How KhutbahLive handles your data

KhutbahLive turns a live khutbah into captions and a written transcript. To do that it has to process the imam's voice and keep the text it produces. This page says exactly what is collected, why, who else touches it, whether it is used to improve our models, and how long it is kept. Last updated 4 September 2026.

Who is responsible

VectorLab ApS, Gormsvej 2, 4000 Roskilde, Denmark, is the data controller for the KhutbahLive service. For anything on this page, write to [email protected].

The three ways you might use KhutbahLive

What we hold about you depends on which of these you are.

A mosque operator — you sign in, start and stop khutbahs, pair screens, and download transcripts.
A congregant — you scan a QR code in the hall to follow captions on your phone, or to open a transcript afterwards. No account is needed and none is created.
The imam — your voice is what the service transcribes.

What we collect, and why

Sermon audio

During a khutbah the microphone feed from the mosque's sound system is streamed to our servers, transcribed, and translated. A recording of the khutbah is also kept so that a higher-quality transcript can be produced afterwards and so the mosque can return to it. Audio is captured only while an operator has a khutbah running.

Transcripts and translations

The Arabic transcript and each translation are stored per khutbah. Quran and hadith passages are matched to an approved canonical translation rather than machine-translated. A mosque may choose to make a transcript available to congregants through a public link or QR code; anyone with that link can read it and download it as a PDF.

Operator accounts

Operators sign in through a third-party authentication provider. We hold your name, email address, and which mosque you belong to. We do not store your password; the authentication provider does.

Connection records

Each time a screen, a phone, or an operator connects to a live khutbah we record when it happened, the kind of device, its browser or app version, and the country and city derived from its network address. This is used to show operators what is connected to their hall and to diagnose problems. We do not store the network address itself.

Paired screens

A TV or projector paired to a mosque holds a device identifier and a secret on the device so that it can rejoin the mosque's khutbahs without being paired again. The KhutbahLive Display app for Android TV collects nothing else: no analytics, no advertising identifiers, no location, and it never captures audio or video.

Improving our models

We also use sermon recordings, the transcripts and translations produced from them, and any corrections operators make, to train and evaluate the speech-recognition and translation models behind KhutbahLive. This is how the service gets better at Arabic sermon speech and at rendering it faithfully. This data is used only by VectorLab for KhutbahLive; it is not sold, and it is not passed to the third-party providers listed below for their own model training.

A mosque that does not want its khutbahs used this way can say so at any time by writing to [email protected], and its recordings and transcripts will be excluded from future training. The imam can ask the same for his own voice.

What we deliberately do not collect

No analytics or advertising trackers on the website, the web app, or the TV app.
No recording of congregants — the only audio is the imam's, from the sound system.
No account, name, or contact details from congregants following along on a phone.

Who else processes your data

We use a small number of specialist providers, each for one job. They act as our processors: they handle data only on our instructions and do not use it for their own purposes. By category, they are:

Speech-recognition providers — receive the sermon audio and return the Arabic transcript.
Machine-translation providers — receive transcript text and return translations. Quran and hadith passages are not sent for translation.
Real-time media infrastructure — carries the audio and captions between the hall and our servers during a live khutbah.
An authentication provider — manages operator sign-in.
A content-delivery and network-security provider — sits in front of the service and supplies the country and city used in connection records.
Cloud storage in the European Union — holds recordings and transcripts.

Some speech-recognition and translation providers operate outside the EU. Where that is the case, transfers rest on the European Commission's standard contractual clauses. You can ask us for the current list of providers by writing to [email protected].

How long we keep it

Recordings and transcripts are kept for as long as the mosque wants them. We do not delete them on a schedule, because a mosque's archive of its own khutbahs is part of what the service is for. They are deleted when the mosque asks, or when the mosque's account is closed. Connection records are kept alongside the khutbah they belong to. Material already used for model training is not retrievable from a trained model, but is excluded from any further training once a mosque or imam asks.

Your rights

Under the GDPR you can ask us what we hold about you, ask for it to be corrected or deleted, ask for a copy, or object to how it is used. If you are an imam who would like a recording removed, or a congregant who believes a transcript contains something about you, write to [email protected] and we will act on it. You can also complain to the Danish Data Protection Agency (Datatilsynet).

Changes

If we add a provider or start storing something new, we will update this page and the date at the top. The current version is always at khutbah-live.com/privacy.