AskHaven Privacy Policy

When you use the AskHaven chat at askhaven.org, you are talking with an AI assistant designed to help you find a starting point for help with food, housing, utilities, healthcare, transportation, benefits, jobs, and family support. You do not have to create an account and you do not have to share your name.

We do not store the text of your messages.

Your messages are sent in real time to a large language model API run by Abacus.AI to generate a response. After the response is delivered, the message text is not written to AskHaven’s database. We keep only the following non-identifying metadata:

• An anonymous session ID (a random string used to keep your conversation continuous in your browser tab).
• The 5-digit ZIP code, only if you share one. We do not capture or store finer location.
• The general category we detected (for example: food, housing, utilities). No personal details.
• The number of messages exchanged.
• Whether the conversation was in English or Spanish.
• Engagement-depth signals (whether you asked follow-up questions, whether the conversation was off-hours, etc.). These are aggregate signals, not personal disclosures.

We do not log your IP address against your chat session. We do not place tracking cookies that follow you across the web.

The optional survey at /survey lets you anonymously report a need that AskHaven could not solve. We store the category you selected, the optional 5-digit ZIP code, the severity, and the short description you typed.

Please do not include personal information (names, phone numbers, addresses, account numbers, medical details) in the description. The survey is designed to capture what is missing in a community, not whois missing it. We treat the description field as free text and reserve the right to redact information that appears personal before any aggregated report is shared with funders or partners.

When an organization fills out the partner form at /partners/join, we collect the organization name, contact name, email address, optional phone number, optional website, and the message describing the community served. This is contact information, not anonymous data, because we need to follow up with you about partnership coordination.

We use this information only to coordinate AskHaven partnership. We do not sell, rent, or share it with anyone outside the AskHaven team. AskHaven is free for all community-serving organizations — there are no paid tiers.

After an assistant message, you can optionally rate the response with a thumbs-up or thumbs-down button and add a short comment. We store the rating, the optional comment, your anonymous session ID, and the index of the assistant message you rated.

Please do not include personal information in the comment field. We use feedback only to improve AskHaven’s quality and to identify resource gaps.

The AskHaven admin dashboard is only accessible to a small set of administrators using email-and-password authentication. Passwords are stored hashed (using bcrypt), never in plain text. Admins can see anonymized aggregate counts, partner inquiries (which are contact submissions, not anonymous), the resource directory, and gap-survey entries.

Admins cannot read raw chat messages because raw chat messages are not stored in the database — they only ever pass through the LLM provider in real time and are then discarded. The admin dashboard surfaces conversation metadata only.

This is one of AskHaven’s core architectural commitments. AskHaven’s server code never writes the text of chat messages to disk or to the database. The only fields that are persisted per conversation are an anonymous session ID, an optional 5-digit ZIP code, a detected category, the message count, the language, and aggregate engagement-depth signals. Even an AskHaven administrator with full database access cannot read what you typed, because what you typed is not stored.

Your messages are processed in real time by Abacus.AI’s LLM service in order to generate a response. We do not control what an LLM provider may log on its side; please see the LLM provider section below.

When location is helpful for finding nearby resources, AskHaven asks for a 5-digit ZIP code only. We do not record longer postal codes (“ZIP+4”), do not record street addresses, and do not record neighborhood-level identifiers. If you mention a specific address in your chat, that address passes through the LLM in real time but is not stored in our database because we do not store conversation text at all.

AskHaven’s chat is powered by an LLM API provided by Abacus.AI. Your messages are sent to Abacus.AI to generate the assistant’s reply. Abacus.AI has its own privacy and security practices. Please consult Abacus.AI’s policies for details on what they may log on their side. AskHaven does not authorize the LLM provider to use AskHaven traffic to train models on individual user content.

The following retention windows describe how long different categories of information are kept before they are removed or aggregated. We are working toward an automatic enforcement schedule; in the meantime, these are the windows we commit to as a matter of policy.

AskHaven is intended for use by adults seeking help, or by adults helping someone else. We do not knowingly collect information from children. If you are a minor, please ask a trusted adult (parent, caregiver, school counselor, pastor) to help you use AskHaven.

Separate from the public chat, AskHaven also runs an internal coordination tool called the Bridge Assistant. The Bridge Assistant is not a help experience and is not intended for the general public. It is used by the AskHaven project team to coordinate work between systems. The Bridge Assistant has its own access controls, hashed-IP audit logging, and operating rules that block submission of personally identifiable information. It is not used to handle public chat content.

AskHaven is operated by Vertex Prime Group LLC in partnership with El Bethel Missionary Baptist Church (Redford, Michigan). If you have questions about this policy, want to request deletion of partner-form contact information you submitted, or have a privacy concern, please use the partner form at /partners/join with the subject “privacy request” and we will follow up.

We may update this policy as AskHaven’s features change. The “Last updated” date at the top of this page reflects the most recent revision. Material changes will be summarized here.