Prayer Lake was built specifically to avoid tracking or identifying the people who use it. This page describes, plainly and completely, the small amount of data the site does handle and why. It's written for a small personal art project — not legal advice, and not a substitute for a lawyer if you have specific compliance requirements.
The short version
No accounts. No login. No cookies. No analytics or tracking scripts of any kind — not even privacy-friendly ones. Nothing you submit is ever stored alongside anything that could identify you. There is no technical way for the site or its operator to trace a submitted prayer back to the person who wrote it.
What's stored when you submit a prayer
Three things are saved, permanently, in the prayers table:
- The prayer text itself — displayed publicly on the lake page, individually (in word-cloud form) and grouped into thematic clusters.
- A word count — used only to help build the word cloud faster.
- A country, and (for US submissions) a state — derived from your IP address at the moment of submission (see "Location" below), shown only as an aggregate count on the "Distant shores" map. It is never displayed next to your prayer's text, and never stored anywhere alongside it in a way that could be individually queried back out.
Nothing else about you — no name, no cookie, no browser fingerprint, no account ID, no session — is ever stored in that table or anywhere connected to it. This content is retained indefinitely, since the site's purpose is to accumulate everything released into the lake over time.
Location
Your country (and, for US visitors, your state) is looked up from your IP address using a local, offline database (MaxMind GeoLite2), entirely on the site's own server. Your IP address is never sent to MaxMind, or to any third party, or to any external API — the lookup happens locally, once, at the moment you submit. Only the resulting country/state code is kept; your actual IP address is discarded immediately afterward and is never written to the database in any form. If the lookup fails for any reason, your prayer still submits normally with no location recorded.
Anti-spam rate limiting
To keep the site usable, submissions are rate-limited (a handful
per hour) using a one-way, salted cryptographic hash of your IP
address — never the IP address itself. This hash is stored in a
separate table, unconnected to the prayers table by
any shared ID, key, or reference: there is no query that can join
one to the other. Rows in this table are automatically deleted
after about an hour. This table's only purpose is counting recent
submissions from the same source; it is never used, or usable, to
figure out what any particular visitor wrote.
Cookies, analytics, and tracking
None. This site sets no cookies, uses no localStorage, and loads no third-party scripts, fonts, or analytics of any kind — the typeface is self-hosted rather than pulled from a font CDN specifically so that no third party sees a visitor's request even for that. There is nothing to opt out of, because nothing is being tracked to begin with.
Standard hosting/server logs
This site runs on shared web hosting (Ionos). Like virtually all web hosts, the underlying server infrastructure may briefly retain standard technical access logs (e.g., IP address, request time, and similar metadata) for security and operational purposes, under the host's own retention practices — this happens below the application level and is outside this site's own code and control. The application itself, described above, never persists your IP address in any of its own data.
Access, correction, and deletion requests
Because no submission is ever linked to an identifiable visitor, there's no self-service way to find, edit, or delete "your" prayer, and no way for the site operator to look one up on your behalf by anything other than its own visible text. This is a direct consequence of the site's design, not a policy choice to withhold data — the linkage simply doesn't exist to retrieve.
Children's privacy
This site is not directed at children, and does not knowingly collect data from children. As there are no accounts or age verification, this isn't technically enforced — supervision is left to parents/guardians.
Changes to this policy
This policy may be updated from time to time; the date at the top reflects the latest revision. There are no accounts, so there is no mechanism to notify individual visitors directly — check back here periodically.
Contact
Consistent with the site's anonymous, no-account design, there is currently no dedicated inquiries channel for this project.