Privacy

The short version

Seph runs its own model on its own server. Your conversations are not sent to OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, or any other model provider, because there is no third-party model involved — the weights are ours and they run on our hardware. What follows is the detail, including the two places where data genuinely does leave.

What is stored

• Your account — email address, and a hashed password or a Google account identifier if you signed in that way. Sessions are stored so you stay logged in.
• Your conversations — the messages you send and the replies Seph generates, so you can come back to them. Also the tool calls made while answering (a search query, a verse reference) and their results, because a reply is not reconstructible without them.
• Files you attach — stored in our own object storage, not a third-party service.
• Feedback you submit — when you rate a reply, we store the rating, any note you write, which model produced it, and a copy of the reply text. See the retention note below, which is the one thing here that may surprise you.

What we do not do

• No advertising, and no selling or sharing of your data.
• No third-party analytics or tracking scripts.
• No fonts, scripts, or stylesheets loaded from third-party CDNs — everything the page needs is served from this domain, so simply loading Seph does not announce you to anyone else.

Where data does leave the server

Two places, stated plainly rather than buried:

• Web search. When Seph searches the web, it goes through our own SearXNG instance, which queries public search engines on our behalf. Your IP address and your account are never passed on — those engines see our server, not you. But the text of the search query does reach them. The query is derived from your message, so treat anything you ask Seph to look up as something a search engine will see.
• Sign-in with Google, if you choose it. That is a direct exchange between you and Google, subject to their privacy policy.

Deletion, and one thing it does not cover

You can delete any conversation or individual message, and it is removed from the database rather than flagged as hidden. Deleting your account removes your account, sessions, conversations, messages, and feedback.

The exception: feedback you have already submitted is not deleted when you delete the conversation it came from. Feedback stores its own copy of the reply text, precisely so it stays meaningful once the conversation is gone — it is the record used to find out where the model goes wrong. If you want feedback removed without deleting your account, email us and we will remove it.

Security

Traffic is served over HTTPS. Passwords are hashed, never stored in readable form. The model and search services are not reachable from the internet at all — only the web app can talk to them, over a private network.

We should be honest about scale: this is a small, self-hosted service, not a company with a security team. It is built carefully, but it is not the place for information you could not afford to have exposed.

Who holds this data

Seph is operated by Sephar Innovations, which is responsible for the data described above. Nigerian law governs how it is handled — see Terms of use.

Contact

Questions, or a request to see or delete your data: support@sephar.dev.