Privacy Policy

This Privacy Policy (the “Policy”) describes how Bazidpur.com and the Bazidpur mobile application (together, “Bazidpur”, “we”, “us”, or “our”) collect, store, process, disclose, and protect the personal information of registered members and visitors (“you” or “Member”). By accessing the website, registering for an account, or using any feature of the platform, you acknowledge that you have read, understood, and agreed to the terms of this Policy. If you do not agree, please discontinue use of the platform.

Bazidpur is a private community heritage platform serving members and descendants of families connected to Bazidpur village (Nawada district, Bihar, India) and the wider diaspora. We process personal information in accordance with this Policy and applicable data protection law, including the Information Technology Act, 2000 and the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 of India, the General Data Protection Regulation (EU) 2016/679 (where applicable), the California Consumer Privacy Act 2018 (where applicable), and the laws of any other jurisdiction in which our Members reside.

We collect only the minimum personal information reasonably necessary to provide and maintain the Bazidpur service. Information collected falls into the following categories:

2.1 Identification Data

• First name, last name, and (optionally) date of birth
• Sex / gender
• A profile photograph, where you choose to provide one
• Your family link to Bazidpur (e.g., “grandson of [name]”)

2.2 Contact Data

• Email address
• City, state / region, and country of residence

2.3 Authentication Data

• Hashed password (we do not store passwords in plain text and cannot recover them)
• Session tokens, login timestamps, and IP address at the time of login

2.4 User-Generated Content

• Photographs and media files you upload to personal or community albums
• Forum threads, replies, and attached media
• Poetry, memoirs, and other written submissions
• Comments, likes, reactions, and reports of content posted by others

2.5 Technical Data

• IP address (for security, abuse prevention, and rate limiting)
• Device type, operating system, and application version (mobile app only)
• Approximate geographic location derived from IP, where relevant for safety

2.6 Communication Records

• Records of communications between you and our administration team via the Contact form
• Notification emails we send to you regarding your account, content reports, or moderation actions

We do not collect financial or payment information. Membership is provided free of cost.

We process your personal data on one or more of the following legal bases under applicable law:

• Your explicit consent, including consent to this Policy and the Community Guidelines at sign-up;
• Performance of our contractual obligation to provide the platform service to you;
• Compliance with legal obligations to which we are subject; and
• Our legitimate interest in maintaining a safe, lawful, and respectful community space.

Your personal data is used solely for the following purposes:

• Creating and managing your member account;
• Providing access to community features (forum, photo and video albums, family tree, poetry, memoirs, and similar);
• Displaying your name and approximate location on the community world map, only where you have provided consent;
• Communicating with you about your account, membership status, content reports, or administrative matters;
• Investigating and responding to violations of our Community Guidelines or any applicable law;
• Improving the safety, security, and usability of the platform.

We do not sell, rent, lease, or share your personal information with any third party for advertising, marketing, or other commercial purposes.

We share your personal data only with the following categories of recipients, and only to the extent strictly necessary:

5.1 Service Providers (Data Processors)

• Supabase, Inc. — authentication, user database, and real-time services, processed under Supabase's Data Processing Addendum;
• Cloudflare, Inc. (Cloudflare R2) — storage of photographs and media files;
• Vercel, Inc. — hosting of the website and serverless functions;
• Resend, Inc. — delivery of transactional and notification emails on our behalf.
• Expo (650 Industries, Inc.) — delivery of push notifications to your device via the Expo Push Service, which in turn relays to Apple Push Notification Service (APNs, iOS) and Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM, Android).

Each of these providers operates under written data-processing agreements that limit the use of your personal data to the services we have contracted them to provide.

5.2 Legal and Regulatory Disclosures

We may disclose your personal data where required to do so by law, by a court of competent jurisdiction, or by a regulatory authority — for example, in response to a subpoena, lawful court order, or law-enforcement request. We will, where legally permitted, notify you before any such disclosure is made.

5.3 Protection of Rights and Safety

We may also disclose personal data where necessary to protect the rights, property, or safety of Bazidpur, our Members, or any other person — including in connection with the investigation, prevention, or remediation of fraud, security issues, or violations of this Policy or our Community Guidelines.

We do not transfer your personal data to any third party for any other purpose.

Bazidpur provides a content-flagging mechanism on every category of user-generated content, including forum threads and replies, photo albums and individual photographs, video albums and embedded videos, poetry submissions, memoirs, comments, and any other content posted by a Member. We treat the integrity of this process as fundamental to the safety of our community.

7.1 Individual Review of Every Report

Each report submitted by a Member is reviewed individually by our administration team. No report is dismissed without examination. We do not use automated moderation as a substitute for human review.

7.2 Review Timeframe

We endeavour to review every flagged item within twenty-four (24) hours of submission. In exceptional cases involving severe or time-sensitive content (including credible threats of violence, child safety concerns, or doxxing), review and action are taken on an expedited basis.

7.3 Actions We May Take

Following review, the administration team may take any of the following actions, as appropriate:

• No action, where the content is found to comply with our Community Guidelines and applicable law;
• Issuance of a written warning to the Member who posted the content;
• Removal or hiding of the offending content from the platform;
• Temporary suspension of the Member's account, restricting access pending further review;
• Permanent termination of the Member's account, in cases of serious or repeated violations;
• Reporting to law-enforcement authorities, in cases involving suspected criminal conduct.

7.4 Notification of Outcome

Every reporter is notified of the outcome of their report by email, regardless of whether action was taken. Where action is taken against a Member, that Member is separately informed of the decision and the reason for it. We aim to close the loop on each report transparently and consistently, while protecting the confidentiality of the reporter.

7.5 Right of Appeal

A Member who disagrees with a decision made against their content or account may submit a written appeal to the administration team via the Contact page within fourteen (14) days of being notified. Appeals are reviewed by a different administrator wherever practicable, and our decision following appeal is final.

7.6 Blocking and Personal Filters

Independently of the formal flagging mechanism, Members may block any other Member directly from the platform's interface. A blocked Member's content will no longer be visible to the blocking party across the platform. Blocking is private — the blocked Member is not notified. Blocks may be reviewed and removed by the blocking Member at any time from the Profile screen.

Bazidpur deeply respects the rule of law in every country in which our Members reside or in which our services are accessed. We acknowledge that what constitutes lawful expression varies between jurisdictions, and we take this seriously.

8.1 Lawful Content Standard

Members agree that they will not upload, transmit, or store any content through the platform that:

• Violates any applicable law, statute, ordinance, or regulation of the country in which the Member resides;
• Violates the criminal laws of the Republic of India, in which our administration team is primarily located;
• Constitutes hate speech, incitement to violence, defamation, harassment, child sexual abuse material, infringement of copyright or trademark, fraudulent or misleading commercial activity, or any other content prohibited under applicable jurisdictional law.

8.2 Action Upon Notice of Local Law Violation

If the administration team is notified — whether by a Member, by a third party, or by any governmental or law-enforcement authority — of content on the platform that violates the law of the jurisdiction in which the affected Member or affected party resides, we will conduct a prompt review and, if the report is substantiated, take appropriate action. This may include removal of the content, suspension or termination of the responsible Member's account, and, where required, reporting to the relevant authorities.

8.3 No Safe Harbour for Unlawful Content

Bazidpur does not provide a safe harbour or refuge for any content that is unlawful under any applicable jurisdictional law. We reserve the absolute right to remove any such content immediately upon becoming aware of it, with or without prior notice to the responsible Member.

8.4 Specific Statutory References

Without limitation, Bazidpur operates in accordance with the following:

• The Information Technology Act, 2000, and the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021 (India);
• The Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 (India);
• The General Data Protection Regulation (EU) 2016/679, where Members reside in the European Economic Area or the United Kingdom;
• The California Consumer Privacy Act, 2018 (CCPA) and the California Privacy Rights Act, 2020 (CPRA), where Members reside in California;
• Applicable consumer protection, intellectual property, defamation, and criminal laws of jurisdictions in which our Members reside.

We cooperate fully with legitimate requests from law-enforcement agencies and judicial authorities, subject to the following:

• We require a valid legal instrument (court order, warrant, or equivalent recognised under the requesting jurisdiction's law) before disclosing any Member's personal data;
• Emergency disclosures may be made without prior legal process where there is a credible and imminent threat of harm to life or serious injury;
• We will inform the affected Member of any disclosure made about them where legally permissible.

For all law-enforcement enquiries, please contact our designated Grievance Officer (see Section 20 below).

Depending on the laws applicable in the jurisdiction in which you reside, you may have the following rights with respect to your personal data:

• The right to access the personal data we hold about you;
• The right to rectify inaccurate or incomplete personal data;
• The right to erase your personal data (the “right to be forgotten”);
• The right to restrict or object to the processing of your personal data;
• The right to data portability — to receive your personal data in a structured, commonly used, machine-readable format;
• The right to withdraw consent at any time, without prejudice to the lawfulness of processing carried out before withdrawal;
• The right to lodge a complaint with the data protection authority of the jurisdiction in which you reside.

To exercise any of these rights, please contact us via the Contact Us page or our Grievance Officer (see Section 20). We will respond to verified requests within thirty (30) days, or such shorter period as may be required by applicable law.

Members may request the deletion of their account and associated personal data at any time. Requests may be submitted via:

• The “Delete Account” feature within the mobile application (under Profile);
• The Contact page on the website;
• An email to the administration team.

Upon receipt of a verified deletion request, we will permanently delete or irreversibly anonymise your personal data within thirty (30) days, save for data that we are required by law to retain (such as records of suspected criminal conduct retained for legitimate investigatory purposes).

We retain personal data only for as long as is necessary to provide our services and to comply with our legal obligations. Specifically:

• Account data is retained for the duration of your membership, and for up to thirty (30) days following account deletion to allow accidental-deletion recovery;
• User-generated content (forum posts, photographs, etc.) is retained while your account is active. Following deletion, public-section content may, at our discretion, be anonymised rather than removed, to preserve the integrity of community conversations;
• Suspension and moderation records are retained for a minimum of two (2) years for administrative and audit purposes;
• Reports of suspected criminal conduct, including those forwarded to law-enforcement authorities, are retained indefinitely.

Members of Bazidpur are located in many countries. By using the platform, you acknowledge and consent to the cross-border transfer of your personal data to and from India and to such other jurisdictions as may be necessary for the operation of the service.

Where personal data is transferred from the European Economic Area or the United Kingdom to a third country, such transfer is conducted in accordance with the safeguards required by the General Data Protection Regulation (including Standard Contractual Clauses where applicable).

The Bazidpur mobile application may send you push notifications regarding activity relevant to your account — for example, when a member replies to a thread you started, when an admin acts on a report you filed, or when your membership application is approved. Push notifications are entirely opt-in; they are never used for advertising or marketing.

To support this feature, we store:

• A device-specific Expo push token issued by the operating system when you grant permission;
• The platform (iOS or Android) and a non-identifying device name, where available;
• Your category-by-category notification preferences (forum replies, photo comments, etc.);
• A log of notifications we have sent to you (subject, body, timestamp), accessible to you from the Notifications screen within the app.

You may toggle individual categories or disable notifications entirely from Profile → Notification Settingswithin the application. You may also revoke the operating system's push permission at any time from your device's system settings; in that case, we retain your push token until the operating system invalidates it, but no further notifications will be delivered.

We take reasonable and appropriate technical and organisational measures to protect your personal information from unauthorised access, alteration, disclosure, or destruction. These measures include:

• Encryption of data in transit using Transport Layer Security (TLS);
• Hashing of passwords using industry-standard algorithms (we do not store plain-text passwords);
• Role-based access controls to limit administrative access to personal data;
• Row-level security policies on our database to restrict data access at the record level;
• Use of reputable infrastructure providers with their own security certifications.

However, no method of transmission over the Internet or method of electronic storage is completely secure, and we cannot guarantee absolute security. You play an important role in protecting your account by choosing a strong, unique password and by keeping your sign-in credentials confidential.

On the website, we use a small number of strictly necessary cookies to maintain your login session and for cross-site request forgery protection. In the mobile application, we store an authentication token in the device's secure storage (Keychain on iOS, EncryptedSharedPreferences on Android).

We do not use third-party advertising cookies, analytics cookies, behavioural tracking, or social-media tracking pixels.

Bazidpur is intended for use by adults (eighteen (18) years of age or older) and by members of the Bazidpur family community. We do not knowingly collect personal data from children under the age of thirteen (13), or under the age of sixteen (16) within the European Economic Area.

If we become aware that a child has provided us with personal data in contravention of this Policy, we will delete that data immediately. Parents and guardians who become aware that their child has registered with the platform are requested to contact us so that the account may be removed.

In the event of a data breach that poses a risk to the rights and freedoms of affected Members, we will notify the affected Members and the competent data-protection authority without undue delay and, where feasible, no later than seventy-two (72) hours after we have become aware of the breach, in accordance with applicable law.

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time to reflect changes in our practices, in the law, or in the services we provide. The “Last updated” date at the top of this page will reflect the latest revision.

Material changes to this Policy will be brought to your attention by a notice within the application or by email to the address associated with your account. Continued use of the platform after the effective date of any revised Policy constitutes acceptance of the revised terms.

This Privacy Policy and any dispute arising out of or in connection with it shall be governed by and construed in accordance with the laws of the Republic of India, without regard to its conflict-of-laws principles. The courts of Nawada, Bihar, India shall have non-exclusive jurisdiction over any such dispute, without prejudice to the rights of Members to bring proceedings in the courts of the jurisdiction in which they reside, where required by applicable consumer protection law.

In accordance with the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021 of India, the following Grievance Officer is designated for the purpose of receiving and addressing complaints relating to this Policy or the platform:

For all other queries, please reach out via the Contact Us page on the website or in the app.