Privacy Practices
How we collect, use, and safeguard personal information entrusted to Yates Baptist Church—online and in person.
📝 Simplified Summary
This page explains how we care for your privacy online. We collect a small amount of information—like your name, email, or IP address—only when you choose to share it.
If you fill out a form, send a prayer request, or log in as a church staff member, we may keep that info to respond to you or keep the site secure. We do not sell your information or share it with others.
We use cookies and website tools to understand how people use our site. These tools don’t track who you are, just how the site is working. If you are under 13, we do not collect your information.
You can ask us what data we have about you. You can also ask us to fix or delete it. Email info@yateschurch.org or call (919) 489‑2309.
This simplified summary is part of our accessibility commitment for higher‑reading‑level policies.
1) Scope
This policy covers information collected through our websites, forms, giving platforms, event registrations, pastoral communications, and other contact interfaces—whether entered online or in person and later recorded into our systems.
2) What We Collect
- Identifiers
- Names, addresses, emails, phone numbers, household relationships.
- Engagement
- Event registrations, volunteer signups, giving records (amount, date, fund). We do not store full payment card numbers on our servers.
- Technical
- IP address, device/browser type, pages visited (aggregated), cookies where consented.
- reCAPTCHA & Bot Detection Data
- When you submit a form on our site (e.g., contact, login, prayer request, or other data submission forms), we use Google reCAPTCHA v3 to help protect against abuse. As part of that:
- We transmit your token and IP to Google’s reCAPTCHA service for verification.
- Google may use that data (token, IP, user agent, browser signals) to assess whether the request is legitimate or suspicious.
- We log limited metadata about the validation event (score, action name, timestamp, and IP) for debugging, monitoring, and spam defense purposes.
- No personal identifiers (name, email, message content) are shared with Google or included in our reCAPTCHA logs.
- Media
- Worship livestream and campus photography (Photo & Media Policy).
3) How We Use Data
- To respond to your requests or communications (ministries, events, support, pastoral care).
- To process donations and generate giving statements via secure third‑party processors.
- To manage volunteers, facilities, safety, and internal operations.
- To improve website usability, accessibility, and performance—based on aggregated analytics.
- To help defend the site from spam, automated abuse, and malicious activity using reCAPTCHA validation scores.
5) Security
We use HTTPS to encrypt data in transit, and we limit access to systems based on roles and permissions. reCAPTCHA data is stored separately and in minimal form (score, action, timestamp, IP). Our donating systems do not store full card numbers; they rely on PCI‑compliant third‑party platforms.
6) Children & Youth
We do not knowingly collect information from children under age 13 without parental consent. Program-related communication is typically directed to parents/guardians unless specifically arranged. Media use is handled under the Youth Media & Communications policy.
7) Your Rights & Requests
- Manage your contact preferences through church communications or by unsubscribing via footer links.
- Opt out of non‑essential email communications anytime.
- For form submissions processed via reCAPTCHA, you may request that your activity metadata (logs we store) be anonymized or deleted. To request deletion, contact us at info@yateschurch.org.
- Request access to, correction of, or deletion of your personal data: email info@yateschurch.org or call (919) 489‑2309.
8) Retention
We retain form submission activity logs for site security (including reCAPTCHA scores) for a limited time, currently up to 200 entries, then rotate older entries out. Personal data is retained only as long as needed for ministry, legal, or accounting purposes. See our Records Retention policy for more detail.
9) Changes to This Policy
We may update this Privacy Policy occasionally. The version displayed here is the current one. We will highlight material changes when possible.
10) Contact
Questions, requests, or concerns? Email info@yateschurch.org or call (919) 489‑2309.