What we know about you

Under the Australian Privacy Principles, religious belief is explicitly a sensitive category of personal information. Who visits a Shia centre’s website is therefore not an ordinary analytics question.

For that reason the Centre built its own counting, and it is the one described below: no cookie, no stored IP address, no identifier that could be correlated with anything. Those are structural, not promises.

Since 31 August 2026 the site also carries Google Analytics, which does not work that way: it sets cookies and Google receives visitors’ IP addresses. It was added so the Centre can see how people find the site. We name it plainly here rather than leave it for you to discover in your browser, and a tracker blocker or third-party-cookie block will prevent it without affecting anything you came here to read.

The Centre’s own counting writes nothing into your browser — no cookie, no session storage, no identifier of any kind. (Google Analytics, described above, does set its own cookies.) Our record of a page view holds:

• the page address
• the host you arrived from — google.com, not the full link, because a full link can carry a search term
• whether you are on a phone, a tablet or a desktop
• your country, and the city and region your network reports
• campaign tags, if you followed a tagged link
• how far down a page you scrolled, files you downloaded, links you followed out
• how quickly the page loaded, so we can tell when the site is slow
• anything you type into the site’s search box, stored without any link to you

Instead of an identifier, each visitor is a salted hash of their network address and browser. The salt is regenerated every day. That is the whole point of rotating it: Monday’s hash and Tuesday’s hash for the same person do not match, and cannot be made to match afterwards, even by someone holding the entire database.

We state the cost of that honestly. “Unique visitors” means unique per day; somebody who visits on Monday and Tuesday is counted twice. Two people sharing a network and the same browser version are counted once. Both are the correct trade for a mosque.

Our network provider sends the Centre’s server more than the city: it also offers latitude, longitude and postcode. Those are discarded unread. A coordinate pair attached to “visited a Shia centre” is a different order of disclosure from a city name, and the point of this design is not to hold it.

Also never stored: your IP address, your full browser string, the full address of any page that referred you, and any advertising or cross-site identifier.

An account is optional; most of the site works without one. If you make one we hold your name, email address, an optional phone number and photo, and your preferences — which marja you follow, which prayer calculation and language you want, the household you belong to, and the date your khums year starts. Your password is stored only as a cryptographic hash.

Signing in sets one cookie. It is the only cookie this site sets, it exists to keep you signed in, and it is not used for analytics.

One honest difference: for signed-in accounts we do record the IP address and browser of each session. That is a security measure — it is how an account holder can tell that somebody else has signed in as them — and it applies only to accounts, never to ordinary visitors.

You can turn on notifications without an account. In that case we store only the address your browser gives us to deliver to, and the two keys needed to encrypt the message. No name, no email, nothing that says who is being told about a majlis. If you are signed in, it is linked to your account so your devices and preferences stay together.

Delivery necessarily passes through whichever push service your browser uses — Google, Mozilla, Microsoft or Apple. They handle the delivery; the message content is encrypted to your browser. You can turn notifications off at any time.

Requests to the Centre — a funeral, a nikah, a hall booking, a general enquiry — record your name, and the phone number, email address and message you give us. A request can be marked private, which restricts it to the committee members handling it.

Offering to host an iftar records your name, contact details, how many you can seat and what you intend to cook. Volunteering and madrasah enrolment record what those forms ask for.

A janaza notice is different, because it concerns someone who has died and their family. It records the deceased’s name, the family’s connection, where the death occurred, the arrangements, and a contact name and phone number. Nothing is published until the family has asked the Centre to publish it. The contact number is for the committee and is not published with the notice.

Giving to the Centre is currently by direct bank transfer. Your bank shows us your transfer and the reference you used; the reference is what lets the committee put your gift into the right fund, which matters because several categories of Islamic giving are restricted in their use and must not be co-mingled.

We keep a record of gifts: the donor name and email given, the amount, the fund, any note, and whether a receipt was issued. You may ask to be recorded under a different public name, or not named at all.

The Centre never sees or stores card numbers. Card giving through a payment provider is built into this site but is not switched on; if that changes, card details would go directly to the provider and never to us, and this page will say so before it happens.

The Centre is registered with the ACNC but is not endorsed as a deductible gift recipient, so donations are not tax deductible. Receipts are issued as a record of your gift, not as a tax claim.

We keep this list short on purpose, and it is complete as at the date below.

Our host

The server this site runs on, and the database, are rented from a commercial hosting provider.

Our network provider

Sits in front of the site to keep it fast and to absorb attacks. It reports the visitor country and city we count.

Our mail provider

Sends the Centre’s email: verification, password resets and announcements you have asked for.

Google Analytics

Records page views so the Centre can see how the site is found. It sets its own cookies and receives your IP address. A tracker blocker stops it.

Push services

Google, Mozilla, Microsoft and Apple, only if you turn notifications on, and only to deliver them.

Video

YouTube and Facebook embeds load only after you click play, and YouTube is used in its no-cookie mode.

Recitation audio

Some Quranic audio is streamed from a public recitation archive when you press play.

Nothing else. The Centre does not sell, rent or trade your information, and does not share it with anyone for their own purposes. We disclose information only where the law requires it.

Two things worth naming because they are common elsewhere and absent here. The fonts this site uses are served from our own server, not fetched from Google, so reading a page makes no request to them. And the site’s search does not send your question to any AI service — that capability exists in the code and is switched off.

Individual page views are deleted after 90 days. What survives is a daily count — how many views, how many visitors, from which city, on what device — and those totals carry no visitor identifier at all, so they can be kept indefinitely without holding anything about a person.

Account details are kept while the account exists. Donation and financial records are kept as long as charity record-keeping requires. Requests and notices are kept while they are useful to the committee.

Your own browser also remembers small things for your convenience — where you were up to in a text, your audio settings. That stays on your device and is never sent to us.

You may ask what the Centre holds about you, ask for it to be corrected, ask for your account to be deleted, or unsubscribe from announcements — every broadcast carries an unsubscribe link, and turning notifications off takes one tap.

There is one request we cannot fulfil, and we would rather say so than pretend otherwise: we cannot find, show or delete your anonymous visits, because nothing in that data identifies you. The design that protects you also puts it beyond reach.

The Centre handles personal information in line with the Australian Privacy Principles. If you are unhappy with how we have handled yours, tell us first — we would like the chance to put it right. You can also complain to the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner.

Accounts are intended for adults. Madrasah enrolment is made by a parent or guardian, and the details given are used only to run the classes.

Write to [email protected], or speak to a committee member at the Centre.

If what the site collects changes, this page changes with it rather than afterwards. Last updated 31 August 2026. Terms of use.