Privacy
TheShia has no accounts, no advertising, and no trackers, and the site itself sets no cookies — prayer times, the calendar and the library ask nothing of you and store nothing about you. One tool is different. The AI Scholar, our experimental question service, cannot work without keeping a little information, including one anonymous cookie. Exactly what it keeps is set out below.
Prayer-time locations are computed on your device and stored only in your browser. If you use the location button, your position never leaves your device.
We use Cloudflare Web Analytics, a cookieless service that counts page views without identifying visitors.
The AI Scholar (beta)
The AI Scholar at theshia.org/scholar is an experiment that answers questions from Ayatollah al-Sistani's published writings. Unlike the rest of this site, it cannot do that without keeping some information. This is all of it, in plain words.
What it keeps
- A random, anonymous ID. Our server generates it and it is kept in this browser and in one cookie. It is not tied to a name, an email address or an account, because there are none. It exists so the tool knows which answer your feedback belongs to, and so your two questions a day can be counted.
- Your questions, and the answers produced for them, stored against that random ID with the date and the language you asked in.
- Your settings — the answer format you prefer, and a tester code if you have entered one — kept in this browser only. Your past questions are kept here too, so the Scholar page can show you a list of them; that list never leaves this device, and you can remove a single question or clear the whole list at any time.
- Your network address (IP), used only as a brake against bursts of automated abuse — not to count your daily questions, which are counted per browser. It is held as a short-lived counter that deletes itself within about two days, in a separate store, and it is never saved next to your questions.
Who else sees it
To write an answer, your question and the passages found for it are sent to Anthropic, the company behind the Claude AI model the Scholar uses. They process it to produce the answer text. Your anonymous ID is not sent with it — it never leaves our servers.
When you ask a question, Cloudflare Turnstile runs a quick check that you are a person and not an automated script.
Everything else stays in a Cloudflare database on TheShia's own account. It is never sold, never shared for advertising, and never used to build a profile of you.
What is never collected
No account. No name, email address or phone number. No advertising trackers, and nothing that follows you to other websites.
Your history lives with this browser
Because there is no account, your history belongs to this browser and nothing else. You will not see it on another device or in a private window. If you clear your browser's cookies and site data, the link between you and it is broken permanently — we cannot restore it, and we cannot tell that it was ever yours.
Clearing it
You can clear your history from the Scholar page whenever you like.
What clearing does, exactly: the answers stored for you are deleted outright, and your anonymous ID is removed from the question log and from every judgement you sent. Two small counters that hold your daily question count are not touched — they expire on their own within a day or two and contain none of your question text.
One thing we would rather say plainly than let you assume: if you have already told us an answer was right or wrong, that judgement is kept. Checking the tool's accuracy is the entire purpose of this beta, and those replies are what it learns from. Clearing your history does not withdraw a judgement you already sent — but it is no longer linked to you.
How long it is kept
Questions you judged are kept indefinitely, because they are what the tool's accuracy is measured against — kept without your ID once you clear. Questions you never judged are deleted automatically after six months.
Counting clicks from our other apps
Some of our own apps link here. When you follow one of those links we add 1 to a counter, so we can see whether the link is useful. We do not create any record of you.
The four things a counter holds
- Which app sent you — for example, Haraka.
- Which page on this site you arrived at.
- The date, in UTC — the day only, never a time.
- A country, but only if it is one of nine we count by name (United Kingdom, Iran, Iraq, United States, Canada, Australia, Pakistan, India, United Arab Emirates). Every other country is stored as "XX", together with visits where no country was available. This happens as the counter is written, so a rarer country is never stored at all.
What is never recorded
No IP address, no identifier, no cookie, no session, no browser or device details, no referring page, and no time more precise than the day. There is no row for a single visit anywhere in this counting — only totals. The store has no column such a detail could go in, so this is a property of how it is built, not a promise we remember to keep.
How long the counts are kept
Daily counts are kept for thirteen months. After that they are combined into monthly totals and the daily rows stop existing, so the long-term trend remains while the finer detail does not.
The link you land on also carries utm_source, utm_medium and utm_campaign in its address. These are read by our cookieless site analytics so the same click can be counted a second, independent way — two measurements that disagree tell us something; one nobody can check does not.