Privacy Policy

At signup: your name, email address, organization/professional role (optional), and phone number (optional). If you sign up or log in with Google or Microsoft, we receive your name and email from that provider (scope: openid email profile) — we do not store a profile photo.

While you use Samachar: which articles you like, comment on, or save; your content preferences (Topics); your light/dark theme choice; and, if you join Community channels, the messages you post there.

If you enable a personalized section: the topics you've opted into and which articles matched them — this is a derived interest profile, not just the raw checkboxes you selected.

If you use the Assistant: your messages and the conversation history. The Assistant is rule-based (reminders, saved notes, a fixed set of answers) — it does not use a generative AI model and nothing you type is sent to a third-party AI provider. Any document or image you upload to it is processed locally on our server (Tesseract/PDF text extraction), not sent anywhere external.

If you link Telegram: your Telegram user ID (linked via the bot's /link command) and the content of messages you send the bot.

If you submit feedback or report a bug: your name and the text you submit — kept even if you later delete your account, so the report stays readable to whoever is resolving it (see "How long we keep it").

We do not collect payment information — there is no paid tier.

Some data necessarily leaves our own systems to make Samachar work. Each of these is a data processor acting on our instructions, not a third party we sell data to:

• Google (Gmail) — password-reset links and, if you've enabled a personalized section, the "your section is ready" email (your name, email address, and a short preview of matched article titles) are sent via Gmail's mail servers. This is a transfer of personal data outside India.
• Google / Microsoft — if you use "Sign in with Google/Microsoft," those providers authenticate you and share your name and email with us, per their own privacy policies.
• Telegram — if you link your Telegram account, messages you send our bot and replies it sends back are carried over Telegram's own servers.

We do not use third-party advertising or analytics trackers.

Separately from your own account data, some of Samachar's underlying research automatically collects publicly available contact details of individuals at OTHER organizations — specifically, grievance officer names, emails, and phone numbers that companies are legally required to publish under Indian consumer-protection and IT intermediary rules. We treat this as voluntarily/mandatorily made public information, not data collected from you or about you, and it is used only for the platform's own business-development research, not resold.

Your account data is kept for as long as your account is active. If you delete your account (the menu next to your name → Delete My Account), your account record, content preferences, and consent history are removed immediately. Some things are deliberately NOT deleted with your account, because they form part of a shared record others rely on or a conversation others participated in:

• Messages you posted in shared Community channels, and likes/comments on articles — remain visible, attributed to a deleted account.
• Feedback or bug reports you submitted — your name at the time of submission is kept with the report so it stays actionable.
• Assistant conversation history and any personalized-section data already generated are not automatically purged today; contact the Grievance Officer below if you'd like these removed on deletion and we will action it manually.

Your account data is used internally to operate Samachar. We do not sell or rent your personal data to third parties. See "Who processes it" above for the specific external processors your data passes through to make particular features work.

Under the DPDP Act, you have the right to:

• Access — request a summary of the personal data we hold about you and how it's being processed.
• Correction & erasure — correct inaccurate data, or ask us to delete it (or use the menu next to your name → Delete My Account to do this yourself, instantly, for the data covered above).
• Withdraw consent — at any time, as easily as you gave it. Withdrawing marketing consent doesn't affect your account; withdrawing account-processing consent means closing your account, since that data is what makes the account work.
• Nominate — name another person to exercise these rights on your behalf in the event of your death or incapacity.
• Grievance redressal — raise a concern with us (contact below) about how your data is handled.

Samachar is a professional platform for dispute-resolution practitioners and is not intended for anyone under 18. We do not knowingly collect data from minors.

We apply reasonable security practices proportionate to the data we hold — passwords are stored hashed, never in plain text, and access to the underlying database is restricted to the platform's operator. In the event of a personal data breach, we will notify affected users and the relevant authorities as required by law.

Ajitesh Priyadarshi
Email: Ajitesh@sama.live

Contact the Grievance Officer for any concern about how your personal data is collected, used, or processed.