Privacy

As long as you are simply reading the site, we have no idea who you are. There is no registration here and no accounts. The only thing you can tell us is your email address, if you subscribe to the newsletter yourself; what happens to it is described below, in the “Newsletter” section.

Everything the site “remembers” about you is your own settings and where you stopped: the language you chose, the translation you last opened, the place you stopped at, the theme, the text size, your favourite translations, the player settings, whom you last listened to and how far. They are kept in your browser, not with us.

We set no advertising or tracking cookies or markers. There are only a few settings the site needs to work properly, and they are used for one thing alone — to show you the pages the way you chose them.

Analytics

We keep only aggregate visit statistics: how much and what is read, not who reads it. We count them ourselves, on our own server: there are no third-party counters and no ad networks here.

What goes into the count: which pages are opened — including which Bible translations, chapters and verses — how long a page stays open on screen, from which countries, in which time zone and at what time of day, from which devices, systems and browsers, what language the browser is set to, and which sites people come from by a link. We also note whether a visitor looks like a person or a program and whether the request came from a data-centre network — this keeps robots out of the reader count. In the player: what people listen to, when they start and stop it, and how far they get.

All of it adds up into daily totals. They are kept indefinitely and are open to everyone on the statistics page; rare values there are folded into a common group so as not to single out any one reader. No history of any one person appears, and no list of “what this visitor read”.

What we do not do

We write nothing to your browser for counting — no cookies, no browser storage. While a page is open on screen, it tells the server from time to time that it is being read — that is how reading time is counted. Of the browser’s properties it passes on exactly one: whether the browser itself reports that a program is controlling it. This flag is needed to filter out robots and is not stored anywhere.

Neither your IP address nor your browser details go into the statistics. They live exactly as long as the request is being handled: some of the features listed above are derived from them, and they themselves are not written into the daily totals. The statistics hold no addresses at all — even for search engine robots we record the robot’s name, not its address.

We do not follow you across days or across sites.

How we tell one visitor from another

By a temporary tag that is valid for one day. It is computed from your IP address, your browser details and its language with a secret key for that day, and the key is destroyed after midnight. After that there is nothing left to match yesterday’s tags against: neither we nor anyone else can link yesterday’s visitor to today’s.

Records carrying this tag are kept only until the nightly processing — after that only the totals remain.

If you do not want to be counted

If you have set your browser to ask sites not to track you, we see that request and honour it — nothing else is needed. The setting is not in every browser and goes by different names. In Chrome it is Do Not Track, in the privacy settings. Other browsers and extensions support Global Privacy Control — which ones exactly is listed there.

Then we keep no tag and nothing about what you read. We only count how many pages readers with this setting opened and roughly how many of them there were — and nothing more.

Requests that look like probing the site for vulnerabilities are counted even with this setting: that is protecting the site, not statistics.

Site search

What you type into the site search, we save in a separate log — without your IP address, without an identifier and without a time more precise than the day, so a query in it cannot be linked either to you or to your other queries. We keep it for ourselves and show it to no one. Each day’s records are deleted a week after that day ends; all that remains is a count — how many times each query was searched for that day. If your browser asks sites not to track you, your queries are not recorded in this log.

Service logs

The site itself and the protection against attacks in front of it keep service records of requests. Your IP address and the address of the page you opened go into them, and the records of the protection also hold your browser details: without this an attack cannot be told from an ordinary reader. What you typed into the search stays out of the site’s own records — only the records of the protection in front of it keep it. That is not analytics — a different purpose and separate storage; those records are never joined with the statistics. They are kept even when your browser asks sites not to track you.

There is only one way we get your email address: you type it into the subscription form yourself. We do not ask for your name. Besides the address we remember which letters you chose — “Project news”, “Personal letters” or both — and the language of the letters you chose in the form.

A subscription does not begin with the form but with a confirmation: a letter with a link is sent to the address, and until you open it and press the button, no letters come. Nothing in the form is ticked in advance; the one exception is a link for the project’s supporters, which arrives with a choice of letters already ticked — you see it and can change it. We never subscribe anyone ourselves.

The letters come from an address on our subdomain mail.only.bible, and they are delivered by a third-party mail service in Europe. It is the only outside service that sees your address, and it receives it for one purpose alone — to deliver the letter. The address is passed to no one else.

We do not watch what you do with the letters: they carry no tracking images and no tagged links. Whether you opened a letter or clicked anything in it, we do not know.

Every letter has an unsubscribe link — for each kind of letter separately. As soon as no subscription is left for the address, it is deleted from the mailing base entirely; we do not keep it “just in case”.

Apart from the mailing base we keep a consent record: when this address subscribed, confirmed the subscription and unsubscribed, in which language and from which letters. Neither your IP address nor your browser details are in it. It serves one purpose — to prove that you asked for the letters yourself and that we honoured your request to stop — which is why the entry stays after you unsubscribe.

The subscription form exists only on only.bible; there is no newsletter on bible.ru.

What this page does not cover

Everything written above applies to the site you opened this page on — only.bible or bible.ru.

Anything hosted outside this site is not described here: our subdomains (except mail.only.bible — the newsletter comes from it, and it is covered above), our pages on social networks, our apps and other platforms. Different software runs there, with its own rules, and this page does not answer for it.

You can ask us anything, including about this page, by writing to support@only.bible. Correspondence with us — by email or any other means — is not covered by these rules either; the newsletter is not correspondence and has its own section above.