Privacy

AskShia has no user accounts or advertising profile. There are no analytics or third-party advertising trackers in the website or native apps. Like any internet service, our infrastructure can receive ordinary network metadata such as an IP address; the details and open retention decisions are explained below.

Your chosen marja, interface language, light/dark preference, reading state, prayer settings and recent questions are stored locally in browser storage on the website or app storage on Android/iOS. Clearing the site/app data or uninstalling removes the local copy and we cannot recover it. Android application backup is disabled; iOS device-backup behavior is controlled by Apple and your iCloud/device settings. When you ask a follow-up, the client may send up to six relevant local conversation turns with the new question so the answer has context; they are processed as described in the next section rather than saved as an AskShia conversation account.

Your question and your selected marja are sent to our API at api.askshia.eu, which runs on a server in the European Union. There the question is classified, matched against the published rulings in our corpus, and used to compose an answer.

Classification and answer generation can use Ollama Cloud and, when configured as a fallback, OpenRouter and its selected model provider. The current question, relevant local conversation turns, retrieved source passages and answer instructions can leave our infrastructure. No account name or advertising identifier is attached, but those providers apply their own processing and retention terms. Do not include names, contact details or facts that are not needed for the question.

We do not build a profile from your questions and we do not sell or share them for advertising.

Some questions cannot be answered from the rulings we hold — a book of rulings does not define its own vocabulary, so it will never tell you how many kilometres a farsakh is. When that happens, AskShia may look the point up outside the corpus: first on your marja’s own official website, and then, for plain facts such as units, dates and places, on a short list of general reference sites. The result is always shown separately from an answer, labelled with where it came from, and linked so you can read the original.

This means the wording of your question is sent to the search provider, SearXNG, an open-source metasearch engine we run ourselves. AskShia sends the query only to that instance; how the instance routes it to its enabled engines follows its own configuration. Three things limit that, and they are enforced in code rather than by policy:

• It only happens after the corpus has already failed to answer you.
• A question that reads as your own situation is never sent — not to any provider, and not even to your marja’s own site. A question written in the first person, one that mentions marriage, health, menstruation, money troubles or similar, or one long enough to be an account of your circumstances, is kept on our servers and the lookup is skipped. Only short, impersonal, factual questions can leave.
• Nothing identifying you accompanies the query — no account, no location, no identifier. Because the instance is self-hosted, no commercial search account or profile is attached to the query.

A result from a general reference site is never allowed to state a religious ruling. If one reads like a ruling it is discarded rather than shown to you.

Choosing a marja reveals a religious affiliation. Under the EU General Data Protection Regulation that is special category data (Article 9), which carries a higher bar than ordinary personal data.

Before the first question on a device, AskShia asks for a specific consent action covering the question, selected marja, API and configured model providers. You can decline and continue using the reading and prayer tools. You can change or clear your marja at any time and withdraw question-processing consent below. The appropriate Article 6 and Article 9 legal bases, children’s position, transfers and retention still require approval by EU privacy counsel before a public launch.

The prayer-times, qibla, and mosque pages ask your browser or mobile operating system for foreground location. That permission is yours to grant or refuse, and the app works without it — location-dependent results simply will not be available.

If you grant it, your coordinates are used on the device to calculate prayer times and the qibla bearing. The website sends them to OpenStreetMap’s Nominatim service to obtain a place name; the native apps use the operating system’s reverse-geocoding service. We do not deliberately store those coordinates.

The mosque finder sends the coordinates you supply to our API in order to search for nearby mosques. That query is not retained. Public mosque self-registration is disabled; the app does not currently collect mosque contact submissions.

Prayer and devotional reminders are optional and scheduled locally through the mobile operating system. If you separately opt in to announcements, the app asks your operating system for notification permission first and uploads only an Expo push token plus coarse technical details (platform, app version and language). Tokens are encrypted at rest, used only to deliver the notification you asked for, and can be removed by contacting us. Turning off notifications in your device settings stops delivery. Expo processes that token as our push provider; Apple and Google provide operating-system notification transport.

Hadith books, duas and Quran commentary are stored on our own servers. The text is reproduced from thaqalayn.net and remains attributed to its translators and publishers, but reading it contacts nobody but us — your browser never connects to thaqalayn.net, and neither does our server while you read. Book covers are served from our origin too. We do not keep a record of what you read.

Some things still go directly from your browser to other services, which therefore see your IP address and which page you opened, the same as if you had visited them yourself: Quran verse text from api.alquran.cloud, Quran recitation from everyayah.com, and dua recordings from mp3.duas.org. The audio hosts are contacted only if you press play.

Our web server keeps standard access logs (IP address, timestamp, requested path) for operational and security purposes. The application deliberately excludes raw question text from its structured logs. Final log fields, access controls, and retention must be confirmed with the production host before public launch.

If you explicitly mark an answer unhelpful or ask us to log a missing topic, the question, selected marja, feedback category and time are stored for corpus review. No account, email, IP address or device identifier is stored with that record. These feedback records are automatically removed after 90 days.

Answers quote from published works and always link to their source. AskShia is a reference tool, not a substitute for a qualified scholar, and it does not issue rulings of its own.

Under the GDPR you have rights of access, rectification, erasure, restriction, portability and objection. In practice these are largely satisfied by design: because we hold no account or server-side conversation history, there is usually little on our side that can be connected back to you. Optional corpus-gap feedback and operational logs may still exist for the periods described above.

For any request, or to withdraw the consent described above, write to privacy@askshia.eu. You also have the right to lodge a complaint with your national data protection authority.

Withdraw question-processing consent on this device

If this notice changes materially — in particular if analytics are ever added, or the model provider changes — the date at the top of this page will change with it.