Privacy Policy

Good Soil is made by ChurchWiseAI LTD. It is a general-audience game, accounts are for ages 14 and up, and younger children can play all of it without giving us anything. This page explains, in plain language, what the game collects and what it never does — and it is short, because the answer is genuinely small.

It is written to be plain rather than legal. We have built it around the rules that apply to us — Canada’s privacy law, Quebec’s, the US children’s privacy rule, and the UK’s children’s design code. Every statement below describes what the game actually does; where we have chosen to collect nothing, we say so plainly rather than reserving the right to change our minds quietly.

Playing without an account

If you play without signing in, nothing about your game leaves your device. Your farm, your coins, your inventory — all of it lives only in your browser’s local storage, on your device, and none of it is uploaded anywhere. We have no copy of it and no way to look at it.

To be exact about the one thing that does happen: the game is a website, so the page, its pictures and its sounds have to travel to you over the internet. They come from our web host, Vercel, and like any host it necessarily receives the ordinary connection details every website receives — your device’s IP address, the browser you are using, which file you asked for. That is the unavoidable cost of a page loading at all. It carries no farm data and nothing you typed into the game.

When the menu opens, the app also checks once whether you are already signed in, so it knows which farm to load. That check goes to our sign-in provider, Supabase, and carries the same ordinary connection details and nothing else.

The parts of that local save written by you, in your own words, are the names you give things: your farm’s name, your animals’ names, and the name of a well if you dig one. Everything else is numbers and game-state describing your fictional farm. If you make a postcard of your farm to share, the picture is drawn on your device and handed to your phone’s own share sheet or your downloads folder — it never comes to us.

If you sign in

Signing in is optional. It lets your farm follow you between devices, and it is what makes the neighbor features below possible. There are two ways to do it, and they collect different amounts.

• A sign-in link by email. We store your email address. That is the whole of it.
• “Continue with Google”. You sign in on Google’s own page, under Google’s privacy policy, and Google passes us your profile — which is your email address, your name, and your profile picture. That is more than the email route collects. If you would rather we didn’t hold your name and picture, use the email link instead; the game is identical either way.

Either way, the sign-in itself is handled and stored by Supabase, the company that runs our database and accounts. We use whichever of those details you gave us to sign you in and to know which farm is yours — and for nothing else.

Alongside it we store a copy of your save: the same farm state described above, including the names you chose. It is capped in size, only ever readable by your own account, and only ever reached through purpose-built server functions rather than an open database table.

One thing that may surprise you, so it is worth saying: the farm name other players see is not the one you typed. The server picks a name for you from a small approved list of words, and that is the only name that ever leaves your account. Your own typed names — for the farm, the animals, the well — stay yours and are never shown to anyone else.

Purchases

Good Soil doesn’t require you to spend money. Everything you can reach by playing is free. We are building a small optional shop for Golden Seeds, an in-game currency, and this explains how a purchase works whether or not that shop is switched on for you today.

Who handles your payment. All payment is handled by Stripe. You would enter your card details on a page Stripe hosts, never on ours. We never see, receive or store your card number, its expiry date or its security code at any point — Stripe simply tells us afterwards whether the payment succeeded.

Buying requires being 18 or older. That is a separate, stricter check than the 14+ needed for an account, because a purchase is a contract and Ontario law treats a contract made by someone under 18 differently.

What we keep. Once a purchase completes we keep a record that it happened: the amount, and how many Golden Seeds it granted, tied to your account so we can credit the right wallet and handle a refund if one is ever needed. We are never given your card details, so we cannot keep them. That purchase record is kept longer than the rest of your account data — see “How long we keep it” below, and why.

Where your information is stored, and who else could see it

If you sign in, your email address and your farm’s save data are stored on a database physically located in Ohio, in the United States, run for us by a company called Supabase. The pages, pictures and sounds are served by another United States company, Vercel. If you ever use the Golden Seeds shop, Stripe — also a United States company — processes that payment.

That matters, so we would rather say it plainly than let you assume otherwise: once you sign in, your information sits under United States law as well as Canadian law. It is possible for a US court order or similar legal process to require Supabase, Vercel or Stripe to hand over data they hold for us, in circumstances a Canadian court might not permit. This is true of a great many services Canadians use daily that run on US infrastructure. We are not aware of it ever having happened to Good Soil’s data.

If you never sign in, none of this touches you. Nothing about your farm leaves your device, in any country.

Neighbors: visiting other farms

Good Soil now has neighbors, and this section describes it as it actually works today, not as it is meant to work one day.

You need an account to have a neighbor, so the same age rule applies: this part of the game is for 14 and up. Nobody can find you. There is no search, no directory, no list of players, no “people you may know”. The only way two farms are ever connected is that one player creates a single-use invite link and hands it to the other, and the other accepts. Both sides have to agree, an invite stops working after seven days, and one account can have at most twenty neighbors.

Players still cannot type anything to each other. When someone helps you, you can send back one of eight fixed phrases — “Thank you”, “That was kind”, “Peace be with you” and five more. That is the entire vocabulary. There is no message box, no editing, no adding a number or a link to a phrase, and no place in the database for one: the server records which of the eight was chosen, and refuses anything else.

When a neighbor visits, what they see is your server-chosen farm name, a rough sense of how far along you are, your fields and buildings, and anything you have asked for help with. They do not see your email, your real name, your picture, when you were last online, or the names you gave your farm and your animals.

You can mute, remove, block or report a neighbor right from your neighbors list — you never have to visit their farm first. The same controls are also available from inside a visit. Reporting records a reason picked from a short list — not a written complaint — along with who reported whom, so we can look into it.

While all this is running, the game stores the connection between two accounts, invites you have made (as a scrambled fingerprint of the link, never the link itself), records of help given and received, which of the eight phrases were sent, whether you have muted someone, and any reports. If you never touch the neighbor features, none of that exists for you.

Children and families

Good Soil is a general-audience game, and accounts are for ages 14 and up. Younger children are welcome to play it — the whole farm, the whole town, all of it — and we never ask them for anything.

Here is how that works in practice. There is exactly one place in this game where any personal information is collected: the sign-in card. So that is where we ask your age — once. If you are under 14, we simply don’t show you the sign-in, we say so kindly, and you keep farming. We don’t ask again, and we don’t keep your birthdate — only whether you cleared 14, and the day you answered. That answer stays on your device.

The trade-off, stated plainly: a younger player’s farm lives in their own browser and won’t follow them to another device, and they can’t have neighbors. That is the whole cost, and we think it is the right one. The alternative is asking a parent to prove who they are — usually with an ID or a payment card — just to let a child hand us an email address. That means holding more information about a child, not less. Nothing held is nothing to lose.

Whatever your age, Good Soil has no advertising, no purchases, no push notifications, no leaderboards, no streaks, and no way for players to type messages to each other. There is nothing in it designed to make a child anxious about leaving, and nothing that rewards a child for praying, reading Scripture, giving, or going to church — those are invitations in this game, never scored.

One more promise about the sign-in details, because they are the only personal information we hold: we use them to sign you in, and for nothing else. We don’t send marketing to that address, we don’t add you to a mailing list, and we don’t pass it to anyone.

Parents: you are welcome to read this whole page, which is why it is linked from the front of the game and not hidden behind a sign-up. Deleting an account and its farm is a button in Settings — see “How long we keep it” below for exactly what it removes and what it leaves. If anything here is unclear, or you would rather a person did it, write to us and we will.

How long we keep it, and how to get rid of it

Accounts nobody comes back to. If an account goes 24 months without a single sign-in, we delete it and the farm with it.

Records of money. If you ever buy anything, the record of that purchase is kept for six years. This is the one thing a deletion request cannot remove — Canadian tax law requires us to keep it, and we would rather tell you that than quietly make an exception later. It is a record that a purchase happened and for how much. It has never included card details, because we are never given them.

Records of a security problem. If there is ever a breach affecting personal information, our record of it is kept for five years. Canadian and Quebec privacy law each set a minimum; we keep to the longer one.

Invite links stop working seven days after they are created, whether or not anyone used them. That timer has always been real.

The 24-month check runs on its own: once a week, an automatic sweep looks at last sign-in dates and deletes what has gone silent for two years — the farm, the farm’s name, and everything the neighbour part of the game holds. The one exception is an account with a purchase on it, which waits out the six-year money-record clock above instead. Removing the sign-in entry itself is still finished by a person, for the same reason given two paragraphs down — our sign-in system is shared with our other services, and a machine should not guess which of them you meant to leave. No one has to remember to run the sweep; the earlier version of this page told you a person did all of it, because back then it was true.

You can delete it yourself, from inside the game. It is in Settings, in the same panel that tells you which address you are signed in with, and it is called “Delete my account”. It asks once more, says plainly what is about to go, and then goes: the farm we keep for you online, the name your farm goes by, and everything the neighbour part of the game holds about you — your neighbours, your invites, and any report to do with you. Nothing is kept back for a waiting period, and there is no undo.

Two limits on that button, because a page like this should say where a button stops. It does not delete the sign-in itself. Taking an email address out of the system that sends the sign-in links is still a person doing it, not a form, and we would rather tell you that than dress it up — so write to us at the address below and ask, and we will.

And it does not touch the farm saved on your own device. That is a separate copy, it is not ours, and deleting your account leaves it exactly where it is — once you are signed out, the game goes back to whatever farm that device was playing before you signed in. To clear that copy too, clear your browser’s data for this site, which also removes your answer to the age question.

Seeing and correcting what we hold

You can ask us what we hold about you, and we will tell you. You can ask us to correct anything that is wrong. You can ask us to delete it — and for almost everything, you can do that yourself from Settings without asking anyone.

Write to hello@churchwiseai.com. We will answer within 30 days, and a person will read it. If we ever have to say no to part of a request — the purchase records above are the realistic case — we will tell you which part and why.

If something goes wrong

If information is ever exposed, lost or reached by someone who should not have it, we write down what happened, work out whether it puts anyone at real risk, and keep that record.

If it does put you at risk, we tell you — promptly, and without waiting until we have finished working out every detail. We also tell the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, and the Commission d’accès à l’information for anyone in Quebec, where the law requires it. We would rather tell you early and follow up than tell you late and tidily.

Changes

If what we collect changes, we’ll update this page and the “last updated” date at the top.

Contact

The person responsible for privacy at Good Soil is our Privacy Officer, ChurchWiseAI LTD. Questions about this policy, a request to see or correct what we hold, or to have your account and farm deleted — write to hello@churchwiseai.com and a person will read it.

If we handle a privacy question badly, you can take it further: to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, or, if you are in Quebec, to the Commission d’accès à l’information. We would rather you came to us first so we can put it right — but you are never required to.

ChurchWiseAI LTD
125 Concession Street
Ingersoll, ON N5C 1G2, Canada