Privacy policy

My Catholic Compass (mycatholiccompass.com) is a free, non-commercial Catholic education website based in North Carolina, United States. In this policy, "we" and "us" mean My Catholic Compass.

Like most websites, the servers that run this site receive basic technical information each time a page loads. This includes your IP address, your browser and device type, the page you asked for, the page that sent you here and the time of your visit.

The site is hosted on Ploy, which also provides our site analytics. The analytics record:

• the pages you view, and how far you scroll
• clicks on buttons and links, including links to other websites
• words typed into the site's search box
• how you found the site, such as a search engine, another website or a link with campaign tags
• general information about your device and browser, and your approximate location, such as your country

We use this only to understand which pages help people and to make the site better. We don't use it for advertising, and we don't build profiles of individual visitors.

Our analytics provider can also use the network address of a visit to estimate which organization the network belongs to, such as a company or school.

Cookies are small files a website keeps in your browser. We use only a few, and none of them are for advertising.

Ploy analytics also keeps a few short-lived entries in your browser to group page views into one visit and to send them reliably.

You can block or delete cookies in your browser settings, or browse in a private window. The site still works without them.

On some pages you can add where you are on your journey in the faith, and your country if you like. We save only the step and the country you choose so we can show the live totals. We don't attach your name, email or IP address to your entry, and the totals are public.

The checkboxes on the examination of conscience page work only inside your browser. Nothing you mark is saved, stored or sent to us or anyone else. It is gone when you leave or reload the page.

Some parts of the site load from other services. When they do, those services receive your IP address and basic browser information.

• Videos play from YouTube in its privacy-enhanced mode (youtube-nocookie.com), and video preview images load from YouTube's image servers. YouTube is owned by Google, and Google's privacy policy applies.
• Our fonts load from Google Fonts.
• Some images and files are served from Google Cloud Storage.

We link to many other websites, such as the Vatican, the USCCB, Mass Times and Wikipedia. Once you leave our site, their own privacy policies apply.

We use the information described here to run and protect the site, to count visits, to improve our pages and to show the journey counter totals.

We don't sell or rent it to anyone. It is shared only with the service providers that run the site for us: Ploy for hosting and analytics, and Cloudflare, which carries the site's traffic. We may also share information when the law requires it.

Analytics records are kept for as long as we use the service, so we can see how the site does over time. Journey counter entries are kept for as long as the counter runs, because they make up the public totals. Neither includes your name.

This site is made for families, and parts of it are written for children. We don't knowingly collect personal information from children under 13. The site never asks anyone, of any age, for a name, email address or other contact details.

• Block or delete cookies and site data in your browser settings.
• Use a private or incognito window.
• Skip the journey counter. It is always optional.

Depending on where you live, the law may give you rights over your personal information. Because we don't collect names, email addresses or accounts, we usually hold nothing we can link back to you.

If we change this policy, we will update this page and the date at the top.