Privacy Policy — Vasavi Community

1. Who we are

Vasavi Community is operated by Yealisetty Nikhil, as a sole proprietorship ("we", "us", "our").

For the purposes of the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 ("DPDP Act") we are the Data Fiduciary for the personal data described in this Policy. You are the Data Principal.

Grievance Officer: Yealisetty Nikhil
Email: yealisettynikhil@gmail.com

Write to that address for any privacy question, data request or complaint. We acknowledge within 48 hours and respond within 30 days.

2. Plain-language summary

3. What we collect

We collect only the categories listed here. Each row states what it is, why we have it, and whether you can avoid giving it.

3.1 Account, phone number and the one-time password (OTP)

Your mobile number is your identity on Vasavi Community. There is no email or social sign-in.

How the OTP is handled. The code is generated, sent and checked by Google Firebase Authentication. We never see it. When you enter it correctly, Firebase gives the app a signed confirmation, and that is the only thing sent to our server. Our server accepts each confirmation once, and only within 10 minutes of your verifying the code — after that it must be done again. The confirmation is never written to the database; the server keeps only a one-way fingerprint of it, in memory, for those 10 minutes, so that the same one cannot be used twice. Firebase applies its own limits on how often a number may be sent a code.

Who sees your number during this step. To deliver the SMS, your mobile number is transmitted to Google (Firebase Authentication), which processes it under its own terms and privacy policy and may share it with the mobile operator that carries the message. We do not send your name, profile or any other field to Google for this purpose. Google's SMS verification also runs an automated anti-abuse check on the device (Play Integrity) to confirm the request comes from a genuine installation of the app.

Session tokens. After sign-in we issue a signed session token valid for 30 days, plus a refresh token. Long sessions are a deliberate choice for our largely 45–65-year-old membership, who should not have to sign in repeatedly. A super administrator can invalidate every token issued to an account instantly. Tokens are stored on your device in the operating system's encrypted secure storage, not in ordinary app storage.

Failed sign-ins. We count consecutive failed PIN attempts and temporarily lock the account after repeated failures. The count and the lock expiry are stored on your account record and never returned to any client.

3.2 Profile information

3.3 Sensitive and special-category data

We do not knowingly collect caste-, health-, biometric- or financial-account data beyond what is listed in this Policy.

3.4 Content you create

Feed posts, comments, reactions, community photographs, forum threads and replies, polls and votes, reviews of businesses, milestones, blessing cards, event RSVPs, business listings and visiting cards, promotions, direct messages, group and business chat messages, trip plans, expenses and settlements, invitation designs and their guest lists, and japa/parayanam participation records.

Direct messages and group messages are stored on our servers so that they persist across your devices. They are not end-to-end encrypted. A super administrator can access message content when required to investigate a report of abuse, or when compelled by law. Treat the app as you would a community WhatsApp group, not as a private channel.

3.5 Business information, and information about your customers

If you list a business, we hold the listing itself — name, category, address, contact numbers, description, photographs, opening hours, offers and the reviews members leave — and we show it in the directory.

If you use the AI voice receptionist or the customer-relationship (CRM) features, the app additionally stores records about people who may not be members of Vasavi Community at all: your customers and enquirers. For each we may hold their name, phone number (and alternate/WhatsApp number), email, business name, location, preferred language and contact method, your own notes and tags, a history of calls and follow-ups, and machine-generated commercial estimates such as a purchase-probability score, an estimated deal value, and the products, budget, timeline, objections and risks extracted from a conversation.

Who is responsible for that data. You are. For the personal data of your own customers, you are the Data Fiduciary and we act as your processor: we store and process it on your instructions so that we can provide the CRM and voice features to you. You must have a lawful basis for entering a customer's details, must tell your customers how you use this app to handle their information, and must not upload data you have no right to hold. We delete a business's customer records when you delete them or when you close the business listing, subject to §6. If a customer of yours contacts us directly, we will route their request to you and assist you in answering it.

3.6 Payments and subscriptions

We use Razorpay as our payment gateway, and Google Play Billing where a purchase is made through the Play Store. We receive and store: the payment or purchase identifier, the amount, the plan or product purchased, the status, the receipt or invoice number, the refund record, and the mandate identifier for auto-renewing plans. Your name, mobile number and email are passed to the gateway so it can raise the charge and issue a receipt.

We never receive or store your card number, CVV, UPI PIN, bank account number or net-banking credentials. Those are handled entirely by Razorpay or by Google, under their own privacy policies.

Where a subscription auto-renews, the mandate is held by the gateway, not by us. Cancellation and refund handling are described in our Refund & Cancellation Policy and Subscription & Billing Terms.

3.7 Device and technical data

We do not operate a third-party crash-reporting SDK — no crash data is sent to Sentry, Crashlytics or any similar service. When the app hits an unexpected error, our own servers record the error's type, the screen it happened on, your app version, your phone model and Android/iOS version, and the error message and stack trace. We need those last two to actually fix the fault; a fingerprint alone tells us a screen broke and never why.

Because an error message can contain personal data that happened to be in memory at the moment of the fault, both the message and the stack trace pass through automated redaction before they are stored. Phone numbers, email addresses, authentication tokens and long digit sequences (such as card or Aadhaar numbers) are replaced with [redacted]. This runs on our servers, so it applies regardless of what the app sends.

These records are visible only to our super administrators, are kept for 90 days from the last time that error occurred, and are never sold or shared.

3.8 Analytics

Analytics run through two separate sinks, and they differ in what they can identify:

• Google Firebase Analytics. We record a screen_view event as you move between screens, plus a closed list of product events (search performed, business viewed, purchase started or completed, notification opened, voice session started, paywall viewed, nudge opened or dismissed, app error, and a few others). After you sign in we set your member id as the Firebase user id and attach two user properties: your role and your area id. Firebase can therefore associate this activity with a pseudonymous identifier for you. Google processes it under its own terms, and it is subject to Firebase's own retention settings.
• Our own servers. The same events are batched and sent to us, where we store only daily aggregate counts — how many times an event fired and how many distinct members fired it. Event labels are deliberately kept low-cardinality; a member id may never be used as a label. We do not keep a per-member browsing history on our own infrastructure.

We also record advertisement impressions so we can count how often an ad was shown and report and bill accurately, and we derive an interest profile from what you engage with. It orders what you see inside the app and, while Offers from nearby shops is on, decides whether a SUPREME shop's offer notification is relevant to you (at most one a day). Shops never see your interest profile — only how many members an offer reached.

Turning off analytics collection entirely is not currently offered in-app. If you want your Firebase analytics identity cleared, sign out — that clears the identifier on your device — or write to the Grievance Officer.

3.9 Addresses and places you save

Several features are about a place, so they ask you for one: the address of a business you list, the address of your home when you invite the Parayanam Mandali to it, and the venue of an event or an invitation. You can type these, or use the map picker — search for a place, or drag the pin.

What we store is what you chose: the address text, the Google place identifier, the latitude and longitude of the pin, and for a home visit the optional flat or floor, landmark and access note you add so people can find the door. This is content you entered, not a reading of where your phone was. It is kept for as long as the listing, request, event or invitation it belongs to, is visible to exactly the people who can see that record, and is deleted when you delete it.

The address search and the pin-to-address lookup are provided by Google (Places API and Geocoding API). Those requests are made by our server, not by your phone: Google receives the text you typed, the place you picked and the coordinates of the pin, but not your name, your phone number, your account or your device's network address. Google's handling of that request is governed by its own terms. With no key configured every picker falls back to typing the address by hand, and nothing is sent to Google at all.

3.10 Permissions we request on your device

We ask for each of these at the moment you first use the feature, and the app works without them — you simply cannot use that feature.

We do not collect your contact list, your call log, your SMS, your precise location in the background, or any data from other apps. The app does not request the "draw over other apps" permission; it is explicitly blocked.

3.11 AI features, and what is sent to AI providers

When you use an AI feature — the assistants, occasion planning, image and invitation generation, greeting text, translation, or the business AI team — the text of your request and the context needed to answer it are sent to a third-party AI provider, processed there, and the result returned to you. Where you attach a photograph (for example a shop photo used as a reference for a generated card), that image is sent too.

Search index. So that assistants can answer questions like "find a carpenter in my area", we convert community records into numerical representations ("embeddings") and store them in a specialist search database run by Qdrant Cloud. The collections indexed this way include member profiles, family records, business listings, posts, events, satrams, calendar entries, notifications, help articles and CRM records. The text sent for indexing is generated from records you or your community have already created. This index is hosted on servers in Australia (§5.4).

Voice calls. Two different technical paths exist, and they differ in who hears the audio:

• ElevenLabs path — your device streams audio directly to ElevenLabs. Our servers never receive the audio. ElevenLabs holds the recording on its own systems, and we can retrieve it from them on demand for support or dispute handling.
• Gemini Live path — audio is relayed through our servers to Google so that our assistant can perform actions during the call.

In both cases, after the call ends we store a transcript, a summary (in English and Telugu), the detected intent and sentiment, the caller's number, the duration and cost in minutes, and any lead or follow-up record the call produced. We do not store the raw audio recording on our own servers.

3.12 What we do NOT collect

We do not collect data about you from data brokers, we do not track you across other apps or websites, we do not use advertising identifiers for cross-app tracking, and we do not build profiles for sale.

4. Why we process your data (purposes)

We process personal data only for these purposes, and only on the basis of the consent you give at registration and at each permission prompt, or where a legitimate use permitted by law applies (for example, responding to a medical emergency, or complying with a legal obligation):

1. Running your account — registering you, verifying your number by OTP, signing you in, keeping your session valid, and letting you edit your profile.
2. The community — the member directory, the gotra network, family circles, the member ID card, area feeds, events, festivals, parayanam and community campaigns.
3. Businesses and commerce — listings, reviews, visiting cards, promotions, the CRM and voice receptionist, and telling a business owner (on eligible plans) that a member viewed their page.
4. Celebrations and invitations — generating greetings, invitations and celebration experiences, and delivering per-guest invitation links.
5. AI features — answering your questions, planning occasions, generating images and designs, searching community records, and voice assistance.
6. Payments — taking payment, managing auto-renewal, issuing receipts, handling refunds, and preventing payment fraud.
7. Notifications — celebration reminders, community announcements, business offers and subscription notices, in your chosen language.
8. Safety and moderation — investigating reports, removing content that breaks our rules, and blocking abuse.
9. Security and fraud prevention — rate limiting, OTP and sign-in lockouts, audit logging of administrator actions, and detecting misuse.
10. Improving the app — aggregate usage counts, and error diagnostics.
11. Legal compliance — tax, accounting, and responding to lawful requests from a court or authorised government agency.

We will not use your personal data for a new purpose that is materially different from these without asking you first.

5. Who can see your data

5.1 Other members

• Your profile — name, area, gotra, profession, photographs and the optional fields you filled in — is visible to signed-in members of the Vasavi Community. It is not public and is not indexed by search engines.
• Your posts, comments, reviews and community photographs are visible to members, primarily within your area.
• Your blood group is visible only if you switched visibility on.
• Your family relationships are visible according to your Family Privacy settings, and only where both members have declared the link.
• Businesses see only how many people viewed their page. A business sees who you are only after you contact it — a message, a call, a WhatsApp or contact tap, a quote, callback or booking request, or saying you are interested.
• Invitation links you publish and share are viewable by anyone who has the link. Treat a shared invitation link as public.

5.2 Administrators

Area administrators and super administrators can view and moderate member content in order to run the community. Sensitive administrative actions are recorded in an audit log. Business-wide administrative powers (approvals, pricing, taxonomy, commerce) are restricted to super administrators only.

5.3 Service providers (Data Processors)

We share the minimum necessary data with the following providers, each under a contract requiring them to protect it and to process it only on our instructions:

This is the complete list of processors as at the effective date. If we add or change a processor we update this table and, where the change is material, the Data Safety declaration on the Google Play store listing in the same release.

5.4 Transfers outside India

Several providers above process data on servers outside India — in particular the AI providers, and the Qdrant Cloud search index, which is hosted in Australia. Where that happens we rely on the provider's contractual commitments to protect the data and to process it only on our instructions, and we do not transfer data to any country to which such transfer is restricted by the Central Government.

5.5 We do not sell your data

We do not sell, rent or trade your personal data. We do not share it with third-party advertising networks or data brokers.

5.6 Legal disclosure

We may disclose personal data where we are required to by law, by a court order, or by a lawfully authorised government agency, and where necessary to protect the safety of a person or to enforce our Terms.

6. How long we keep it

7. Your rights

Under the DPDP Act you may, at any time:

• Access — obtain a summary of the personal data we hold about you and the processing we carry out.
• Correct, complete, update — most fields you can edit yourself in the app; for the rest, ask the Grievance Officer.
• Erase — request deletion of your personal data. See §8.
• Withdraw consent — as easily as you gave it. You can turn off any device permission in Android or iOS settings, turn off Smart Nudges in the app, or write to the Grievance Officer. Withdrawing consent stops future processing; it does not undo processing already lawfully carried out, and some features will stop working.
• Nominate — nominate another individual to exercise these rights on your behalf in the event of your death or incapacity. Write to the Grievance Officer.
• Grieve — raise a complaint with our Grievance Officer, and if unsatisfied, with the Data Protection Board of India.

We respond to rights requests within 30 days. To exercise a right, write to yealisettynikhil@gmail.com from the mobile number or email registered on your account, or use the in-app path described in §8.

8. Deleting your account and your data

You can delete your account yourself, from inside the app:

• In the app: Profile → Settings → Delete Account. You confirm with your 4-digit PIN, because the action cannot be undone.
• By email: yealisettynikhil@gmail.com — write from the mobile number or email registered on your account.

8.1 What happens immediately

Deletion is not queued for later. As soon as you confirm:

1. Any active subscription is closed and auto-renewal is stopped at the gateway first, so that nothing can continue to charge a deleted account.
2. Your account record is deleted, including your name, phone number, email, PIN hash, date of birth, gotra, blood group, photographs and push token.
3. The following are deleted with it: your posts, comments, business listings, milestones, notifications, japa and parayanam records, AI creations, your interest profile, your event RSVPs and your session tokens.
4. You are removed from event attendee lists, poll votes, trip participant lists and community groups.

An audit record that a deletion took place survives, because a compliance trail must outlive the account it refers to. It records the action, not your content.

8.2 What needs a request

A small set of records is not reached by the automatic cascade, because each of them belongs to a shared context rather than to your account alone:

• direct, group and business chat messages you sent to other people;
• declared family relationships;
• reviews you left on other members' businesses;
• invitations you created and their guest lists;
• voice-call transcripts, summaries and lead records;
• CRM customer records held by a business you owned.

Tell us at yealisettynikhil@gmail.com — or say so when you request deletion — and we will delete or irreversibly anonymise these within 30 days. We are working to bring all of them into the automatic path.

8.3 What we keep, and why

Payment, invoice, refund and tax records are retained for 8 years from the end of the relevant financial year, because Indian tax and company law requires it. They are kept for that purpose only. Moderation records may be retained for up to 3 years, so that an account blocked for abuse cannot simply re-register.

Deleted data may persist in an encrypted disaster-recovery backup until that backup expires (at most 6 months). Backups are never used for ordinary operations, and if we ever restore from one we re-apply completed deletions.

Cancel any active subscription before deleting, and note that a purchase made through Google Play must also be cancelled in your Play Store account if you want it to stop renewing there.

9. Your duties

The DPDP Act places duties on you too. You must not impersonate another person when providing personal data, must not suppress material information, and must not raise a false or frivolous grievance. Providing verifiably false information may result in your account being suspended.

10. Children

Accounts on Vasavi Community are for individuals aged 18 and above.

Our community features naturally involve families. If you enter information about a child — a child's name, date of birth, photograph, or their relationship to you — you may do so only if you are that child's parent or lawful guardian, and by doing so you consent on the child's behalf as required by the DPDP Act. We do not knowingly show a child's data to anyone outside the family circle in which it was declared, and we do not use a child's data for tracking, behavioural monitoring or targeted advertising.

If you believe a child has registered an account, or that a child's data has been entered without a parent's consent, write to yealisettynikhil@gmail.com and we will remove it.

11. Security

We protect your data with:

• sign-in by mobile number and a BCrypt-hashed PIN that is never transmitted back to any client, with automatic lockout after repeated failed attempts;
• OTP hardening — codes live in memory only, expire in 5 minutes, are destroyed after 5 wrong guesses, and are capped at 8 per number per day, so that a forgotten-PIN reset cannot be brute-forced into an account takeover;
• signed session tokens that a super administrator can revoke instantly, held on your device in the operating system's encrypted secure storage;
• a single input-sanitisation chokepoint that strips zero-width, bidirectional and tag characters from user input;
• rate limiting on sensitive endpoints;
• HTTPS in transit and encryption at rest at our database and media providers;
• AI provider credentials held encrypted, not in plain configuration;
• explicit protection of write-only fields — the PIN hash, the failed-attempt counters and the push token can never appear in an API response;
• an audit log of sensitive administrative actions;
• role-based access control, with the most sensitive powers restricted to super administrators.

No system is completely secure. Keep your PIN private, never share an OTP with anyone — including someone claiming to be from our team, who will never ask for it — and tell us at once if you think your account has been misused.

If a personal data breach occurs, we will notify each affected Data Principal and the Data Protection Board of India without delay, in the manner and within the timelines the DPDP Rules require.

12. Changes to this Policy

We may update this Policy. The current version, with its effective date, is always available at this address and in the app. Where a change materially affects how we use your data, we will notify you in the app and, where the law requires it, ask you to consent again before the change applies to you.

13. Contact