Privacy policy

Data we hold

Find A Minyan is an introduction agency. It exists so that travellers who will be in the same place at the same time can find each other and arrange a minyan between themselves. Everything we hold is in service of that, and there is no other business here — nothing is sold, nothing is rented, and there is no advertising on the site or in any communications.

Your account

Your email address, your telephone number if you gave one, and whether we have confirmed each of them. Your password is held only as a modern one-way hash — we cannot read it, and neither can anybody who took a copy of the database. If you use two-factor authentication, a passkey or a social login, we hold what is needed to check those and nothing more. We hold the settings you chose: how dates are shown to you, which distance the "who's near me" selector starts at, whether you would rather hear from us by email or text.

We hold this because you asked us to open an account, and we cannot run one without it.

Your trips

Where you will be and when, how many men over bar mitzvah are with you, and any contact details you chose to put on the trip itself. Locations are held to postcode level (for the UK, similar level for non-UK), deliberately: that is close enough for somebody to work out whether they want to make a minyan with you, but not specific enough to knock on your door.

What you write to other members

Conversations happen here, on the site, so that neither side has to reveal their contact details. That means we store the messages you send. Nobody reads it as a matter of course, but a message that is reported for abuse will be read by an administrator.

What you send us

Anything you submit through the contact page — your name, your email address and your message. If you are reporting a problem with the site, the page also attaches the address of the page you were on, what your browser says about itself, your screen size and whether you were signed in. All four are shown to you before you send them; none of it is collected behind your back.

A record of changes

Every change to a listing, an account or a venue is recorded — what changed, when, and who did it. This is how a question about what happened to somebody's listing can be answered honestly rather than guessed at, and how an administrator's own actions can be checked. It is kept for six months before being deleted.

What is published for anyone to see

A trip listing is public. Anybody visiting Browse, signed in or not, can see:

• the line you wrote in "Where you'll be"
• your dates
• how many men over bar mitzvah are with you
• a marker at postcode level, not at your door
• whether you have said a minyan is already arranged
• the Rov's name and description, if you entered one

Your contact details are not on that list, and never leave our server. Your name, your email address, your telephone number and the contact details on the trip are not hidden behind a login — they are not sent to a browser at all, so there is nothing in the page to find whoever is looking. Somebody who writes in and asks us for them gets the same answer.

Shuls and holiday camps are maintained by us, and their markers carries the full address and whatever contact details are on file. We entered those knowing they would be public, which is the whole point of listing a shul or a camp.

A Rov travelling with a party

If a Rov is travelling with a party, whoever added that trip can say so and give his name, a short description and his mobile number. On Browse a visitor can narrow the map to trips that have a Rov, and his name and description appear on that trip's marker.

His number is never shown and never leaves our server. There is no Rov directory, no Rov page and no endpoint that returns his number to a browser. What his marker carries instead is a Contact Rov button: a visitor types their question and their own mobile number, and we text both to him. If he wants to answer, he rings or texts them back — and if he does not, he retains his privacy.

The Rov's name and description are entered by the member who adds the trip, on the understanding that the Rov has agreed to be named.

Removing them takes one of two forms. The member who entered the trip can edit it and turn off "a Rov is in the party", which clears his name, description and number as part of the ordinary save. Or the Rov himself can contact us, and an administrator will clear him from every trip on which he appears. He does not need to tell us which member listed him, or where.

Accounts we create for people who ring us

Not everybody who wants a minyan is online. Some of the people this site is for do not have internet access at all, so there is a telephone and text service: somebody rings, gives their details and the trip they are taking, and a member of the site team enters it for them.

That creates an account, and you should know it does. The account is keyed on the mobile number given on the call. It holds that number, the trip entered against it, and an email address we invent from the number itself on a domain that does not carry mail — so nothing can ever be sent to it — purely because the software needs every account to have one. It does not have a password and cannot be used to sign in, by the caller or by anybody else. The only messages it ever receives are texts about the trip it holds.

We create it because the caller asked us to list them, which is the same reason anybody else's account exists. It is not created from a list, and never for somebody who has not rung.

To have it removed, ring the same number or contact us and say so. We remove the trip and empty the account, exactly as described under your rights below.

Messages we send you

The annual "We're live again this year" announcement

Once a year, at the start of the season, we send a message saying the site is open again for the summer. You can disable this notification under the notification preferences on your account.

Messages about your own trip

These cannot be disabled, as it would defeat the entire point of the site.

• Somebody writing to you about your trip.
• A minyan proposed near you.
• The minyan you joined reaching ten.
• The minyan you joined dropping below ten.
• The minyan you joined being cancelled.
• A code to confirm your mobile number when you add or change it.

If you donate

Donating is optional and nothing on the site depends on it. If you do, the payment is taken by Stripe on Stripe's own page — you leave this site to make it, and your card number, your name and your billing address are typed into Stripe and never reach us. We have no way of seeing them and we do not hold them.

What we keep is the amount, the date, Stripe's reference for the payment, and — if you were signed in when you gave — which account it came from. That last one exists for one purpose: so that we do not ask you again in the same year. A donation made while signed out is not connected to anybody.

We are asked to keep a record of money that has changed hands, so a donation stays on file even if you later delete your account. By then there is nothing on it that names you: it is an amount and a date against an account that has been emptied. Stripe holds its own record under its own privacy policy, and it is Stripe that emails you a receipt.

Who else sees the data

We do not sell, rent or share your details with anybody for their own purposes. A short list of suppliers see parts of it in order to do a job for us:

• An email provider and a text-message provider, who need the address or mobile number in order to deliver a message, and the message contents
• Address lookup services — postcodes.io for UK postcodes and OpenStreetMap's Nominatim for everywhere else — which see the address you type into the trip form while it is being looked up
• A routing service, which is given pairs of coordinates in order to work out the driving time between two places. It is given latitude/longitude coordinates, never people
• Stripe, if you choose to donate, who take the payment on their own page and so are given whatever you type into it — your card details, your name and your billing address. We never see those ourselves
• The company that hosts the site and its database could, in theory see the data. However, as part of our privacy agreement with them, they are obliged not to look in the database unless we explicitly request them to do so.

We will hand something over if the law requires it. No-one else ever sees it.

Cookies

One cookie, to keep you signed in, plus the ones that make a form submission safe. There is no analytics, no advertising network and no third-party script watching what you read — which is also why there is no cookie banner asking you to agree to any of it.

How long we keep things

• Your account and your trips, for as long as you have an account. A past trip is kept as your own record of where you have been; delete it and it goes from the map immediately
• Conversations, for as long as both members have accounts
• The record of changes, for six months
• The record of a donation, indefinitely — money that has changed hands has to be accountable for. It is an amount, a date and Stripe's reference, and never anything about a card
• Driving times between places, for the season they were worked out in, then purged. They are about places rather than people
• Codes we text you to confirm a mobile number, minutes. They expire and are then deleted
• Passwords carried over from the old site, twelve months from the changeover. After that the old value is cleared and the next sign-in goes through a password reset

Your rights, and how to use them

Two of them you can exercise yourself, immediately, without asking anybody:

• A copy of everything we hold about you. Your data, on your account, downloads the lot as a single file
• Deletion. The same page allows you to remove your account. It tells you plainly what goes and what stays before you confirm — the messages you have already sent stay in the other person's conversation, with your name off them, because deleting half a thread would leave somebody with a conversation that made no sense

You can correct anything we hold from your profile and the edit form on each trip. For anything else — objecting to how we use something, asking us to restrict it, or a question this page has not answered — contact us and we will answer within a month.

If you are not satisfied with how we have handled it, you can complain to the Information Commissioner's Office at ico.org.uk. We would rather you told us first, but you are not obliged to.