Privacy Policy.

1. Who we are and what this policy covers

Eklaysia is operated by Atain, a sole proprietorship of Thompson Cherian, based in Kerala, India (“Atain”, “we”, “us”). Eklaysia is a software platform for churches, ministries and Christian NGOs (each an “organisation” or “church”), covering membership, giving and receipts, accounting, websites, messaging, media and administration.

This policy covers:

• the Eklaysia SaaS platform used by organisation administrators and staff at app.eklaysia.com;
• the Eklaysia member mobile app, published on Google Play as “Eklaysia” (package com.eklaysia.mobile);
• the public websites organisations publish through Eklaysia (<church>.eklaysia.com or a custom domain); and
• this marketing site, eklaysia.com.

This policy is written with reference to India's Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 (“DPDP Act”) and the Information Technology Act, 2000.

2. Who is responsible for your data — two roles

Eklaysia involves two distinct data-protection roles under the DPDP Act:

• Your church is the Data Fiduciary for the congregation data held in its workspace — member profiles, attendance, giving, messages, registers and similar records. The church decides what to collect and why; Atain acts as its Data Processor, handling this data only on the church's instructions and this policy's terms. If you are a member, your first point of contact for questions about what your church stores about you is your church's administrators.
• Atain is the Data Fiduciary for the data we collect for our own purposes: platform accounts and sign-in data, subscription and billing records, support correspondence, platform security and audit data, and visits to this marketing site.

If you join a church's video meeting as a guest, or interact with a church's public website (for example a contact form or prayer request), that church is the Data Fiduciary for what you submit; we process it for them.

3. The data we collect

Online payment collection is not yet live on Eklaysia. When online giving payments launch, they will be processed by an RBI-authorised payment provider and this policy will be updated to name it before it handles any data.

4. Religious affiliation is sensitive — and we treat it that way

Eklaysia is built for Christian organisations. Simply appearing in a church's Eklaysia workspace can reveal your religious affiliation, and records such as baptism dates, ministry involvement, prayer requests and pastoral notes are inherently faith-related. We treat all such data as sensitive personal data and apply heightened protection to it, including:

• strict tenant isolation — every organisation's data is segregated at the database level with row-level security, so no request can read another organisation's data;
• role-based and field-level access controls — for example, giving records are visible only to authorised finance roles, and pastoral notes have their own restricted permission tier;
• no advertising, no profiling for marketing, and no sale or rental of data — ever;
• a standing engineering rule that personal data is kept out of logs and diagnostics.

5. Children's data and safeguarding

Children (persons under 18) use Eklaysia only within their church's supervised community. Under the DPDP Act, processing a child's personal data requires verifiable parental or guardian consent; because the church is the Data Fiduciary for congregation data, the church is responsible for obtaining guardian consent before adding a child's record or inviting a child to the app. The platform supports this: children are identified from date of birth and linked to their guardians in the family record.

Protections built into the product:

• minors join only age-appropriate channels;
• minors cannot exchange direct messages with unrelated adults — such attempts are blocked and logged;
• youth channels operate under adult-leader supervision, with reporting flows that escalate to the church's safeguarding lead;
• we do not track children behaviourally, and we serve no targeted advertising to anyone, children included.

Safeguarding exports. Because message history is not end-to-end encrypted, a church's designated safeguarding lead can export channel or direct-message records — including a minor's messages — for child-safety investigations or where the law requires it. Every such export needs dual authorisation by two administrators and is permanently recorded in the church's audit trail. This is a deliberate design choice: the safety of children in the community takes priority over message secrecy.

6. Why we process data, and on what legal basis

We do not use your data for advertising, we do not build marketing profiles, and we do not sell or share data for anyone else's commercial gain.

7. Where your data lives

Eklaysia's servers, databases, file storage and backups run on Amazon Web Services in the Mumbai (ap-south-1) region, India. Your data is stored at rest in India.

Some transient processing can occur on infrastructure outside India in the ordinary course of running a modern internet service: Cloudflare's global edge network carries traffic to and from our servers; LiveKit's infrastructure relays live audio/video during meetings; and AI transcription/summarisation requests may be served through AWS cross-region inference within the Asia-Pacific region. These are processing paths, not storage locations — the records themselves stay in Mumbai. The DPDP Act permits such transfers except to countries the Government of India specifically restricts, and we honour any such restriction.

8. Who we share data with

We share personal data only with the service providers (processors) that run the platform for us, each bound to use it solely to provide their service to us:

Beyond processors, data is disclosed only: to your own church (which is the point of the platform — its administrators and authorised leaders see the records the church keeps, according to their roles); where the law requires it (a valid order of a court, government or the Data Protection Board of India); or in a business transfer of Atain, in which case this policy continues to bind the successor. We never sell or rent personal data.

9. Cookies and similar technologies

We use a minimal set:

• Session cookie — keeps you signed in to the console (essential);
• Language cookie (NEXT_LOCALE) — remembers your interface language;
• Cloudflare / Turnstile — security cookies used to distinguish humans from bots.

There are no advertising or cross-site tracking cookies anywhere on Eklaysia. This marketing site loads its typefaces from Google Fonts, which involves your browser requesting the font files from Google's servers.

10. How we protect your data

• Encryption in transit (TLS) everywhere, and encryption at rest for stored data and backups;
• database-level tenant isolation (row-level security) between organisations, verified by automated “leak tests” on every change;
• role-based access control with field-level rules for the most sensitive records (giving, pastoral notes, salaries), enforced on the server;
• statutory identifiers in HR records stored with additional application-level encryption (AES-256-GCM);
• append-only financial ledgers and audit logs — records of money and administrative actions cannot be silently altered;
• mandatory two-factor authentication for organisation administrators;
• daily encrypted backups retained for 30 days.

No internet service can promise absolute security, but if we become aware of a personal data breach we will notify affected organisations and the Data Protection Board of India as the DPDP Act requires.

11. How long data is kept

• Account data — kept while your account is active; removed when you delete your account (see below).
• Messages — retained according to your church's own retention settings; churches may configure automatic deletion for discussion channels.
• Statutory records — giving records and 80G receipts, accounting ledgers, statutory registers (baptism, marriage, membership and similar) and audit logs are retained by your church even after you delete your account, because Indian law (including the Income-tax Act, 1961 and FCRA record-keeping requirements) obliges the organisation to keep them. These records remain under the church's stewardship as Data Fiduciary.
• Backups — encrypted database backups age out automatically within 30 days.
• Workspace closure — when an organisation closes its Eklaysia workspace, its data is deleted after a wind-down period during which the church can export it (see the Terms of Service).

12. Your rights

Under the DPDP Act you have the right to:

• Access — a summary of the personal data being processed about you and how it has been shared;
• Correction and updating — you can edit much of your profile directly in the app, or ask your church office to correct records it maintains;
• Erasure — delete your account in the app (Me → Delete account) or by written request; see our account deletion page for exactly what is removed and what your church must retain by law;
• Grievance redressal — raise a complaint with our Grievance Officer (below) and, if unsatisfied, with the Data Protection Board of India;
• Nomination — nominate a person to exercise your rights in the event of death or incapacity;
• Withdraw consent — at any time, with effect going forward; some services will stop working without the data they need.

For congregation records your church holds as Data Fiduciary, direct your request to the church; we support churches in fulfilling it. For account data we hold as Data Fiduciary, contact us directly.

13. Changes to this policy

We will update this policy as the service evolves — for example, when online payments launch. Material changes will be announced in the console and app, with the new version number and effective date shown at the top of this page. Continued use after the effective date constitutes acceptance.

14. Governing law

This policy, and any dispute arising from it, is governed by the laws of India.