Privacy Policy
JainSansar (“we”, “us”, “the Platform”), operated by Kapnox International Services Pvt Ltd, a private limited company registered in India, having its registered office at 401, Kapnox International Services Pvt Ltd, 8-3-833/47&58, Hyderabad-73, Telangana, India, is a community platform for the Jain community (family/Parivar records, Sanghs, events, media, messaging and related features). We are the Data Fiduciary for the personal data you provide. This policy explains what personal data we collect, why, how we protect it, and the rights you have over it.
1. Scope
This policy applies to your use of the Platform through our website and apps. It does not cover third-party services you may reach through links we do not control. By creating an account you confirm you are 14 years or older (see “Children” below).
2. Personal data we collect
Data you give us
- Account data: mobile number, email address, date of birth, password (stored only as a secure hash), and a username.
- Profile & family (Parivar) data: names, relationships, gotra, photos, education, work, interests, community affiliations, and other details you or your family choose to add.
- Panchang location: the city or pincode of your family address, or a city you choose, is used only to calculate the sunrise, sunset and pachkhan times shown to you; you can change or clear your choice on the Panchang location page.
- Community data: Sangh memberships, events, posts, messages, media you upload, and similar activity.
- Verification data: one-time passwords and the contact points you verify.
Data collected automatically
- Device & usage: IP address, browser/user-agent, device fingerprint, pages viewed, and security/audit logs (including login attempts).
- Cookies: essential cookies for sign-in and security, and — with your consent — non-essential cookies. See our Cookie Policy.
3. Why we use your data, and our legal basis
We process personal data for these purposes, each limited to what that purpose needs:
- To provide the Platform — create and secure your account, show your Parivar/Sangh features, deliver messages and notifications. Basis: performance of the service you request / your consent at sign-up.
- To keep the Platform safe — prevent fraud, abuse, and unauthorised access (rate-limiting, IP checks, CAPTCHA, audit logs). Basis: legitimate use for security as permitted by law.
- To communicate with you — verification codes, service notices, grievance responses. Basis: performance of service.
- Personalised advertising — only if you separately consent; you can withdraw at any time. Basis: your consent.
- Face matching — searching. Finding photographs of yourself, only if you separately switch it on; you can withdraw at any time. Basis: your explicit consent.
- Face matching — the searchable index. Generating faceprints from media that is already publicly visible on the Platform, and from member profile, cover and gallery photographs, so that members who have switched the feature on can find themselves. This does not depend on the consent of the uploader or of the people appearing in the media, so we explain it in full at “Face matching and biometric data” below, together with the limits we apply and how to have faceprints erased. Basis: legitimate use for the Platform’s stated purpose, subject to the safeguards in section 5.
- Legal compliance — to meet obligations and respond to lawful requests. Basis: compliance with law.
We do not use your data for a new, incompatible purpose without telling you and, where required, obtaining fresh consent.
4. Consent and how to withdraw it
Where we rely on consent, it is specific, informed and freely given, and you may withdraw it as easily as you gave it. Manage or withdraw consents at Settings → Consents. Withdrawing consent does not affect processing already done, and some features may stop working if the data they need is withdrawn.
5. Face matching and biometric data
The Platform offers an optional face-matching feature that lets you find photographs and videos of yourself among the media you are permitted to see. To provide it, we generate a mathematical representation of facial features — a faceprint, or biometric template. A faceprint is a set of numbers; it is not a stored image and cannot be used to reconstruct a photograph.
Two different things happen to make this work, and only one of them depends on your consent. We set both out plainly, because the second one affects you whether or not you ever use the feature.
Searching is yours, and is off until you switch it on
You can only run a face search after you enable the feature and give explicit, separate, opt-in consent, and you can only search for yourself, using your own profile photo as the reference. Each search generates a faceprint from that reference, uses it for that one search, and discards it — we never store your reference image or the faceprint made from it.
Building the searchable index does not depend on your consent
So that a search has anything to find, we generate faceprints of the faces appearing in two categories of media on the Platform:
- photographs and videos that are already publicly visible to signed-in members; and
- member profile, cover and gallery photographs, which are not public to everyone but whose audience each member controls through their own privacy settings. Without these, the feature could not match anyone’s face to their own profile picture, which is the single most useful photograph of a person on the Platform.
We do this whether or not the person who uploaded the media has enabled face matching, and whether or not the people appearing in it have. If your face appears in a photograph in either category, a faceprint of it may exist in our index even if you have never switched the feature on.
These limits apply to that index, and we hold ourselves to them:
- Nothing else is ever indexed. Outside the two categories above we generate no faceprints at all — not from identity documents, payment proofs, donation records, registration paperwork, or any other restricted media. Those are never submitted for face detection in any form.
- Indexing never widens who can see anything. A search result is checked again, at the moment it is shown, against the same permissions that govern the photograph everywhere else on the Platform — including each member’s own profile-photo visibility settings. You are shown only what you were already allowed to see, so face matching can never reveal to you that restricted media exists.
- Eligible only for as long as it stays eligible. If media is made restricted, hidden, or deleted, we erase the faceprints derived from it. The index is reconciled against the current state of the media, not the state it was in when it was indexed.
- No names in the index. The index records numbers and a reference to a photograph. It does not record whose face any entry belongs to, and we do not build or keep any list of where a named person appears.
- Only ever your own search, about yourself. We use the index solely to answer a member’s own search for themselves. We do not use it for surveillance, profiling, advertising, law-enforcement screening, or any automated decision that affects you, and we do not run searches on anyone’s behalf but their own.
- Processed in-house. Matching runs on our own servers using our own software. Faceprints are never sent to any third-party face-recognition service, and we neither sell nor share them.
- Possible matches, not identification. A result means a face is mathematically similar to yours above a set threshold. It is not proof of identity — look-alikes appear, and people who are genuinely present are missed.
Turning it off, and having faceprints erased
You can switch face matching off and withdraw your consent at any time at Settings → Privacy. When you do, we stop letting you search, and we permanently erase the faceprints derived from the photographs and videos you uploaded and stop generating new ones from them — promptly, and in any event within 30 days. Your photographs themselves remain subject to your normal media and visibility settings.
We want to be straightforward about the limit of that. Because the index does not record whose face is whose, switching the feature off cannot by itself remove your face from photographs other people uploaded. If you want faceprints of you erased from someone else’s public photograph, or the photograph itself taken down, use the report tools on the media or write to our Grievance Officer, and we will act on your request. You can also ask us to erase faceprints derived from a specific photograph without asking for the photograph to be removed.
Withdrawing face-matching consent does not affect the lawfulness of any processing carried out before you withdrew it.
6. How your data is shared
- Minimal public identity (name and parents). A member’s display name and their parents’ names are a minimal public identity shown to all signed-in members, so the same person is not added twice and families can be linked correctly. You cannot hide these two items, though you may block a specific person, who then sees nothing about that member. All other profile data — including the profile photo, date of birth, contact details, gallery and relationships — remains governed by your visibility controls below.
- With other users, per your visibility settings. Beyond the minimal public identity above, Parivar/profile data is shown to others only according to the per-item audiences, whitelists and blacklists you control in your privacy settings.
- With our moderators, when you report a chat. Reporting a message or a conversation sends the reported messages — the last 20 you could see at that moment, with the senders’ names — to our moderation team, so they can act on your report.
- With Sanghs you join, to the extent needed for membership and governance.
- With service providers (e.g. SMS/email delivery) strictly to run the Platform, under confidentiality obligations. Our current key processors are MSG91 (SMS and one-time-password delivery) and our email/SMTP hosting provider (transactional email such as verification and notification messages). We do not use a third-party payment gateway — where payments apply, they are handled manually.
- For legal reasons — when required by law, court, or a government agency acting under law.
We do not sell your personal data.
7. Data retention
We keep personal data only as long as needed for the purposes above or as the law requires. Security records (e.g. login attempts) are kept for a limited window and then deleted. When you delete your account, we deactivate it and purge your personal identifiers after a short retention window kept for dispute-resolution and legal reasons. In general: account and profile data are retained while your account is active; security and audit records (e.g. login attempts and IP logs) are retained for up to 180 days and then deleted; and after you delete your account we deactivate it immediately and purge or irreversibly anonymise your personal identifiers within 90 days — except where a longer period is required to comply with law, resolve disputes, or enforce our agreements. Biometric faceprints derived from media you uploaded are permanently erased within 30 days after you turn face matching off or delete your account. Faceprints in the searchable index are kept only while the media they came from remains eligible for indexing, and are erased when that media is made restricted, hidden or deleted — see section 5.
Anti-scraping records. To protect members from bulk copying of the directory, we record which member records were shown to which account, and we embed an identifying mark in certain full-size images we serve to you. These records are kept against a pseudonymous account key, and IP addresses within them are stored only as a keyed hash, never in readable form. Most of this data — the routine record of what was shown to whom — is deleted after 180 days. A small amount is kept indefinitely: records of access that tripped our bulk-extraction limits, and the index that lets an image found elsewhere be matched back to the account it was served to. We keep those without a time limit because copied data usually surfaces long after it was taken, and evidence deleted on schedule is evidence that no longer exists. We use it only to investigate suspected unauthorised extraction and to enforce our Terms of Service; it is never sold, shared for advertising, or used to profile you. Because this is data we may need to enforce our agreements and establish legal claims, it falls within the exception to erasure described in section 8.
8. Your rights
As a Data Principal under the DPDP Act, you have the right to:
- Access a summary of your personal data — download it at Settings → Your Data.
- Correction and updating — edit your profile and account details in Settings.
- Erasure — request deletion of your account and personal data (subject to legal retention).
- Grievance redressal — raise a complaint and receive a timely response (see below).
- Nominate another person to exercise your rights in the event of death or incapacity. To register a nominee, write to our Grievance Officer (details below); we record the nomination and, on receipt of satisfactory proof of death or incapacity, allow the nominee to exercise your rights in accordance with the DPDP Act.
9. Children
You must be at least 14 to create an account, and registration is age-gated accordingly. Under the DPDP Act, 2023 anyone under 18 is a child, so if you are under 18 we ask for the verifiable consent of a parent or guardian before your account can be used, and we never use your interests or activity to choose advertisements. We do not knowingly create accounts for anyone under 14. If you believe an account was created below that age, or without the consent of a parent or guardian, contact our Grievance Officer and we will act promptly.
10. How we protect your data
We apply reasonable security safeguards, including encrypted transport (HTTPS/TLS), password hashing, CSRF and cross-site-scripting protections, parameterised database queries, rate-limiting, IP access controls, CAPTCHA, and audit logging. No system is perfectly secure, but we maintain a breach-response process and will notify the Data Protection Board and affected users of a personal-data breach as required by law.
11. Grievance Officer & Data Protection contact
For any privacy question, request, or complaint, contact our Grievance Officer:
- Name: Mukesh Gandhi
- Email: grievance@jainsansar.com
- Phone: +91 86789 11199
- Address: 401, Kapnox International Services Pvt Ltd, 8-3-833/47&58, Hyderabad-73, Telangana, India
You may raise a complaint by contacting the Grievance Officer at the email, phone, or address above, or by filing it through our grievance form — which gives you a reference number you can use to track it. We acknowledge complaints within 24 hours and aim to resolve them within 15 days.
12. Changes to this policy
We may update this policy. We will post the revised version here with a new “Last updated” date and, for material changes, give notice through the Platform.