not republish, scrape, sell or redistribute the devotional content or any part of the service.

8. Suspension and termination

• You may delete your account at any time from your account page (Privacy Policy §11). Export your data first; deletion is immediate and cannot be undone.
• We may suspend an account only for one of three reasons: a breach of these Terms, a legal requirement, or a credible threat to the security of the service or its users. Suspensions last a set period (a day, a week or a month) or, for serious breaches, are permanent. The reason and the duration are recorded when the suspension is made, and you can obtain both by writing to the contact address. You may ask us to review a suspension; we will answer within 30 days.
• If we ever discontinue the service, we will e-mail every account holder at least 30 days in advance and keep “Download my data” working for the whole of that period.
• When an account ends, for any reason, its data is deleted as described in Privacy Policy §8.

9. Disclaimers

The service is provided “as is” and “as available”. We do not promise that it will be uninterrupted, timely or free of errors, that the devotional content is accurate, complete or suited to any purpose, or that the service meets your needs. Nothing in it is professional advice (§3).

Nothing in these Terms limits or excludes any right or remedy that the consumer-protection law of the place you live in gives you and does not allow to be excluded.

10. Limitation of liability

To the fullest extent the law allows, the owner is not liable to you for any indirect, incidental, special or consequential loss, for loss of data or content in the circumstances described in §6, or for anything done or not done by the third-party providers named in the Privacy Policy.

Where liability cannot be excluded, it is limited to the greater of the amount you paid for the service (nothing) and one hundred Canadian dollars (CAD 100).

Nothing in these Terms excludes or limits liability for fraud, wilful misconduct or gross negligence, or for death or personal injury caused by negligence, or any other liability that the law does not allow to be excluded.

11. Your responsibility

You are responsible for your own use of the service. If your breach of these Terms causes a claim against the owner by someone else, you will bear the costs that flow from that breach.

12. Changes to these Terms

The version and effective date are at the top of this page. We may update these Terms when the service or the law changes. If a change reduces your rights or adds obligations, we will e-mail you at your registered address and show a notice at sign-in at least 14 days before it takes effect. Continuing to use the service after that date means you accept the change; if you do not, delete your account before it. Corrections and clarifications that do not affect your rights take effect when published. Earlier versions are available on request.

13. Governing law and disputes

These Terms are governed by the laws of Canada. If you have a problem, write to us first; most things can be settled by a reply, and we answer within 30 days.

If you live in the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom, Quebec or anywhere else whose law gives consumers protections or a choice of forum that cannot be waived, those protections and that choice remain yours. These Terms contain no arbitration clause and no waiver of class actions.

14. General

• These Terms and the Privacy Policy are the entire agreement between you and the owner about the service.
• If a court finds part of these Terms unenforceable, the rest stays in force.
• Not enforcing a term on one occasion is not a waiver of it.
• The owner may transfer the service to a successor who takes on these Terms and the Privacy Policy, and will tell you by e-mail if that happens. You may not transfer your account.
• The French version is provided for convenience (§1). Headings are for reference only.

15. Contact

no-reply@prayerspace.ca — for anything about these Terms, a suspension, or rights in content shown on the service. A postal address is available on request.