Video and audio sessions are never recorded. There is no recording feature, no transcription, and nothing is kept afterwards. Nobody at GraceBook can hear or read what was said, during or after.

A text session is destroyed when the session ends. A text session is conducted in writing, so those messages have to exist while it is happening. They are deleted within minutes of the session finishing — deleted outright, not hidden or marked as removed. If nobody ever closes the session, they are deleted automatically twelve hours after it was due to end.

There is no download. We do not offer you a copy of a transcript on your way out, and this is deliberate rather than an omission. A file that exists can be demanded — by a partner, by a family member, by anyone with power over someone who came here precisely because something at home was wrong. A file that does not exist cannot be. The protection of not having it applies to your own device as much as to our servers.

So if a text session matters to you, take your own notes. We say this before a session rather than after, so that it is a choice you can act on.

We do not host them. Those who accompany others have kept their own records for centuries, and mentors here continue to keep them outside GraceBook. We are not declining to build a feature so much as declining to become the holder of those records.

This follows from what notes about a named person actually are. Under data protection law you would be entitled to ask to read anything a mentor wrote about you — which is not a thing to spring on a mentor after the fact. And for a priest, anything touching the internal forum must not be written down at all. A platform that never holds these cannot be compelled to produce them, and cannot lose them.

After a session you can tell us how it went. This goes to GraceBook staff. Your mentor never sees it and is not told that you left it.

We keep it for twelve months, then delete it. This is the one thing here kept longer than a session, and the reason is specific: one concern is deniable, and several from different people is a pattern. Those arrive months apart. A shorter window would show us each of them alone and connect none of them, which would make the whole thing decorative.

You can change it or withdraw it at any time while we hold it. Withdrawing removes it; it is not kept as a previous version.

Staff can see which session it came from, and therefore who wrote it. We do not describe this as anonymous, because it is not.

We keep that a session was booked, when it happened, who it was between, and whether it was completed or cancelled. Both of you can see your own history, which is what this is for.

This holds no content. It records that things happened, never what was said.

You can close your account yourself, at any time, from your Account page. You do not have to ask us or wait for a reply. Your name, email address, password and profile are removed immediately, along with any feedback you had sent us.

Two things survive, and neither stays connected to you. That a session took place, so the other person keeps their own history — you appear on it only as a deleted account. And the amount and origin of any gift, which our charity accounts have to be able to produce.

Deletion here runs on a schedule and takes no notice of anything else. We do not suspend it, hurry it along, or point it at a particular mentor because a complaint has arrived — the timetable is the timetable, and that is what makes it trustworthy in both directions.

One consequence is worth stating plainly: because a session transcript does not survive the session, it will not exist by the time anybody asks about it. That protects a seeker from having their worst hour retained as evidence. It also means a mentor accused of something has no transcript to clear their name with. We think the first outweighs the second, and we would rather say so than let you discover it.