Privacy Policy
First draft, under legal review. Recording isn't open yet, and this site collects no personal information today.
1. Who We Are
Billion Testimonies is being organized as a Utah nonprofit corporation. Until it is formed and this site is assigned to it, Brent Jacobsen runs the site, and "we" and "us" mean him; after that they mean the corporation. We decide how the information described here is used, which makes us its "controller" under European and UK law and its "controlador" under Brazilian law.
Contact for anything in this policy: [email protected].
We will name our representatives in the European Union and the United Kingdom, and our data protection officer (encarregado), on this page before recording opens.
2. Summary
When you say "I believe in Jesus Christ" on video, you are telling us your religious belief, which the law in many countries treats as especially sensitive. We ask for your explicit consent before you record. We show your video only as you choose, with your country and nothing else about you. We keep your IP address with your video, encrypted, so we can keep the count honest, and we never publish it. We don't keep your phone number. We never sell your information, show advertising, or use your video for anything except Billion Testimonies. You can delete your video at any time.
3. What We Collect and Why
| When you | We collect | We use it to |
|---|---|---|
| Visit the site | Your IP address and browser information, processed by our hosting provider to deliver the page | Send you the page, choose your starting language from your country, and protect the site from attacks. We set no cookies and use no tracking or analytics tools. We do not keep your IP address from a visit. |
| Post on another platform with #ibelieveinjesuschrist or #billiontestimonies | The link to your public post, its language and its country | Count your post once. We keep a copy of the video only if you sign a release letting us show it. |
| Send us a link through the site or WhatsApp | The link; the WhatsApp number it came from, if you use WhatsApp | Check and count the post, and reply to you if we need to |
| Record on our site (when recording opens) | Your video; your answer to an age question; your consent record; your choice of who can see the video; the language; the country; your IP address | Store, check, count and show your video as you choose, and keep the count honest |
| Verify by phone (when phone verification opens) | Your phone number, only long enough to send and confirm a one-time code. We then discard it and keep a keyed fingerprint that cannot be turned back into the number. One family phone can verify up to six people, and we store no names or birth years. | Make sure each person counts once |
| Answer the optional questions | Your faith tradition and congregation, if you choose to give them | Produce statistics only. We never publish them with your video. |
| Record a longer testimony | The longer video and a transcript | Store it, subtitle it, and show it as you choose |
| Record at a congregation session | Your video, consent card or on-screen consent, and the name of the volunteer who ran the session | The same uses as a recording on our site, with the volunteer vouching for the session |
| Contact us as a congregation leader | Your name, congregation, city and country, email and any note | Contact you about Billion Testimonies, and nothing else |
| Give (when the Give page opens) | Your name, email, address and gift amount; our payment processor handles your card or bank details | Process your gift, send your receipt and keep the records tax law requires |
We do not collect your precise location, and we do not build any database of faces or voiceprints. Our duplicate check compares the recording file and its audio pattern against earlier recordings; it does not identify who you are.
4. Your IP Address
We keep the IP address from which a video was recorded or uploaded, together with the video, for verification and audit. We use it to detect fraud and automated mass uploads, to support the independent review of our count, and to confirm a video's country. We never publish it or show it with your video. We encrypt it, and only the people and systems doing verification and safety work can read it. We keep it for as long as we keep the video, because the count has to stay open to fraud checks and to the independent review for the whole campaign, which runs for years. We delete it when the video is deleted.
5. Religious Belief and Your Consent
A video saying "I believe in Jesus Christ" reveals your religious belief. The European Union and United Kingdom (GDPR, Article 9) and Brazil (LGPD, Article 11) treat this as a special category of personal data, and so do other countries. Before you record, we show you a separate consent screen that says in plain words what we will keep, who can see it, and how to delete it. You give your consent by an action of your own on that screen. You can withdraw it at any time by deleting your video, and withdrawing does not affect what we did before.
6. Legal Bases
| Use | European Union and United Kingdom | Brazil |
|---|---|---|
| Storing, counting and showing your video, and the optional statistics questions | Your explicit consent (Articles 6(1)(a) and 9(2)(a)) | Your specific and highlighted consent (Article 11, I) |
| Keeping your IP address with your video, and a fingerprint of your phone number, for verification and audit | Our legitimate interest in an honest count and in preventing fraud (Article 6(1)(f)), and your explicit consent, which covers the whole record (Article 9(2)(a)) | Your consent (Article 11, I) and fraud prevention and security (Article 11, II, g) |
| Counting a public post you made with our hashtags | Information you have made public yourself (Article 9(2)(e)) and our legitimate interest in counting it (Article 6(1)(f)) | Information you made public (Article 7, §4) |
| Showing a post from another platform | Your signed release (consent) | Your signed release (consent) |
| Delivering the site and choosing its language | Our legitimate interest in running the site (Article 6(1)(f)) | Legitimate interest (Article 7, IX) |
| Gifts and receipts | Our contract with you and our legal obligations (Articles 6(1)(b) and (c)) | Contract and legal obligation (Article 7, II and V) |
7. Children
We count every checked clip once, whatever the person's age, and we show only adults. A video of anyone under 18 never appears on our site, in compilations or on our map.
Under 13. When a post by a child under 13 reaches us through a hashtag or a link, we keep only the count, the language, the country and a one-way fingerprint of the link that stops it being counted twice. We do not keep the video, the link or the child's name. On our own site, a child can record only through family mode, after a parent or guardian gives verifiable consent, and the video stays private. (Family mode opens later.)
13 to 17. A teenager can record on our site only with a parent's or guardian's consent. Their video is never shown publicly, and at most it can be shared by link.
Age. Posts on other platforms carry no birth date, so we treat anyone who appears to be under 18 as a minor and anyone who appears to be under 13 as a child, and a person reviews borderline cases.
Parents. A parent or guardian can have any video of their child removed, without giving a reason, within 24 hours of asking. Write to [email protected] or use our Takedown Process. We follow the US Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, the GDPR's rules on children's consent, and Article 14 of Brazil's LGPD.
8. Who Sees Your Information
The public sees your video only if you chose "everyone," and people with the link see it only if you chose "link only." A shown video carries your country and nothing else about you. There are no comments, likes, follower counts or profiles.
Statistics. We always publish the overall count. We publish counts by faith tradition only once the traditions are roughly balanced, and until then our Board and partner organizations see that breakdown privately. Published statistics never show a group smaller than 10 people, and we never publish information about an individual.
Our service providers process information only on our instructions and under contracts that forbid them to use it for their own purposes, including training their own AI models. They are: Cloudflare (website hosting, network security, email forwarding, storage and database); cloud storage providers in the United States (video storage and backup copies); a phone verification provider; a speech-to-text and translation provider; Anthropic (AI services that help us check links and recordings, draft translations and review flagged content); Meta, for WhatsApp messages you send us; and, when the Give page opens, a payment processor. We will name each provider on this page before it receives anyone's information.
Volunteers and staff who review flagged videos see only what that review needs, and each signs a confidentiality agreement.
No sale of data. We never sell, rent or trade your information, and we never show advertising.
9. Government and Legal Demands
We give information about a participant to a government or anyone else only when US law requires it, such as a valid subpoena, court order or warrant enforceable in the United States. Every demand goes to our President and our counsel before anyone answers it. We ask for any overbroad demand to be narrowed and challenge any we believe is unlawful. We tell the person concerned before we disclose, unless the law or a court forbids it. We take particular care with demands that concern people in countries where professing Christian faith is dangerous. We publish the number of demands we receive each year.
10. Where We Keep It
We are based in the United States, and we and our service providers store information in the United States. If you take part from outside the United States, your information is processed in the United States under the protections this policy describes.
11. How Long We Keep It
| Information | How long |
|---|---|
| Your video and longer testimony | Permanently, as part of the archive, unless you delete it |
| Your consent record, age answer, visibility choice, language and country | As long as we keep your video |
| Your IP address kept with your video | As long as we keep your video; deleted when the video is deleted |
| Your phone number | Not kept. We discard it once the one-time code is confirmed. |
| The keyed fingerprint of your phone number | As long as we keep your video, so the same phone cannot count again; deleted when the video is deleted |
| Faith tradition and congregation | As long as we keep your video; used only in totals |
| Link to a counted public post | While the post counts, or until you ask us to remove it |
| A child's counted post (under 13) | The count, language, country and link fingerprint only, until a parent asks us to remove them |
| WhatsApp messages with links | 30 days after we check the link; then we keep only the link |
| Congregation leader contact details | Until you ask us to delete them, or 2 years after our last contact |
| Gift records | 7 years, as tax law requires |
| Security logs | 30 days |
| Takedown and safety records | 3 years |
When you delete your video, we remove it from the site and from storage at once, and from any backup copies within 90 days. We keep a one-way fingerprint of a removed link or recording so that it is not counted again, and nothing else. If you choose to leave your one count in the total, it stays as a number with nothing attached to you.
12. Your Rights
You can ask us to show you the information we hold about you, correct it, delete it, give you a copy, or stop using it, and you can withdraw your consent at any time. You can ask for a person to review any decision our automated checks made about your video. We answer within 15 days where Brazilian law applies and within one month elsewhere, and we do not charge for it. Write to [email protected], or use the delete link we gave you when you recorded.
If you are in the European Union, the United Kingdom or Brazil, you can also complain to your data protection authority (in Brazil, the ANPD). Several US states give their residents similar rights, and we honor these requests for everyone, wherever they live.
13. Security
We encrypt information in transit and at rest, and we encrypt IP addresses separately from videos, with access limited to verification and safety work and logged. If a breach puts your information at risk, we will tell you and the authorities as the law requires.
14. If Your Faith Puts You at Risk
If you live in, or expect to return to, a country on the Open Doors World Watch List, your video defaults to the private archive. We never feature or map videos from those countries. You can blur your face, record audio only, or delete your video at any time. If you think a video puts you or someone else in danger, write to [email protected] and we will act within 24 hours.
15. Changes
We will post any change to this policy on this page with a new effective date. If a change affects how we use a video you have already recorded, we will ask for your consent first.