1. Who we are and what this policy covers
This Privacy Policy describes how AskRabbi collects, uses, discloses, and retains personal information when you visit askarabbi.ai, create an account, use our AI conversations, personalize your learning, read or listen to teachings, use the Jewish calendar, or contact us. It also covers the installed web app and our supporting application services.
In this policy, "AskRabbi," "we," "us," and "our" refer to the provider of the AskRabbi service at askarabbi.ai. We are responsible for the personal information described here and, where applicable, act as its data controller. For privacy requests and questions about this policy, contact support@askarabbi.ai. Further request details appear in Contact and privacy requests.
This policy describes our practices; it does not waive your rights or serve as consent to every form of processing. Our Terms of Service govern use of the service. Independent websites and sign-in providers have their own policies.
2. Information we collect
- Account and sign-in information: your email address, name, account and identity-provider identifiers, email-verification status, and session information. A sign-in provider may also supply a profile image. Password and recovery flows are handled through our authentication provider; our account database does not store your readable password.
- Profile and preferences: the name you enter, birth date and time, birthplace and current city or U.S. ZIP code, associated time zones and location coordinates, language choices, religious movement or practice, heritage or community, optional additional context, reading preferences, calendar choices, and product-email preference.
- Conversations: your questions, generated answers, conversation titles, selected sources, citations, and related timestamps and records. We save submitted questions as part of processing, including when an answer cannot be completed.
- Usage and technical information: usage allowances and consumption, request and error information, authentication and security events, and technical information such as IP address, browser, device, and access times received by our hosting and service providers. Cloudflare Web Analytics provides page-view and performance measurements.
- Communications: information you send us in support, privacy, feedback, or legal requests and the information needed to respond.
- Browser storage: essential cookies, local reading preferences, and saved offline learning, described in Cookies and information on your device.
Account setup currently asks for your name, birth date and time, current location and birthplace, language choices, and background selections. You may select "Prefer not to say" for religion and heritage and leave additional context blank. Required fields and validation are shown in the app. If you do not provide information required for account setup, personalized account features may not be available; these legal pages remain public.
Locations are places you enter or select, with coordinates resolved for those places. The current application does not request continuous device GPS tracking or your contacts. Optional voice questions request microphone permission only after you select Record question. Recording ends when you select Stop recording or Cancel, leave the conversation, hide the app, or reach the 30-second limit. Weekly teaching audio is generated narration, not a recording of you.
When you finish a voice recording, the browser sends its audio through our authenticated API to Microsoft Azure Speech for transcription. You can review and edit the transcript before sending it as a question. AskRabbi processes recordings in memory and does not save microphone audio or unsent transcripts to account storage. Sent transcripts become ordinary saved chat messages. When you listen to an answer, its saved text is sent to Azure Speech to generate transient audio; the answer and citations remain readable. These application storage practices do not establish zero retention by Microsoft or other service providers.
3. Religious, heritage, and other sensitive information
Religious beliefs, heritage, and the contents of a question can reveal sensitive information. Additional context can also reveal health, family, accessibility, or other private circumstances. Share only what is needed for your learning. Do not submit passwords, government identifiers, payment-card details, confidential professional records, or another person's private information without authority.
When you choose to provide background or additional context, we use it to personalize the service and include relevant context in AI processing. You can select "Prefer not to say," remove optional context, and change your profile in Settings & Personalization. Updating a profile does not rewrite earlier messages or remove information you already included in a chat; delete those chats separately.
Where the law requires explicit consent or another specific condition to process sensitive information, that requirement applies in addition to a lawful basis for ordinary personal information. You may withdraw consent by removing the relevant optional information or contacting us. Withdrawal does not undo processing already lawfully performed, and some personalized functions may no longer be available.
4. Why we use information
- Create, authenticate, protect, and manage accounts; verify email; recover access; and maintain sessions.
- Save and retrieve conversations, find relevant sources, generate and validate AI answers, and adapt language, explanations, and learning context to your choices.
- Calculate calendar information and location-dependent times, and deliver teachings, narration, and offline learning.
- Apply usage allowances, diagnose faults, measure website visits and performance, maintain reliability, and evaluate whether service features work as intended.
- Detect abuse, investigate security or safety issues, enforce the Terms of Service, and protect users and the service.
- Respond to requests, carry out deletion and other privacy choices, send necessary account or service notices, and meet legal obligations.
- Send product updates if you enable that preference. You may turn it off in Settings; essential account and security messages are separate.
We do not sell personal information or share it for cross-context behavioral advertising. The current application does not use advertising pixels or third-party behavioral advertising. We do not use religious or heritage information to target advertisements.
5. AI processing, training, and review
AskRabbi uses Microsoft Azure-hosted AI services to produce and check answers. Processing may include your current question, excerpts of earlier turns, selected source passages, language preferences, and a limited profile projection such as preferred first name, age group, religious background, heritage, and additional context. Calendar tools may also use dates and selected locations and return relevant results to the answer process.
We do not use your conversations to train a general-purpose AI model. Microsoft states that prompts and responses in its Azure-hosted models are not used to train foundation models without permission or instruction. This does not mean that processing is anonymous, that no records are kept, or that nobody can review content. See Microsoft's AI data-processing documentation.
We and our service providers may retain and review questions and answers to detect abuse, investigate safety issues, troubleshoot the service, and comply with applicable requirements. Provider review may be automated and, where flagged content or an investigation requires it, performed by authorized people. Access for these purposes is limited to authorized personnel. Do not treat a conversation as confidential clergy counseling or privileged communication.
AI output may be incorrect, incomplete, or inappropriate, including when it cites sources. Personalization generates educational content; it is not a determination of your religious status or eligibility for legal, financial, health, employment, or other significant benefits. You can contact us about an output or an account restriction.
7. Cookies and information on your device
Essential cookies support sign-in and account security. Identity providers also use cookies during authentication. Blocking essential cookies may prevent sign-in or session continuity.
Local and session storage remember reading preferences, device choices, and limited interface state. Some reading preferences are stored with an account identifier for that browser. The service worker caches public application resources. Offline storage may contain the weekly teaching, source material, holiday dates and descriptions, and downloaded teaching audio and timing data. Offline availability does not create a private or encrypted vault.
The offline learning library is designed to exclude chats, your selected location, and account profile details. Anyone with access to the same browser or device may read saved learning. Signing out attempts to clear saved offline learning; browser restrictions or failures can prevent cleanup. Reading or device preferences may remain. Clear AskRabbi site data in your browser on shared devices. Removing the installed app alone may not clear the browser's data.
The hosted website includes Cloudflare Web Analytics, a browser script that measures page views and loading performance. Cloudflare describes this analytics service as operating without analytics cookies or browser fingerprinting. This is separate from the connection and security information processed to deliver the website. See Cloudflare Web Analytics. The app does not use advertising cookies.
The current app does not change its behavior in response to the legacy Do Not Track signal. Because we do not sell or share information for behavioral advertising, there is no such processing to opt out of; we will honor legally applicable opt-out signals, including Global Privacy Control, where required.
8. Retention and deletion
We retain information according to its purpose, account status, security needs, provider requirements, and legal obligations. We do not promise a single retention period or immediate erasure from every system.
- Account and profile: generally kept while your account remains active, until you update the information or request account deletion.
- Saved chats: kept for your conversation history until you delete a conversation, delete all chats, or delete your account. Deleting chats alone does not delete your profile, preferences, account, or usage records.
- Account deletion: removes account-associated chats, profile, preferences, usage history, and the AskRabbi sign-in identity. If cleanup is temporarily unavailable, the account is disabled while deletion is retried. A limited recovery record remains while that process is pending. Deleting AskRabbi does not delete your separate Google or other identity-provider account.
- Security, abuse, support, and legal records: may be kept separately for the time needed to investigate incidents, resolve requests or disputes, enforce limits, and comply with applicable obligations. Provider abuse-monitoring records are subject to the provider's applicable retention rules.
- Backups: deleted information may persist until backups expire or are overwritten under the applicable backup cycle. Records retained for recovery or legal purposes are not an active conversation history.
- Local or shared copies: browser data may remain until cleared or replaced. We cannot remove copies you or others have saved outside the service.
Use Settings & Personalization → Your data for self-service deletion. A single conversation can also be deleted from its conversation menu. Contact us if you cannot access your account or need information about retention for a particular category. We may retain information required by law or necessary for a permitted exception, and will explain a refusal or limitation where required.
9. Security
We use safeguards intended to protect information, including HTTPS, protected server-managed sessions, account-scoped access controls, and restricted access to operational systems. No internet service, storage system, or device is completely secure. We do not promise absolute confidentiality or end-to-end encryption of chats: the service and AI providers must process readable content to answer you.
Use a secure sign-in method, protect your email account and devices, and sign out on shared devices. Notify us promptly if you suspect unauthorized access. Where applicable law requires it, we will provide notice of a qualifying personal-data breach.
10. International processing and legal bases
Our infrastructure and providers may process information in the United States and other countries where they operate. AI processing location can depend on the model deployment and provider configuration. Your information is not guaranteed to remain in your country, and another country's protections may differ.
Where European, UK, or other transfer restrictions apply, transfers must rely on an applicable legal mechanism, such as an adequacy decision or approved contractual safeguards, with additional measures where needed. You may contact us for information about the mechanism applicable to your data; merely using AskRabbi does not waive those requirements.
Where a law requires a lawful basis, we process ordinary personal information as necessary to provide the service you request and perform our contract; for legitimate interests in security, preventing abuse, reliability, and support where those interests are not overridden by your rights; to meet legal obligations; or on consent when required. Sensitive information requires an additional permitted condition, including explicit consent where applicable. Marketing choices and sensitive-data choices are separate from acceptance of the Terms of Service.
11. Your choices and privacy rights
Depending on where you live and which laws apply to us, you may have rights to access or obtain a copy of your information, correct inaccuracies, delete information, receive a portable copy, restrict or object to processing, withdraw consent, or opt out of certain profiling, sales, sharing, or targeted advertising. You may also have a right to appeal a refusal and complain to your local privacy regulator. Not all laws or rights apply in every situation.
You can change profile and reading preferences, turn off product-email updates, and delete chats or your account in Settings & Personalization. Other requests, including access and portability requests, can be sent to the contact below. Use the email associated with your account when possible. We may request information reasonably necessary to verify identity and protect another person's data; do not send a password or identity document unless we arrange a necessary secure verification process.
Where permitted, an authorized agent may act for you with proof of authority and appropriate verification. We respond within the period required by applicable law and explain any permitted extension, exception, or refusal. To appeal, reply to our response and state that you want a privacy-request appeal. We do not retaliate or unlawfully discriminate against you for exercising a privacy right; deleting or restricting information needed for a feature can make that feature unavailable.
California and other U.S. state residents: the collection categories, sources, purposes, recipients, and retention criteria appear above. We do not sell personal information, share it for cross-context behavioral advertising, or use sensitive information to infer characteristics for advertising. Where applicable, statutory access, correction, deletion, limitation, opt-out, and appeal rights can be exercised using the process above. This notice does not claim that AskRabbi meets every law's business-applicability threshold.
12. Children and younger users
AskRabbi is not intended for children under 13 or under a higher minimum age required by local law. Users who are old enough to use the service but have not reached the legal age of majority must have a parent or legal guardian's permission and supervision. Do not submit a child's personal information in a conversation unless you are authorized and it is appropriate and lawful to do so.
If you believe a child below the applicable minimum age has provided personal information, contact us. We will investigate and take appropriate steps to remove that information and address the account as required by law. A birth-date field is not a guarantee that every user's age or parental permission has been independently verified.
13. Changes to this policy
We may update this policy as the service or legal requirements change. The effective date and version at the top identify this notice. Material changes will be communicated through an appropriate in-app notice, email, or another method required by law. Where a new purpose requires consent, we will obtain it before that processing; publishing an update alone does not supply that consent. You may request information about earlier versions from us.
14. Contact and privacy requests
Service: AskRabbi at askarabbi.ai
Email: support@askarabbi.ai
Use the subject "AskRabbi privacy request" and describe your request and the account concerned. Include only the information necessary for us to help. This contact is also available for accessibility requests concerning this policy and for parents or guardians raising a child's privacy concern.