Privacy

AskShia has no accounts and no user database. We do not know who you are, and we have no way to link one question to another. There are no cookies, no analytics and no third-party trackers on this site.

Your chosen marja, your interface language, your light/dark preference and your recent questions are stored in your browser’s local storage. They never reach our servers as a stored record, and clearing your browser data removes them permanently. We cannot recover them and we cannot see them.

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 are performed by a third-party language model accessed through OpenRouter. Your question text is sent to that provider. It is not sent with any identifier, account, or history — there is none to send — but it does leave our infrastructure, and OpenRouter and the underlying model provider apply their own retention policies to it. If you would not put something in a search engine, do not put it here.

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

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.

We rely on your explicit consent as the legal basis: you provide the marja yourself, the app cannot work without one, and it is transmitted only to scope the answer to the rulings that marja has actually published. You can change or clear it at any time from the sidebar. We keep no server-side record of which marja any visitor selected.

The prayer-times and qibla pages ask your browser for your location. That permission is yours to grant or refuse, and the app works without it — those two pages simply cannot compute a result.

If you grant it, your coordinates are used in your browser to calculate prayer times and the qibla bearing, and are sent to OpenStreetMap’s Nominatim service to turn them into a place name for display. We do not store your coordinates, and they are not sent to our API.

The mosque finder sends the coordinates you supply to our API in order to search for nearby mosques. That query is not retained.

Hadith books, duas and Quran commentary come from thaqalayn.net. Our server fetches those on your behalf, so thaqalayn.net sees our server rather than you. We do not keep a record of what you read.

Two things still go directly from your browser: Quran verse text is fetched from api.alquran.cloud, and book cover images load from thaqalayn.net. Those two services therefore see your IP address and which page you opened, the same as if you had visited them yourself.

Our web server keeps standard access logs (IP address, timestamp, requested path) for operational and security purposes. These are not used to identify visitors or linked to question content.

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 and no stored question history, there is generally nothing on our side to retrieve or delete beyond the server logs 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.

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.