Who controls the information

When a church uses Grained, the church is the data controller for its own records — its children, its registers, its parents. Grained is the processor: we hold and protect that information and act on the church’s instructions, and we do not decide what to do with it. If you are a parent and you want to see, correct or remove your child’s record, your church is the right first stop, and they can do all three.

When a family uses Grained at home with no church, there is no church in the chain, so Grained is the controller for that family’s account. Family accounts are in a small invited pilot at the moment and are not open to the public.

What we collect

• Your account: name, email address, and a password we never see in readable form.
• Your church: its name, address, phone number and logo, as an administrator enters them.
• Children: the name a church enters, date of birth, class group, attendance, which lessons they have completed, memory verses learned and badges awarded.
• Parents and teachers: name and email, so accounts can be linked and invitations sent.
• Operational records: when an invitation was sent, when someone signed in, and error logs that help us fix faults.

A family account asks for less: a name to show — a first name or a nickname is enough — and a date of birth so we send the right lessons and move a child up as they grow. We do not ask a family for a surname, an address, a school or a photograph.

What we do not collect

• No card details. Grained does not store card numbers. When online payments arrive they will be handled by a payment provider, and the card never reaches our servers.
• No advertising, ever. We do not sell, rent or share personal information with advertisers, data brokers or anyone else for marketing, and there are no advertising trackers in the app.
• No profiling of children. Nothing in Grained builds a behavioural profile or makes an automated decision about a child.
• No location tracking.

Cookies and analytics

This marketing site uses Google Analytics to see which pages help churches find us, and it loads only after you press Accept. Until you do, no analytics script is fetched and no analytics cookie is set. Decline and nothing loads at all.

Inside the app, analytics is behind the same consent question and is built to carry no identifiers: the address of the page is stripped before it is sent, so record identifiers, invitation and password-reset tokens and church names are removed rather than reported. Your sign-in is held as a token in your own browser, not as a tracking cookie.

Who we share it with

Nobody, beyond the small number of technical suppliers it takes to run a service at all — hosting, and the delivery of the emails Grained sends you. They act on our instructions and only for the job we use them for; none of them may use your information for anything of their own, and we never sell or rent it to anyone.

We do not share a church’s records with other churches, and one church can never see another’s data. If you would like to know exactly which suppliers we use, write to contact@grained.org and we will tell you.

How long we keep it

A church’s records are kept for as long as the church uses Grained. A church administrator can delete a child, a teacher, a class or an event at any time; deleting a child removes their progress, attendance and badges with them. If a church leaves Grained, we delete its data on request. A family can ask us to close their account, and the account and everything in it is deleted rather than hidden.

Your rights

Under the GDPR you can ask for a copy of the information we hold about you, have it corrected, have it deleted, object to how it is used, or ask for it in a portable form. Write to contact@grained.org and we will answer within one month. If you are a parent asking about a child in a church, ask the church first — they hold the record and can act immediately.

If you are not satisfied with how we have handled it, you can complain to the Irish Data Protection Commission at dataprotection.ie.

Changes

If we change how any of this works we will update this page and date it. Anything that materially changes what happens to children’s information, we will tell churches about directly rather than quietly editing a page.

Last updated 24 September 2026.