ByWay Privacy Policy

How to read this policy

ByWay is operated by ByWayApp LLC, a Virginia limited liability company based in Arlington, Virginia. This policy applies to bywayapp.co, the ByWay responsive web application, and related services.

ByWay has two kinds of users and we hold different information about each. Rather than publish two policies that mostly repeat each other, we have written one. Most of it applies to everyone. Where a section applies to only one group, it is labeled.

The short version

Not a substitute for the full policy, but these are the commitments that matter most, and they are the same for everyone.

• We do not sell your personal data, and we do not share it with data brokers.
• We do not place advertising or third-party analytics trackers on any page you see after you log in.
• We do not record sessions, and no recording or transcription tool is permitted in a session by anyone.
• We do not use anything about sessions, matching preferences, or guide practice for advertising, and we do not use it to train artificial intelligence models.
• Seekers: your faith tradition and preferences are used to match you with a guide. That is what they are for, and that is all we use them for.
• Guides: the parts of your profile you choose to publish are public. Your vetting records, tax information, and payout details are not, and no seeker ever sees them.
• You can close your account at any time. Records we are legally required to keep are listed in Section 14.
• ByWay is not a healthcare provider, and spiritual direction on ByWay is not medical or mental health treatment.
• Conversations between a seeker and a guide are confidential as a matter of our policy and our contracts. They are not protected by legal privilege. Section 2 scopes this for sponsored seats, and Section 11 explains what it means.

1. Who we are and what this policy covers

Applies to everyone

ByWay is operated by ByWayApp LLC. We connect people seeking spiritual direction with independent spiritual directors, whom we call guides, and we support sessions between them over video.

This policy explains what personal data we collect, why, who we share it with, how long we keep it, and what rights you have. It covers our website and our web application.

It does not cover companies we do not control, and it does not cover what a guide does with information you share with them directly. Guides are independent professionals bound by a separate written agreement with us, described in Section 9.

2. What ByWay is not

Applies to everyone

This section is here because it changes how you should read everything else.

This section describes ByWay’s commercial service. Where sessions are provided under a contract with a government agency or another sponsoring institution, that contract and the sponsoring agency’s own requirements govern, and where they are more protective than this policy, they control. We will tell you before you use a sponsored seat if anything works differently for you.

• ByWay is not a healthcare provider. We do not diagnose or treat any physical or mental health condition. Spiritual direction is not psychotherapy, counseling, or medical care.
• ByWay is not a crisis service. If you are in immediate danger or thinking about harming yourself, call or text 988 in the United States, or call 911.
• ByWay is not a chaplaincy. Communications with a military chaplain carry a legal privilege under Military Rule of Evidence 503. Communications with an independent guide on ByWay do not automatically carry that privilege or any clergy-penitent privilege, even when the guide is ordained.
• ByWay does not employ guides, does not supervise the content of direction, and does not certify that any guide is suitable for any particular person. We vet guides against published criteria, which is a different thing, and Section 4 describes what that involves.

3. Personal data we collect from seekers

Seekers

Categories marked with an asterisk are treated as sensitive under United States state privacy laws and are subject to Section 5.

4. Personal data we collect from guides

Guides

Becoming a guide on ByWay means being vetted, being payable, and being findable. Those three things drive almost everything we hold about you.

5. Sensitive data and your consent

Applies to everyone

Some of what you tell us is sensitive under United States state privacy laws, including the Virginia Consumer Data Protection Act and the California Consumer Privacy Act, and is a special category under the European General Data Protection Regulation. For ByWay this includes information revealing religious or philosophical beliefs, and any information revealing something about physical or mental health.

We ask for your affirmative consent before collecting this information and we tell you at the point of collection what we will do with it. Optional fields are labeled optional. Leaving them blank will not prevent you from using the platform, though for seekers it may produce weaker matches and for guides it may mean fewer seekers find you.

We also want to be direct about something less obvious. For a seeker, being matched with a guide who specializes in a particular tradition or a particular kind of struggle can itself reveal sensitive information, even if nothing was written down. We treat the match itself as sensitive data for that reason, and it is covered by Section 7.

For guides, a public profile is a deliberate disclosure of religious belief and professional identity. That disclosure is yours to make and yours to withdraw. You control your profile and can unpublish it at any time.

We do not use sensitive data to infer characteristics about you for any purpose other than matching, and we do not process it for profiling that produces legal or similarly significant effects.

6. What we do with your data

Applies to everyone

• Operate the platform: create accounts, match seekers with guides, schedule and host sessions, take payment from seekers, and pay guides.
• Vet and maintain the guide network: verify credentials, run background checks, and review concerns that are raised.
• Communicate with you: confirmations and reminders, support replies, and service announcements. Marketing email is separate and you can opt out at any time without affecting your account.
• Improve the platform: understand what works, fix problems, and improve matching. This is done on aggregated data wherever technically possible.
• Keep the platform safe: detect fraud, abuse, and security incidents, and enforce our Terms and Conditions.
• Meet legal obligations: tax and financial records, guide tax reporting, lawful legal process, and record-keeping required by institutional and government contracts.

7. What we never do

Applies to everyone

These are commitments, not aspirations. They are enforced in our systems and in our contracts.

• We do not sell your personal data. We do not exchange it for money or anything else of value, and we do not provide it to data brokers.
• We do not put advertising or third-party analytics trackers behind the login. No advertising pixel, tag, or software development kit runs on any authenticated page. Advertising technology is confined to our public marketing site.
• We do not record sessions, and neither may anyone else. We do not capture, store, or transcribe session audio or video. Guides are contractually prohibited from recording and from admitting any transcription or artificial intelligence notetaking tool into a session.
• We do not use your data for advertising. Matching preferences, intake responses, session history, guide practice data, and free text are never used to target advertising to anyone, on our platform or anywhere else.
• We do not use your data to train artificial intelligence models. Your content is not used to train, fine-tune, or evaluate any general purpose model, ours or a third party’s.
• We do not share seeker data with sponsors beyond Section 18. If an employer, unit, or agency pays for a seeker’s sessions, they do not learn what was discussed or with whom.
• We do not disclose a guide’s vetting file, payout details, or tax information to seekers. Ever, and regardless of who asks.

8. Who we share data with

Applies to everyone

Our payment processor

Our payment processor is Stripe. When you provide personal data in connection with ByWay, Stripe receives that personal data and processes it in accordance with Stripe’s Privacy Policy.

9. What guides can see, and what they may do with it

Applies to everyone

A guide can see the preferences a seeker submitted for matching, anything the seeker writes to them, and the schedule and history of their own sessions with that seeker. A guide cannot see a seeker’s payment details, a seeker’s activity with other guides, or account credentials.

Guides are bound by the Guide Data Addendum. Under it a guide must keep what a seeker shares confidential, must not use it for any purpose other than providing direction, must not disclose it except where the law requires, must not put it into any third-party artificial intelligence tool, and must delete or return it when their relationship with ByWay ends.

10. Feedback and quality review

Applies to everyone

Seekers can give feedback about a guide and can raise a concern with us directly. We use that to maintain quality and safety.

If we open a review of a guide, we tell the guide what the concern is and give them a chance to respond. We do not disclose the identity of a seeker who raised a concern where doing so would put them at risk, and we will tell the guide when we are withholding it and why.

11. Confidentiality and its limits

Applies to everyone

We take confidentiality seriously and we build for it. We also owe you an accurate account of where it ends.

• Confidentiality on ByWay comes from our policy and our contracts, and is not a legal privilege. A court can compel disclosure of information that a privilege would have protected. Where sessions are provided under a sponsoring contract, Section 2 governs instead.
• Guides may be mandatory reporters under the law of their jurisdiction, most commonly for suspected abuse or neglect of a child or a vulnerable adult.
• If we believe there is a serious and imminent risk of harm to any person, we may disclose what is necessary to prevent it.
• We may disclose personal data in response to a subpoena, court order, or other lawful legal process. Where we are permitted to notify you first, we will.

Our Confidentiality Statement explains this in plainer language, and everyone is asked to read it before a first session.

12. Cookies and tracking

Applies to everyone

Our public marketing site uses cookies. Some are strictly necessary and some are used for analytics and advertising so we can understand how people find ByWay. You can control the non-necessary ones through the cookie manager in our site footer, and your choice is remembered.

The application itself, meaning everything after you log in, carries no advertising or third-party analytics cookies, tags, or software development kits. Nothing about matching, sessions, or activity inside the application is visible to any advertising or analytics partner.

Most browsers do not have a functioning Do Not Track standard, so we do not respond to Do Not Track signals. We do honor Global Privacy Control signals where applicable law requires it.

13. Security

Applies to everyone

We protect personal data with administrative, technical, and physical safeguards appropriate to its sensitivity. Data is encrypted in transit and at rest. Access to seeker and guide data by our own staff is limited to those who need it, is logged, and is reviewed. We maintain a written information security program and we test it.

No system is perfectly secure and we will not tell you otherwise. If a breach affects your personal data we will notify you and the relevant authorities as the law requires.

14. How long we keep data

Applies to everyone

We keep personal data only as long as we need it, on the schedule below. Deletion is automated, not manual.

15. Your rights and how to use them

Applies to everyone

Depending on where you live you may have the right to confirm whether we process your personal data, to access a copy, to correct it, to delete it, to obtain it in a portable format, to opt out of targeted advertising, sale, or profiling, and to limit our use of sensitive data. We honor these rights for everyone in the United States regardless of state, because maintaining different tiers of privacy for different people is not consistent with how we want to run this platform.

You can close your account at any time. Seekers can delete their personal data from account settings. Guides can unpublish a profile immediately and close an account, but the records listed in Section 14 as legally or contractually required are kept for the stated period, in a restricted state, and used for no other purpose.

For anything else, email tom@bywayapp.co with the subject line Data Rights Request. We will verify who you are before we act and respond within the time the law allows. We will not charge you and we will not treat you differently for asking.

If we decline you may appeal by replying with the word Appeal in the subject line. If we deny the appeal you may contact the attorney general of your state. You may authorize an agent to act for you, with written proof.

16. Consumer health data

Seekers

Some of what a seeker shares may qualify as consumer health data under Washington’s My Health My Data Act and similar laws in Nevada and Connecticut. Our Consumer Health Data Privacy Policy is published as a separate page with its own link on our homepage. Where that policy is more protective than this one, it controls.

17. Age

Applies to everyone

ByWay is for adults. You must be 18 or older to create an account of any kind. We do not knowingly collect personal data from anyone under 18. If we learn that we have, we will delete it. If you believe a minor has provided us with personal data, contact us and we will act promptly.

18. Sponsored and organizational accounts

Seekers

Sessions may be paid for by an employer, ministry, diocese, nonprofit, or government agency. When that happens the sponsor receives only what it needs for eligibility and billing: confirmation that you are an eligible participant, the number of sessions used, and the amount owed.

A sponsor never receives the identity of your guide, your matching preferences, anything you wrote, or anything about what you discussed. If a sponsor asks for that information we will refuse. Where reporting is required by contract it is aggregated across enough participants that no individual can be identified.

If your seat is funded under a government contract, additional legal requirements may apply. We will tell you before you use a sponsored seat if anything works differently for you.

19. Payment, tax, and independent status

Guides

Guides are independent contractors, not employees. You set your own rates and availability within the platform and you decide which seekers you accept.

Payments run through Stripe. Stripe collects and holds your bank and identity verification details directly under its own terms, and we do not store your bank account information. We hold what we need to pay you and to meet our tax reporting obligations, which for United States guides means issuing the required annual tax forms and reporting to tax authorities.

20. Where your data is held

Applies to everyone

ByWay is operated from the United States and your data is stored and processed here. If you use ByWay from outside the United States you are sending your data to the United States, where privacy law differs from the law where you live.

21. Changes to this policy

Applies to everyone

We will update this policy from time to time. If a change is material we will tell you by email and by notice in the application before it takes effect. We keep prior versions available so you can see what changed and when.

22. Contact us

Applies to everyone

Questions about this policy, or about how we handle your data, can go to our support address.

Email tom@bywayapp.co. Write to ByWayApp LLC, Arlington, Virginia.