Privacy Policy

Who we are

Mass Times Near Me (masstimesnearme.org) is a free service of The Catholic Connect Foundation, a Texas nonprofit corporation recognised as tax-exempt under section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code. Parish listings and schedules come from Catholic Connect and are used with permission from Catholic Connect Inc.

For privacy questions, or to exercise any right described below, email [email protected]. We will provide a postal address on request.

What we collect

Deliberately very little. There is no account to create and nothing to log in to.

• Your precise location, only if you allow it. If you tap “Find Mass near me” your browser asks your permission first. The coordinates are sent to our server so we can look up nearby parishes, and a copy is kept on your own device so the map opens in the right place next time. We also keep a copy on our own servers, as part of the first-party analytics described below.
• What you type in the search box, and which parishes you view. A city, state or ZIP code is sent to a geocoding service to turn it into a point on the map. We also keep a record, on our own servers, of what you searched for and which parishes, Mass times, or other pages you looked at — see “Our own first-party analytics” below.
• Your approximate area. Like most websites, we can tell roughly where a visit came from — typically the country, and sometimes the region or city — from the network address of the request. This is not the precise location described above, it is not derived from your device's GPS, and it is what tells us which languages and which parts of the world this service is actually used in.
• Ordinary technical information. Like every website, our host records the usual server log data — IP address, browser type, the page requested, and the time. This is used to keep the service running and secure, and (as described below) some of it also feeds our own first-party analytics.
• Your preferences. Your day/night map choice and last map position are stored in your browser's local storage. They never leave your device except as described above, and clearing your browser data removes them.

What we do not do

• We do not sell or rent your personal information.
• We do not share your precise location with advertisers, data brokers, or any partner for marketing. See Sensitive information below — this one is a commitment, not an oversight.
• We do not require your name, email address or phone number to use this site. If you choose to give us one — writing to us, or signing up for something the Foundation offers — we use it for that purpose and tell you so at the time.
• We do not sell what our own analytics collects, and we do not hand your precise location or your browsing history to an advertiser as raw data — see Our own first-party analytics below for what we do keep and why.

Measurement and advertising

We use Google Analytics to understand which pages people use, and we use site activity to show you relevant ads on platforms such as Meta, Google, TikTok, Snapchat, Pinterest, Reddit and Microsoft — including for content and partners we promote, such as a Catholic Connect Foundation fundraising appeal or a new parish programme. We never sell your personal information or share it with those partners; these tools exist so we can reach Catholics who would find this service useful and tell whether an ad worked.

These tools set cookies or similar identifiers and share information about your visit, including your IP address and the pages you viewed, with those providers. Under some U.S. state laws that counts as “sharing for cross-context behavioral advertising”, and you have the right to opt out — see Your privacy choices below.

Your precise location is never included. Coordinates are stripped from every URL and every event before anything is sent to an analytics or advertising provider. That is enforced in code, not policy, and it does not change with your settings. Advertising and measurement providers may still infer a general area from your network address in the ordinary way, and we may use that general area — a country, state or city, never a precise point — to decide where to run an appeal or a programme.

Our own first-party analytics

Separately from Google and Meta, we run our own analytics system, on our own servers, shared with other services of The Catholic Connect Foundation. In plain terms, it keeps: your IP address, an approximate location worked out from it, your device and browser type, the pages you visit, what you search for, which parishes you view, and — when you share it — the precise location described above. It is gated by the same consent choice as everything else on this page: turn analytics off below and none of it is sent.

We use this to understand how the site is actually used and to improve it, and to run advertising and remarketing for the Foundation — for example, showing an ad again to someone who already visited, or building an audience of people likely to find a Foundation appeal relevant. We do not sell it. Coordinates and which specific parish you looked at still never reach Google or Meta's tags directly — that rule, described above, is unchanged. When we do use this data for advertising, it is through general categories or a hashed copy of a contact detail you gave us yourself (never a precise location), the same way most services that run online ads do.

The mobile app

Find Mass Times for iPhone and Android is covered by this policy too, and it is not identical to the website. The app measures how it is used — which screens are opened, which service someone searched for, how many parishes came back, whether the map or the list did the work — through Google Analytics for Firebase, and it reports app installs and those same events to Meta so we can tell whether an ad for the app was worth running.

Your location still never leaves the phone. The app asks for your position to sort the parishes around you by distance and to centre the map. That happens on the device. No coordinates, no city and no parish name are attached to any event we send — the events carry a service name, a count and which screen you were on. As on the website, an approximate area can still be inferred from your network address in the ordinary way.

On iPhone and iPad the app does not read Apple's advertising identifier and never asks for permission to track you across other companies' apps and websites, because it does not. On Android the app does use the device's advertising ID so that installs can be matched to the ad that produced them. You can reset or delete it at any time in Settings → Privacy → Ads, and doing so does not affect the app.

There is still no account, nothing to sign in to, and no advertising inside the app itself.

Sensitive information

Using a Catholic Mass finder can reveal something about your religious beliefs, and a precise location can reveal that you visited a particular church. Under U.S. state privacy laws and the GDPR, both religious belief and precise geolocation are treated as sensitive categories deserving stronger protection than ordinary data.

We treat them that way. Location is used to answer the question you asked — which parishes are near you — and, as described in Our own first-party analytics above, to understand and improve the service and to run our own advertising. It is never sold or licensed, and the raw coordinates and which specific church you looked at never reach Google, Meta, or any other advertising or measurement provider, whatever your settings say. Advertising tools may learn that you visited this site; they will not learn where you were standing or which church you looked at.

Who your information reaches

To show you a map with parishes on it, a small number of services necessarily receive some data. Each receives it in order to perform its function for us; their own handling is governed by their own policies.

• Catholic Connect (Catholic Connect Inc., USA) — receives the map coordinates in order to return the parishes near that point, and the IP address of the request for rate limiting and abuse prevention. This is the source of all parish and schedule data.
• CARTO (map tiles) — your browser loads map imagery directly, so CARTO receives your IP address and which map tiles you viewed, as any map provider must.
• Komoot / Photon (geocoding, Germany) — receives the place name you searched. The request is made by our server, so your IP address is not passed on. Because this provider is in the European Union, that text leaves the United States.
• Vercel (hosting, USA) — operates the servers and keeps the standard access logs described above.
• Google and Meta — analytics and advertising, as described above, and only where you have not opted out.

We may also disclose information if we are legally required to, or where it is necessary to protect the safety or rights of others.

How long we keep it

We do not create an account or an identity file for any visitor. Our own first-party analytics keeps what a visit does — the searches, the parishes viewed, the location shared — tied to a browser session rather than a name, for as long as it is useful for the purposes described above; server logs held by our host are retained only as long as needed for operating and securing the service, or as the law requires, and are then discarded. Anything stored on your device stays there until you clear it.

Aggregate and de-identified information

We may produce and use statistics that cannot identify anyone — for example, how many people searched for confession times in a given month, or which regions have the poorest schedule coverage. This helps us decide what to fix and lets the Foundation report honestly on its work. We do not attempt to re-identify anyone from such information and we require the same of anyone we share it with.

Security

We use reasonable technical and organisational measures appropriate to the very small amount of information involved. No website or transmission over the internet can be guaranteed completely secure, and we do not claim otherwise.

Where information is processed

We operate from the United States and our providers are principally in the United States and the European Union, so information may be processed in either. Where a transfer out of the EEA or UK requires a legal mechanism, we rely on the European Commission's standard contractual clauses or another lawful basis.

Your choices and rights

• Location. Say no to the permission prompt, or withdraw it at any time in your browser settings. The site still works — search a city instead.
• Stored preferences. Clearing your browser's site data removes everything we keep on your device.
• Access, correction, deletion, portability, and appeal. Residents of California, Colorado, Connecticut, Texas, Virginia, Oregon, Montana, and other states with comparable laws — and residents of the UK, EU, and other jurisdictions with comparable laws — may exercise these rights by contacting us. Because we hold no account and no identifier for you, in most cases we will have nothing on file to return or delete, and we will tell you so plainly rather than pretend otherwise.
• Do not sell or share my personal information. We do not sell your information. We do share some of it for advertising as described above, and you can turn that off under Your privacy choices. We also honour Global Privacy Control signals automatically, with no action needed from you.
• Non-discrimination. We will never degrade this service because you exercised a privacy right.

Your privacy choices

Change what you allow at any time. In the United States these are on by default and you may switch them off; in the EEA, UK, Switzerland and Brazil nothing is enabled until you accept. We honour Global Privacy Control signals automatically.

Parish information on this site

Parish names, addresses, schedules and descriptions are public information about organizations, not about you, and are published under the same terms as on Catholic Connect. If you represent a parish and want a listing corrected or removed, please contact the Catholic Connect team. Claiming a parish or suggesting a correction is done on Catholic Connect, with its own sign-in, not on this site.

Children

This service is intended for a general audience and is not directed to children under 13. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children. If you believe a child has provided us information, contact us and we will delete it.

Changes

If we change what we collect or who receives it, we will update this page and change the date at the top. Where the law requires your consent for such a change, we will ask for it rather than assume it.