Privacy
Last updated July 21, 2026
Lantern is a personal Bible-study notes app. This page explains what it collects, why, and what it does not do. The short version: it keeps your account and your notes so it can show them back to you, and nothing more.
What Lantern stores
- Your email address. Used to sign you in and to send your sign-in code. If you sign in with Google, Lantern receives the email address and basic profile (name) tied to that Google account.
- Your study content. The notes, observations, journal entries, and passage references you write. This is yours; it is stored so you can read it back the next time you open a passage.
- Basic technical data. Ordinary server and security logs (such as timestamps and error records) needed to run the service and keep accounts safe.
- Diagnostic reports when something breaks. If part of the app fails, Lantern sends a short report so the problem can be found and fixed. These reports carry no note text and no passage references. See "Diagnostic reports" below for exactly what is in one.
What it does not do
- It does not sell or rent your data to anyone.
- It does not show ads.
- It does not run third-party advertising or behavioral tracking, and it does not build a profile of you for marketing.
- It does not record what you read, what you write, or which passages you study. Traffic measurement (see Cloudflare, below) counts visits to the site as a whole and cannot see inside your account, and the diagnostic reports described below are built so that a passage reference cannot travel in one.
Who processes your data
Lantern is a small app built on a few trusted services. They process data only to make the app work:
- Supabase hosts the database and authentication. Your notes and account live here, protected so that each account can only reach its own rows.
- Brevo delivers sign-in emails (the 6-digit code and sign-in link).
- Google handles sign-in only if you choose "Continue with Google."
- Cloudflare serves the website and its network, and measures aggregate traffic (page views and visits) through Cloudflare Web Analytics. This is counted at Cloudflare's edge, not by a script running in your browser: it sets no cookies, does not identify you, and does not follow you to other websites.
- bible.helloao.org provides the scripture text (Berean Standard Bible), which your browser fetches and caches locally. Your notes are never sent to it. If that service is unavailable, Lantern falls back to a copy of the same public-domain text served from lanternword.com itself, so no additional third party is involved.
Diagnostic reports
When something in Lantern fails, it sends a short report so the problem can be found and fixed. It also counts two things that only the app itself can see: how often it had to fall back to its own copy of the scripture text because the usual source was unreachable, and how often it recovered a note you were partway through writing. Those two counts are what tell us whether the safety nets are working.
A report contains:
- A fixed code naming which failure happened, such as
BIBLE_FETCH_FAILED. These are a short, fixed list. They are never assembled from anything you typed or read. - The technical location in Lantern's own code where the failure happened.
- Which browser family you use, whether your window is narrow or wide, and whether you were online.
- Which version of Lantern you were running, so a new problem can be traced to the release that introduced it.
- A random identifier for your browser, so that one person hitting the same bug ten times can be told apart from ten people hitting it once. It is generated at random, it is not derived from your account or your email, and clearing your browser storage resets it.
A report does not contain your notes, your journal entries, the passages you were reading, your email address, or your account id. That is enforced by how the app is built rather than by a filter that strips things out afterwards: the part of Lantern that assembles a report has no access to the descriptive text of an error at all, only to the fixed code. A passage reference cannot reach a report even if someone later writes a new error message that mentions one.
These reports go to Lantern's own database, and from there to the operator's private project dashboard. They are kept for about seven days on Lantern's side and are not shared with an advertising network or any third-party analytics company.
Where your notes are cached
To work quickly and offline, Lantern caches scripture and a mirror of your recent data in your own browser's storage. Clearing your browser storage removes that local copy; your account data remains on the server.
Security
Data is sent over encrypted connections (HTTPS). Access to your notes is enforced per account at the database level, so one account cannot read another's data. No system is perfectly secure, but the design keeps the surface small: there is no public sharing and no ad network in the mix.
Keeping and deleting your data
Your data is kept while your account is active. You can delete individual notes and studies at any time inside the app. To delete your entire account and its data, contact [email protected] and it will be removed.
Children
Lantern is not directed to children under 13, and does not knowingly collect data from them.
Changes
If this policy changes in a meaningful way, the date above will change. Continuing to use Lantern after an update means you accept the revised policy.
Contact
Questions about privacy? Email [email protected].