What we hold, and who can see it
Written to describe what this platform actually does, field by field, rather than to cover us. If any of it turns out not to match what the software does, the software is the bug.
What is collected
Your account: name, email address, phone number, country, state, city, the Samaj you belong to, and a hashed password. Date of birth and gender when you start a matrimonial profile.
A matrimonial profile, if you make one: height, marital status, your introduction, education, career, family, community, lifestyle, languages, partner preferences, and your photographs.
Verification: the government photo ID you upload, and the record of the decision.
Payments: the amount, the currency, the provider and whether it settled. Card details never reach us.
A log of privileged actions: who did what, when, and from which address. This includes every view of an identity document.
Who can see what
The public, without signing in: the region directory, committee members and Presidents by name, and published events and announcements. Nothing about a matrimonial profile, ever, and none of it is offered to search engines.
Other signed in members: your matrimonial profile if it is approved and your membership is running. Your age rather than your date of birth. Your contact details and your employer are masked until you accept an interest from that person.
Your Samaj President: that your profile exists, what state it is in and how complete it is. Not its contents, not your photographs, not your contact details. During verification they see a watermarked image of your photo ID, and that view is recorded.
The platform: everything above, for the purposes of running the service, reviewing reports and answering your questions. Every access to a document is recorded the same way a President's is.
Who it is shared with
The payment provider, because they take the payment. The email and SMS providers, to send you what you asked for. The company hosting the servers and the object storage. Nobody else, and nothing is sold to anybody.
How long it is kept
- Identity documents: deleted 30 days after your profile is approved.
- After a membership lapses: your profile, photographs, verification and saved searches are kept for twelve months so that renewing restores everything without verifying again. After that they are erased, and we email you a month beforehand. Your account and the community site are not affected.
- The audit log: kept, and append only. It cannot be edited or deleted, including by us, because a log somebody can edit answers no question worth asking.
- Your account: until you ask us to delete it.
What you can ask for
If you are signed in, you can do two of these yourself, immediately, from your data: download a copy of everything held about you, or erase your account.
Erasing removes your matrimonial profile, every photograph, any identity document still held, your saved searches, your interests and your blocks, and clears your name, email address, telephone number, date of birth and password. What survives is a numbered record with nothing identifying on it, the payment records the platform has to keep for its own accounts, and the audit log.
The audit log stays because it exists to protect you: it is the record of who looked at your identity document, and erasing it would remove your own evidence along with your data.
For a correction, an explanation of a decision, or anything you cannot do while signed out, write to privacy@ranasamaj.org.
Security
Passwords are hashed with argon2id and never stored in a readable form. Sessions use short lived tokens that rotate, and a stolen one stops working quickly. Identity documents live in a private store with no public address. The site is served over HTTPS only.
What is still outstanding
Said plainly rather than left for somebody to discover:
- No lawyer has reviewed this page, and no data controller is named on it.
- Registration and a lawful basis under the Indian Digital Personal Data Protection Act and United Kingdom GDPR have not been established.
- Verification is carried out by volunteer Presidents rather than employees. The controls around that are real, but the arrangement itself should be reviewed by counsel.
The verification page covers identity documents in more detail.