Privacy Statement

Effective as of August 30, 2026

Engage Lostness is operated by the Innovation Team of the International Mission Board (IMB). This statement explains what we collect, why, and what you can ask us to do about it. It should be read alongside our Terms of Use.

Unlike a public chatbot, Engage Lostness is not anonymous. You sign in to use it, and your practice conversations are saved against your account so you can look back at them. Please read the sections below before you start.

Information we collect and how we use it

Your Google account identity — your email address, your name, and Google's account identifier, received when you sign in. We use these to know whose sessions are whose and to show you your own history. We request only the openid, email, and profile scopes; we cannot see your Gmail, Drive, Calendar, or contacts.
Your practice conversations — everything you type to a character, and everything the character replies, is stored so the coaching can be produced and so you can revisit the session later.
Your coaching debriefs — the AI-generated feedback on each conversation, stored with the session it belongs to.
Session settings — which worldview, region, disposition, and language you chose, and when the session started and ended.
Ratings — each finished conversation is rated 1–5 by the AI on three observable things (listening, meeting the objection, and fit to the person) so you can see progress over time. They describe the conversation, not you; they are never added into an overall score; and they are not used to evaluate anyone. The Terms of Use say more.

We use this to run the service, show you your own history, and understand in aggregate which worldviews are being practiced so we know where to improve the material.

We may also review conversations, with identifying details removed, to improve Engage Lostness and to check that the characters and the coaching are behaving appropriately — that a character has not drifted into caricature, produced something harmful, or broken the rules it is given, and that the coaching is sound. This is quality assurance on our own prompts, and it is the main way those faults get found and fixed. Reviews are carried out by the Innovation Team, and identifying details are removed before a conversation is read.

Reviewing is not the same as training: we do not use your conversations to train AI models, and we ask our providers not to either (see below).

Please do not type sensitive real-world details into a practice conversation. Names, locations, or identifying details of workers, contacts, or communities in sensitive or restricted-access settings should never be entered here — the text leaves our server to be processed by an AI provider, and it is stored against your account. Practice with the fictional character you are given.

Who can see your sessions

Your conversations and debriefs are yours. Every request for session data is scoped to the signed-in account, so another user cannot retrieve your sessions.

There is one exception, and it is deliberate: a leader assigned to you. An administrator can designate a leader and assign specific learners to them for coaching. A leader can see the progress ratings and past coaching debriefs of the learners assigned to them — and no one else's. Leaders do not get the administrative side of the site, and every time a leader opens a learner's progress it is recorded in our audit log, naming who looked at whose. If you want to know whether a leader is assigned to you, ask us via imb.org/contact-us.

A small number of Innovation Team administrators can access the underlying database in the course of operating and debugging the service, and conversations may be reviewed in anonymized form for quality and safety, as described above.

Cookies

We use two cookies, both strictly necessary for the service to work. We do not use advertising cookies, and we do not use analytics of any kind.

el_user — set when you sign in, to keep you signed in for up to seven days. Signing out ends it immediately, on our side as well as yours: the session is recorded as revoked on the server, so a copy of the cookie stops working rather than merely disappearing from your browser.
el_state — a short-lived (ten minute) value used during sign-in to protect against cross-site request forgery. It is cleared as soon as sign-in completes.

Third-party services

To provide Engage Lostness, a limited amount of data is processed by others:

AI service providers. Your messages and the resulting transcripts are processed by AI language models operated by third-party providers. We ask with every request that your data not be retained or used for training. Where a model is not already hosted by a first-party Western provider, we restrict inference to a fixed whitelist of Western-hosted providers, so prompts never transit a provider outside that list.
Google. Used for sign-in only. We do not use Google Analytics or any other Google measurement product on this site.
Scripture text. When a debrief cites a passage, we request that passage from an IMB-operated Scripture service so the quotation is verbatim rather than paraphrased by a model. We send only the Bible reference — never your conversation or your identity.

Sharing of information

We will not sell or rent your personal information to other organizations. We may disclose information to service providers who help us operate Engage Lostness (as described above), and where required to comply with the law, respond to lawful requests, or protect the rights, safety, and security of users and the public.

How long we keep it

Practice sessions are kept so you can see your progress over time, and are retained until you ask us to delete them or your account is removed. We may remove sessions that are old and unused as part of routine maintenance; if we adopt a fixed retention period we will state it here first.

Security

We take reasonable measures to protect the information in our care: the site is served only over HTTPS, sign-in sessions are short-lived and revocable, the application runs under a dedicated unprivileged account, and access to the database is limited. However, no method of transmission or storage is completely secure, and we cannot guarantee absolute security.

Protection of children

Engage Lostness is intended for adults training for ministry and is not directed to children under 13. In keeping with the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), we do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 13. If you believe a child has provided us personal information, please tell us via imb.org/contact-us and we will delete it.

Your rights and choices

Depending on where you live, you may have the right to access, correct, delete, restrict, or port your personal data, to object to certain processing, and to withdraw consent without affecting processing already carried out. In practice:

You can sign out at any time, which immediately revokes that session.
You can choose what you type. Nothing obliges you to enter real details in a practice conversation.
To delete your sessions or your account data, ask us and we will do it. We are candid that self-service deletion is not built into the interface yet; until it is, a request through imb.org/contact-us is the way to exercise this, and we will confirm when it is done.

You also have the right to lodge a complaint with your local data-protection authority.

Changes to this statement

We may update this Privacy Statement from time to time. When we do, we will revise the "effective as of" date above. Your continued use of Engage Lostness after a change means you accept the updated statement.

Contact

Questions about this statement, or a request to access or delete your data, go to the Innovation Team, International Mission Board, via imb.org/contact-us.