How AskSakina Protects Your Privacy
- No Accounts or Logins: You never sign in to AskSakina. We do not maintain a user database or ask for your identity.
- Your Location: Your exact coordinates are stored entirely locally on your own device. To calculate prayer times and weather, your location is rounded to an approximate 1.1 km area before reaching our server. AskSakina then requests the times on your behalf, ensuring third-party providers never receive your IP address.
- How We Use AI: When you use the Companion Engine, your text is securely processed by Google's Gemini AI. Google keeps this text for a limited period, solely to detect misuse and meet legal obligations, and does not use it to improve its products or train its AI. We use a paid, enterprise-grade connection, meaning Google's terms explicitly prohibit them from using your private inputs to train their public AI models.
- Ongoing Infrastructure Updates: In the interest of total transparency, our underlying codebase currently contains inactive legacy database code (Supabase). We are actively stripping this out, and no personal user data is being written to a server-side store in production.
- Rate Limiting: To protect the app from misuse, our API routes record a request counter against your pseudonymised IP address (a daily-rotating salted hash). This is stored securely in Upstash Redis for a 60-second window and is automatically deleted when that time expires.
Website Analytics & Performance
To help us understand how the app is used and keep it running fast, AskSakina uses Vercel's built-in Web Analytics and Speed Insights. These tools measure basic information like page views, device types, and page load speeds. They are designed for privacy: they do not use tracking cookies, and they do not track you across other websites. While Vercel briefly processes your IP address to count unique daily visits, it is immediately scrambled (hashed) and discarded. No personal identifiers are saved, and this data is never tied to your identity.
To protect your dignity and safety, we completely disable analytics on our most sensitive pages. We do not track or measure your visits to our crisis support, emotional comfort, onboarding, or faith exploration guides.