What we collect, and what we do not.

The short version: this site sets no cookies, and every tool on it keeps what you type in your own browser and sends us nothing. The only personal information we will ever hold is what you deliberately submit to join the community.

Who is responsible

Hajj Collective is operated by Dar El Salam, 280 Madison Ave #500, New York, NY 10016, United States, which is the data controller for the purposes of this policy. Questions about it go to the contact page.

What we collect

Nothing, until you type it into the community form. There is no account, no login and no tracking of what you read.

When you choose to join the community, that form asks for:

• Your name
• Your email address
• Your country of residence
• The country that issued your passport
• Whether your passport will still be valid in time
• What your plan is for 2027
• Whether you have applied through Nusuk before
• A phone number, only if you choose to give one

We ask for the two countries because they decide which Hajj system applies to you, and we would rather send you to the right one than to a general answer. Your plan for 2027 decides which rooms you are invited into — the announcements channel for everyone eligible, and the discussion as well for people aiming at this season. The passport answer helps us help you prepare; it does not gate anything. Answering “not yet” costs you nothing but the discussion room, and you will be asked again. Whether you have applied before tells us what you have already been through: somebody who applied and was not selected needs different help, sooner, and is contacted first. The phone number is optional and does one job — it lets a person call you when a call is better than an email. Leave it blank and nothing changes about your invitation. The form also asks for your agreement before it sends anything, and we record when you gave it.

If you go on to open the invitation, we also record your Telegram account’s id and username, and which rooms you joined and when. We record it because the invitation is issued to you personally rather than published: it works once, and our bot checks that the account asking to join is the one it was issued to. Without that record the invitation could be forwarded and the question of who is in the rooms would have no answer.

That record is kept with the rest of your submission, and it is deleted with it — see how long we keep it. We never read your Telegram messages, and we could not: the bot can see what any other member of a room can see, and nothing else.

We use all of it to send you the right invitation, to decide who to contact first, and to answer you if you write back. We do not sell any of it, and we do not send marketing to people who did not ask for it.

What the tools collect

Nothing. The cost calculator, the packing list, the countdown, the readiness check, the Arafah du’a builder, the package worksheet, the glossary flashcards and the document resizer all run inside your browser. What you type into them is stored on your own device using your browser’s local storage, under these names:

• hch:arafah-list — your Arafah du’a list
• hch:cost-calculator — the figures in the cost calculator
• hch:countdown — which countdown items you have ticked
• hch:hajj-type — which form of Hajj the day-by-day guide follows for you
• hch:packing — what you have packed, and your filters
• hch:package-comparison — the package worksheet
• hch:readiness — your readiness answers
• hch-theme, hch-type — your light/dark and type preferences

None of it reaches us. It is on your device and stays there until you clear it, which every one of those tools gives you a button to do. On a shared or borrowed computer, use it — particularly for the du’a list.

The document resizer deserves a specific sentence, because it handles a passport: the image is read, resized and handed back entirely inside the browser tab. It is never uploaded, never stored, and is gone when you close the page.

Cookies

This site sets none. Not for analytics, not for preferences, not for anything — which is why you have not been asked to dismiss a banner. The preferences above use local storage rather than cookies, and local storage is never transmitted to a server.

Fonts are served from this domain rather than from a font service.

Who else sees your data

When you submit the community form, it passes through:

• Google Cloud — hosts this site, runs the small service that receives the form, and stores your invitation until you use it.
• Google Sheets — where submissions are recorded. Access to that sheet is limited to the people who answer them.
• Google Workspace — sends you the invitation email.
• Telegram — our bot issues your invitation and approves your request to join. If you accept, your use of Telegram is governed by Telegram’s own terms and privacy policy, not by this one, and Telegram will show the other members of a room whatever your account shows them.

That is the whole list. The check that the form was filled in by a person rather than a script runs on our own server, so no third-party bot service ever sees your submission, and nothing on the form page is loaded from anywhere but this domain.

Our web server keeps ordinary request logs — an IP address, a timestamp, the page requested — which is how any web server works and how abuse is spotted. They are not linked to form submissions. The form handler additionally holds your IP address in memory for a few minutes, so that one machine cannot submit the form hundreds of times. It is never written to the sheet, and it is gone when the service restarts.

We do not currently run analytics of any kind. If that changes, a cookieless service will be chosen and named here before it is switched on.

How long we keep it

Community submissions, and the Telegram account we matched them to, are kept for up to twenty-four months — a Hajj season spans two calendar years, and the record has to span it with you. An invitation you never open expires after thirty days. Server logs are kept for up to ninety days. Ask us to delete any of it sooner and we will.

Your rights

Wherever you live, you can ask us what we hold about you, ask for it to be corrected, or ask for it to be deleted — and we will do it. If you are in the United Kingdom or the European Economic Area you also have the right to object to processing, to restrict it, and to receive your data in a portable form; if you are in California you have the right to know what is collected and to ask that it not be sold, which it is not.

Ask through the contact page. We will not make you prove anything beyond that you control the email address in question.

Children

The community form is not intended for anyone under 16, and we do not knowingly collect their details. Everything else on this site is free to read at any age, and reading it collects nothing.

Changes

When this policy changes the date at the top changes with it. Material changes affecting people already in the community will be sent to them rather than quietly published.