Restoration Scholar

Effective date: June 3, 2026 · Last updated: October 12, 2026

Restoration Scholar (“we,” “our,” “the service”) is an independent educational tool that provides evidence-grounded answers to theological questions. This Privacy Policy explains what data we collect, how we use it, and which third parties process it on our behalf. We never sell or rent user data to anyone.

1. Data we collect

• Account information. When you create an account we collect your email address, name (if provided), and authentication credentials. Account creation and sign-in are handled by Clerk; we receive a user identifier from Clerk and associate your usage with that identifier.
• Questions you ask. We store the text of every question you submit so that we can generate answers, log your study history, and surface recurring patterns in your personal dashboard.
• Study log. We record metadata about each question — the mode you selected, when it was asked, and whether the answer was grounded, partial, or awaiting review.
• Subscription information. When you subscribe to a paid tier, we collect billing details through Stripe. We do not store full payment card numbers on our servers; Stripe handles all payment processing.
• Uploaded sources. When you submit a source for ingestion (text, URL, PDF, audio, or image), we process the content to extract text and add it to your ingest record. Extracted text and a content hash are retained; the original uploaded file is not stored permanently after processing.
• Usage and security data. We collect IP addresses and request metadata for security monitoring, abuse prevention, and aggregate usage analytics. This data is not shared with third parties and is used solely for operating and protecting the service.

2. Camera and photo library permissions (mobile)

The Restoration Scholar mobile app may request camera and photo library access. These permissions are used only for source ingestion: when you tap “Submit Source” and choose to take a photo or select a photo from your library, the selected image is sent to our servers and processed by the OpenAI Vision API to extract any readable text. The image is not stored permanentlyon our servers after extraction. We do not access your camera or photo library at any other time.

3. Captures (Excavator and personal submissions)

Captures are pages, talks, notes, or other content you collect for personal study using the Excavator bookmarklet or the Submit Source form. Captures are stored privately for your account in your My Captures library and are never shared with other users or used to train models. Two retention modes apply:

• Unsaved captures are stored on our servers temporarily, for a maximum of 24 hours, and then automatically deleted.
• Saved captures (captures you explicitly mark as Saved on the popup or in My Captures) are retained until you delete them. You can delete any capture, or all of your captures at once, from the My Captures page.

Captured content is processed by the same third-party services listed in Section 5 (notably OpenAI for analysis and answer generation), only on your behalf and only for your view. You are responsible for ensuring you have the right to access the content you capture; captures are personal study tools and should be used only for content you have lawfully accessed for personal, non-commercial study.

4. How we use your data

• To provide and operate the service — generating answers, tracking your study history, and serving your personalized dashboard.
• To process payments and manage your subscription.
• To improve the corpus and the quality of answers, including refining evidence selection, prompts, and engine routing.
• To respond to support requests and security concerns.
• To enforce our terms and prevent abuse, including content moderation.

5. Third-party processors

We use the following third-party services to operate Restoration Scholar. Each processor handles only the data necessary for its function, under their own privacy terms.

• Clerk — authentication, account management, and session handling.
• Stripe — payment processing, subscription billing, and tax handling.
• OpenAI — answer generation, content moderation, and image-to-text processing for ingested sources.
• Cloudflare R2 — file storage for downloadable bundles and corpus archives.
• Resend — transactional email delivery (account, support, and moderation notifications).
• Upstash — rate limiting and transactional data caching.
• Neon — primary database hosting.
• Vercel — application hosting and content delivery.

We do not sell or rent your data to any third party. Ever. Our processors are bound by their own privacy commitments and process data only on our behalf.

6. Data retention

Account, subscription, study log, and ingest records are retained for as long as your account is active. Excavator captures are automatically deleted after 24 hours. Moderation logs are retained as a permanent audit trail even if you delete your account, in accordance with our content safety obligations. You may request deletion of personal data at any time (see Section 7).

7. Your rights

You may request the following at any time by emailing support@restorationscholar.com:

• A copy of the personal data we hold about you (data export).
• Deletion of your account and associated personal data, subject to the moderation retention exception in Section 6. You can do this yourself at any time: on the web, open your Dashboard and choose Delete account; in the app, open the Account tab and choose Delete account. Deletion is immediate and permanent. A subscription bought through the App Store is managed by Apple and must be cancelled in your Apple ID settings; a web subscription is cancelled for you.
• Correction of inaccurate information.
• Withdrawal of consent for optional processing.

8. Children

Restoration Scholar is intended for users aged 13 and older. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 13. If a parent or guardian believes we have collected such information, please contact us and we will delete it promptly.

9. Changes to this policy

We may update this policy from time to time. Material changes will be communicated via email to subscribers and reflected in the “Effective date” at the top of this page.

10. Public comments read for Come and See

Come and See reads public comments through the YouTube Data API and public search results to find which questions about the Restoration are being asked. We keep a short excerpt, its link and, on YouTube, the public channel name and subscriber count, for at most 30 days unless refreshed. Only the site owner sees them; they are never published; we never post automatically.

The site owner may also add a public comment by hand from another site; we keep its link and a short excerpt, and no commenter name outside YouTube. On YouTube, the owner may confirm a short watch list of public commenters; for each we keep the channel name and subscriber count, refreshed or deleted within 30 days, and removed 90 days after that person’s last comment.

Ask us to delete any record at support@restorationscholar.com. Deletion from our database is immediate; copies in our database host’s point-in-time backup history (Neon) and in OpenAI’s abuse-monitoring records of the text we send it for matching expire on those providers’ own schedules.

This feature uses YouTube API Services. See the YouTube Terms of Service and the Google Privacy Policy.

11. Contact

Questions about this policy or our privacy practices? Email support@restorationscholar.com.