Selah Verse — Privacy Policy
Last updated: 2026-08-27
Effective 2026-08-27.
Selah Verse ("Selah") is a Bible companion for iPhone. This policy explains what the app collects, what leaves your phone, who else touches it, and how to get rid of all of it. It is written to be read, not to be survived.
The current version of this policy is published at https://selahverseapp.com/privacy.
The short version
- Selah does not ask for your name, your email, or your phone number. Your account is anonymous by default.
- Selah has no advertising, no ad networks, and no third-party trackers. We do not sell or share your data, and we never will.
- Photos you take in Selah's camera are sent to Google's Gemini AI so it can describe the scene and match a verse to it. Google processes the photo and returns a text description. Selah keeps the description. Selah does not keep the photo.
- Search text you type is sent to Google's Gemini AI to be turned into a numeric representation used for meaning-based search.
- The camera never runs until you have read the disclosure and tapped to agree.
- You can delete everything, permanently, by emailing support@selahverseapp.com.
The rest of this page is the detail behind those points.
1. Who we are
Selah Verse is published by the developer of record listed on the app's App Store page, where it is listed as Selah Verse: Bible Keyboard. For anything in this policy, including privacy requests, write to support@selahverseapp.com.
This policy covers the Selah Verse iPhone app (com.attilax0.selah) and everything that ships inside it: the main app, the Selah keyboard (com.attilax0.selah.keyboard), the Selah iMessage app (com.attilax0.selah.messages), and the home screen and lock screen widgets (com.attilax0.selah.widgets).
2. Your account
When you first open Selah, the app creates an anonymous account on our backend (Supabase). No sign-up screen, no password, no email address. The account is identified by a randomly generated ID that means nothing outside Selah and is not linked to your Apple ID, your phone number, your contacts, or any advertising identifier.
That anonymous ID is what lets your saved verses and your settings survive an app restart, and it is what the keyboard and iMessage extension use to stay in sync with the main app.
Because there is no email on file, we cannot recover your library if you delete the app or switch phones. That is the honest trade for not collecting your identity.
3. What Selah collects
3.1 Your settings and profile
Your chosen translation, your card density, the "core need" you pick during onboarding, your notification hour, whether you have completed onboarding, and whether you have an active subscription.
3.2 What you save and read
Verses you save (and any note you attach), which surface you saved them from, and your progress through the chapters you read.
3.3 What you do in the app
Selah records product events so we can tell which parts of the app actually help people and which parts waste their time. Each event is a short name, a timestamp, a session ID, and a small set of properties. In plain terms, the events cover:
- Verses — a verse shown, how long it stayed on screen, dismissed, saved, unsaved, sent, copied, opened from a widget or a notification.
- Search and browse — that a search happened and which result you tapped, which category or trending item you opened, which book you opened in Read.
- Camera — that a capture happened, which of the three suggested verses you kept, whether you asked for more, whether you saved the image and whether it carried a watermark.
- Extensions — that the keyboard or iMessage app was opened, that a verse was inserted or sent, and whether the keyboard was running offline.
- Onboarding, settings and reminders — which onboarding question was answered, when onboarding finished, translation and density changes, check-in answers.
- Subscription — that a paywall was shown and, if it happened, which product was purchased.
- Sensitive-topic safeguards — that a crisis-support response was shown, and on which surface. This records that the safeguard fired. It does not record what you typed.
Events are tied to your anonymous account ID. They are not tied to you.
3.4 Search text
What you type into Selah's search box, the keyboard's search field, or the iMessage app's search field is sent to our server so it can find verses that match your meaning rather than your spelling. See section 4 for what happens to it there.
3.5 Camera photos and scene descriptions
Covered in full in section 4.1, because this is the part that matters most.
3.6 What Selah does not collect
No contacts. No calendar. No location. No health data. No browsing history. No advertising identifier (IDFA). No microphone. No photo library scanning: Selah only ever receives the single image you deliberately pick or shoot.
4. AI processing: what leaves your phone
Selah uses Google Gemini, a third-party AI service operated by Google, for two features. This section is the disclosure of that data flow.
4.1 Camera photos
When you use Selah's camera to find a verse for a moment:
- The photo is resized on your phone to roughly 768 pixels on its longest edge.
- That resized image is sent over an encrypted connection to our server, and from there to Google Gemini.
- Gemini looks at the image and returns text: a description of the scene, its emotional tone, and a general category. It does not generate an image and it does not identify people.
- Selah uses that text to pick three verses to show you.
What is kept, and by whom:
- Selah does not store your photo. The image exists in memory for the length of the request and is never written to our database or to any file storage we control. If you save the finished image to your camera roll, that copy lives on your phone, under your control, not ours.
- Selah does store the text description Gemini produced, along with the three verses suggested, which one you kept, whether you saved it, and technical details of the request (the model name, token counts, how long it took, and which version of this disclosure you agreed to). The description is what lets Selah get better at matching verses to real moments.
- Google's handling of the image is governed by Google's own terms for the Gemini API. Selah sends the request through a paid API tier, which under Google's published terms is not used to train Google's general-purpose models.
Consent is required and it is specific. Before the camera opens for the first time, Selah shows a plain-language screen stating that your photo goes to a third-party AI service for scene description. The camera does not function until you tap to agree, and the server refuses camera requests from any account that has not agreed. You can withdraw consent at any time in Settings → How Selah uses AI, which stops the feature and lets you delete the descriptions already stored.
4.2 Search text
When you search, the text you typed is sent to Google Gemini's embedding model, which converts it into a list of numbers representing its meaning. Selah compares those numbers against the same representation of every verse in the Bible and returns the closest matches.
Selah caches the numeric representation of a query, along with the query text, so that a common search does not have to be sent to Google twice. That cache is shared across all users and is not linked to any account: it is a lookup table of phrase to meaning, not a record of who asked.
4.3 Your onboarding answers
The four onboarding questions and your "core need" are turned into the same kind of numeric representation, by the same Google service, and stored against your account so the For You feed can lean toward verses that fit. The answers themselves are short, fixed choices, not free text about your life.
4.4 Nothing else goes to an AI service
Your saved verses, your notes, your reading history, and your event stream are never sent to Google or to any other AI provider.
5. Who else receives data
| Who | What they get | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Supabase | Everything described in section 3, stored in our database | It is our backend and database host |
| Google (Gemini API) | Camera photos (transiently), search text, onboarding answers | Scene description and meaning-based search |
| Apple | Your purchase, if you subscribe | Apple processes all payments; we never see your card |
| Superwall | Anonymous subscription and paywall events | It runs and measures our subscription screens |
That is the complete list. There is no advertising SDK, no analytics broker, no attribution network, no social login, and no data enrichment vendor in Selah.
6. Extensions and widgets
The Selah keyboard. The keyboard ships with roughly six hundred verses built into it, so the most common searches never leave your phone. If you grant Full Access, the keyboard can reach our server for full-library search, which sends the text you typed into the Selah search field exactly as described in section 4.2. The keyboard never reads, stores, or transmits what you type into other apps. Without Full Access, it runs entirely offline against the built-in verses.
The Selah iMessage app. It sends the text you type into its own search field, the same way. It does not read your conversations.
Widgets. The home screen and lock screen widgets read the day's verse from a shared container on your own device. They send nothing.
7. Subscriptions and payments
Selah Premium is sold through Apple. Apple handles the payment and tells us only whether an entitlement is active. We never see your card number, your billing address, or your Apple ID. Superwall, which presents and measures our subscription screens, receives anonymous event data about which screen was shown and whether a purchase happened.
8. Notifications
Selah's reminders are scheduled locally on your phone. There is no push server and no push token. If you turn notifications off in iOS Settings, nothing is sent anywhere; the schedule simply stops.
9. Sensitive topics
Selah checks search text for language that suggests a crisis before it does anything else with it. When that check fires, Selah shows a compassionate response with crisis resources including the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline and the Crisis Text Line, along with hand-picked verses rather than algorithmic results.
We record that this happened, and on which surface, so we can tell the safeguard is working. We do not record what you typed, and we do not flag, profile, or contact anyone.
Selah is not a counselling service and cannot summon help. If you are in danger, call your local emergency number.
10. How long we keep things
- Your profile, saved verses, and reading progress stay until you ask us to delete them.
- Camera scene descriptions stay until you delete them, either individually in the app or all at once by withdrawing AI consent.
- Product events are kept for up to 24 months and then removed.
- The shared query cache holds phrases, not people, and is kept indefinitely.
- Photos are not retained at all.
11. Deleting your data
Email support@selahverseapp.com from the device you use Selah on and ask us to delete your account. Include the anonymous account ID shown in Settings → About, since without it we cannot tell which anonymous account is yours. We will erase your profile, saved verses, notes, reading progress, scene descriptions, personalization data, and events, and confirm when it is done. We aim to complete deletions within 30 days.
Deleting the app from your phone removes the local copy of your data but does not by itself erase the backend record. Email us to make it permanent.
12. Children
Selah is not directed to children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from them. If you believe a child under 13 has used Selah and left data behind, write to support@selahverseapp.com and we will delete it. Where local law sets a higher age of digital consent (16 in parts of the EU and UK), that higher age applies.
13. Your rights
Depending on where you live, you may have the right to access, correct, export, or delete the data we hold about you, to object to or restrict how we use it, and to complain to a data protection authority.
We do not sell personal information and we do not share it for cross-context behavioural advertising, as those terms are defined under California law. There is nothing to opt out of, because we never opted you in.
Exercise any of these rights by writing to support@selahverseapp.com. We will not charge you and we will not treat you differently for asking.
Our legal bases under GDPR, where it applies, are: consent for camera AI processing and notifications; contract for running your account, your library, and your subscription; and legitimate interests for product analytics, security, and abuse prevention.
Data is processed on servers in the United States. Where required, transfers rely on Standard Contractual Clauses maintained by our processors.
14. Security
Everything travels over encrypted connections. Database access is governed by row-level security so that one account cannot read another's rows. Our AI keys live only on the server and never inside the app. No system is perfect, and we will tell affected users promptly if we ever discover a breach that puts their data at risk.
15. Scripture, attribution and licences
Selah's scripture texts and study data are public domain, CC0, CC BY, or CC BY-SA. The full attribution, reproduced in the app under Settings → About / Credits, is:
Scripture
King James Version (1769), public domain.
Berean Standard Bible, public domain (CC0), Bible Hub, 2023.
Free Bible Version, copyright © 2018 Dr. Jonathan Gallagher. Used under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license (creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0). Text reproduced without modification.
World English Bible, public domain. "World English Bible" is a trademark of eBible.org.
American Standard Version (1901), public domain.
The Holy Scriptures: A New Translation from the Original Languages, J. N. Darby (1890). Public domain.
Young's Literal Translation (1862/1898), public domain.
Texts sourced from eBible.org.Topical & related-verse data
Topical and cross-reference data © OpenBible.info, CC BY.
The OpenBible.info line is a licence obligation under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Free Bible Version line is a licence obligation under CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/); Selah reproduces that text without modification. "World English Bible" is a trademark of eBible.org, used here only to name the translation.
16. Changes to this policy
If we change how Selah handles your data, we will update this page and move the date at the top. For a change that materially expands what we collect or where it goes, we will ask you again inside the app rather than relying on you to re-read this page.
17. Contact
Selah Verse on the web: https://selahverseapp.com
Terms of Use: https://selahverseapp.com/terms