Privacy and safety
What Ozzie will never do, and how it keeps names private
A church's people aren't data to be optimised. These boundaries were written before Ozzie's features, and when a feature can't live inside them, the feature loses.
Ozzie will never
- Send a message to anyone in your church. It drafts; a person sends.
- Change anything in Planning Center. It only reads.
- Write a sermon, devotional or pastoral teaching.
- Pretend to offer pastoral care, counselling, prayer or presence.
- Score, rank or label a person, their faithfulness or their spiritual health.
- Make a pastoral decision, or act without a named person approving that exact step.
- Send the names it read from Planning Center to an AI model.
- Present a guess as a fact. Anything uncertain is marked “Worth a look”, with the reason.
- Hide what it read, when it read it, or what it didn't check.
- Nag, or go around you to someone else. Ignoring Ozzie is always safe.
These aren't settings. No user, church or plan can switch them off. The full list is published in the open source repository.
It only reads Planning Center
Ozzie signs in with Planning Center's standard sign-in, and the access it receives is kept in your Mac's Keychain. It reads with a fixed list of read requests. There is no code path that schedules, edits, accepts, declines or deletes anything in Planning Center. Rooms, follow-ups and group events are a separate opt-in, still read only.
How names stay off AI models
AI is optional. Every check and every draft works without it. When you do use it, to reword a draft or to ask about what Ozzie read:
- Placeholders, not names. The AI sees labels such as [Volunteer A] or [Person 1] instead of the names Ozzie read from Planning Center. Names are put back on your Mac after the reply comes back.
- A second check before anything leaves. The app refuses any request that still holds a name Ozzie has shown you, an email address or a phone number, and nothing is sent.
- The AI picks facts; Ozzie writes the answer. For questions, the AI only chooses which of Ozzie's own facts answer it. Ozzie writes the sentences on your Mac in fixed wording, so the AI can't rank people, describe anyone or claim something was sent.
- Instructions inside email are never followed. Text Ozzie reads is treated as information, not as commands.
- Your choice of route. Use a model running on your own Mac, your own AI provider, or, when managed plans open, a managed route on which every AI request requires zero data retention.
Where your church's information lives
Ozzie runs on your Mac. What it reads from Planning Center is used on your Mac to show you findings. The last check is saved on your Mac, in a file only your user account can read, so it can be shown when Planning Center can't be reached. Visitor card photos are read on your Mac and gone when you leave the page.
Honest limits
- It keeps watch only while your Mac is awake and Ozzie is running. When the Mac sleeps, checks wait; Ozzie catches up once and reports what it missed. Checks that run when your Mac is off are planned for managed plans later.
- It can only recognise names it has read. A nickname or a family member's name that isn't in Planning Center can't be caught. Please don't type other people's details into a question.
- Findings are as fresh as the last check. Every finding shows when it was checked. Things can change in Planning Center between checks.
- It can't know what Planning Center doesn't hold. “No overlap found” means no blockout or schedule overlap was found, not that someone is free or willing.
- Notices aren't a delivery promise. Focus modes, quiet hours and a sleeping Mac can all delay them.
- It is not emergency help. Nobody monitors Ozzie, so it is never a way to reach someone in a crisis. Your church's own people and processes stay responsible for care.
- It is an early build. The Mac app is built from source and isn't signed by Apple yet, so macOS will ask you to confirm before opening a copy you didn't build.
The same rules, however you run it
Every safety check lives in the open source code, not in a paid layer. Run Ozzie yourself or use a managed plan later, and the same boundaries apply. You can read them, and test them, on GitHub.
For this website and the waitlist, see the privacy policy.