Privacy

What Ward Desk is

Ward Desk is a private administrative tool used by the bishopric of the River Heights Ward of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. It exists to help five people carry out a calling: preparing sacrament meetings, keeping track of assignments, and remembering to look after people. It is not a social network, it is not a public directory, and it has no accounts that anyone can sign up for.

This page describes how it handles information about members of the ward. It is written to be read by the people whose information it is.

Where the information comes from

Member information in Ward Desk comes from the official Church directory exports that the ward clerk and bishopric already have access to as part of their callings. Ward Desk does not collect anything from members directly, and there is no form anywhere in it that a member fills in about themselves.

What it stores

For members of the ward, Ward Desk holds:

• Name
• Household — which family someone belongs to
• Organization — the quorum, class or auxiliary someone is part of
• Participation status — a general sense of how active someone is in the ward, as recorded in the Church directory
• Birth month and day only. Ward Desk stores the day and month so that birthdays can be remembered. It never stores the birth year, and so it does not hold anyone’s age or date of birth.

What it deliberately does not store

• No birth years, and therefore no dates of birth or ages.
• No home addresses. Not for anyone, at any time.
• No confidential ecclesiastical records. Anything discussed in confidence with a bishop belongs in the Church’s own systems, or nowhere, and never in this tool.
• No financial information, and no donation or tithing records.

Contact details are temporary

Phone numbers and email addresses are treated differently from everything else. Ward Desk holds a member’s contact details only while that member is on an active list — for example, a list of people to visit this month, or people being invited to speak.

When the reason for the list ends, the contact details are cleared. The point is that Ward Desk should not quietly accumulate a permanent copy of everyone’s phone number simply because it once had a reason to know one.

Who can see it

• The bishopric — five people, each signing in with their own Google account, each individually invited by name. There is no shared password and no generic login.
• Occasional helpers, narrowly. Someone helping with a specific task — writing cards, for instance — may be sent a single-use link that opens only the one list they need for that task. It does not give them an account, it does not let them see anything else, and it stops working when the task is finished.

Nobody else has access. Signing in with a Google account that has not been invited gets no access at all, and creates no record of a member in the app.

What is never done with it

Member information in Ward Desk is never sold, never shared with anyone outside the ward leadership described above, never used for advertising, and never used for any purpose outside ward administration. There is no analytics tracking of members, and the information is not used to train any automated system.

Where it is kept

Ward Desk runs on two hosted services — Vercel, which serves the website, and Supabase, which stores the database. Access to the database is restricted at the database itself, not merely hidden in the app, so that an unauthorised request returns nothing even if it bypasses the screens entirely.

How long it is kept

Member information is kept only while it is useful for ward administration, and is refreshed from the Church directory rather than being allowed to go stale. Contact details are cleared as described above. When a bishopric member is released, their access to Ward Desk is removed.

Asking for your information to be removed

Any member of the ward may ask to see what Ward Desk holds about them, ask for it to be corrected, or ask for it to be removed. You do not have to give a reason.

Speak to a member of the bishopric, or write to admin@riverheightsward.org. Requests are acted on promptly. Removing someone from Ward Desk does not affect the official Church directory, which is a separate system maintained by the Church.

Current status

As of 26 August 2026, Ward Desk is newly built and holds no member information at all. The only information in it is the name, email address and role of the bishopric members who sign in to it. The directory features described above are being built, and this page describes how they will behave when they arrive. It is published now because it should exist before any member data does, not afterwards.

Changes to this page

If how Ward Desk handles information changes, this page is updated and the date at the top changes with it.