Privacy

Last reviewed when this page was published. Voice of Bharath is run by the organisation named at the foot of this page, and this notice explains what it holds about you.

Reporting a problem or an idea

Reporting asks for nothing about you. No name, no phone number, no email address, no account. A report is shown under a throwaway alias.

What is stored with a report: the words you wrote, the area you chose, the category, the photograph if you added one, and the time. Nothing in that identifies you by name.

A one-way fingerprint of your browser and network address is stored with each report. It cannot be turned back into an address or a person. It exists so that one person cannot flood the board with hundreds of reports in a minute, and for nothing else.

Position

If you tick the box to add your location, coordinates are recorded with the report.

The public sees that position rounded to roughly 500 metres — the neighbourhood, not the doorway. It is never shown exactly on the site, and never printed on the photograph.

The exact position is used in two places. Moderators see it, because a report cannot be judged without knowing where it is. And it is included in the monthly summaries sent to the offices that cover the area, because a Tahsildar cannot find a broken culvert from a circle five hundred metres wide, and a report nobody can find helps nobody.

Those summaries carry the problem and its position. They carry nothing about the person who reported it, because nothing of that kind is held.

Photographs

Every photograph is rewritten when it arrives, which removes what the camera wrote into it: GPS coordinates, the make and model of the phone, its serial number, and the original timestamps.

The photograph's own GPS is only read at all if you ticked the location box. Without that tick it is discarded unread.

Do not photograph faces, number plates or anything showing who lives where, and do not write names or phone numbers into a report. A moderator will reject anything that does.

Checking on your report

Each report is given a reference and an access code. Both are needed to see it. The reference alone shows nothing, so nobody can work through the numbers and read other people's reports.

Volunteers

Volunteering is different, and it is worth being plain about it. A volunteer gives a name, an email address, a phone number and the taluk they cover, and creates a password.

Public: the name, the area, the membership number, anything written in the "about" line, and any photograph added.

Not public, ever: the email address and the phone number. They are used to confirm the account, to reset a password, and for moderators to make contact. They are not shown on the site, not given to anyone reporting a problem, and not passed to anyone else.

A volunteer may ask for the account to be closed at any time by writing to support@voiceofbharath.com. The account and its personal details are then deleted. Anything already published under that name stays, because it forms part of a public record others may have relied on; the name can be removed from it on request.

Who else sees any of this

Nobody. The data is not sold, not shared with advertisers, and not passed to third parties for their own purposes.

Two outside services are used, and only these:

The hosting company stores the site and its database, as any host must.

When the position lookup is switched on, coordinates alone are sent to OpenStreetMap to find the name of the place. No report text and nothing about the reporter is sent, and each set of coordinates is only ever sent once.

There is no advertising, no analytics profiling, and no tracking of readers across other sites.

How long things are kept

Published reports and their photographs are kept while they remain useful as a public record.

Sign-in attempt records are cleared after a day. Rejected reports are kept for a limited period so a decision can be reviewed, and then removed.

Asking about your own data

Write to support@voiceofbharath.com. Because reports hold nothing that identifies a person, a report can normally only be found again with its reference and access code. Volunteers can ask for a copy of what is held about them, ask for it to be corrected, or ask for the account to be deleted.

Children

The site is not aimed at children. Nothing on it asks a reporter's age, and nothing should be reported that a child would need to identify themselves to report.

Changes

If this notice changes in a way that matters, the change will be noted on the site rather than made quietly.