Privacy Policy

1. Consent comes before verification, always

No identity check runs without a matching consent record — captured with its purpose, scope, timestamp, IP address and the device it was taken on, before the check starts, not after. This is a legal boundary in this product, not a preference. Where a household holds the worker’s phone to help them confirm something, that assisted confirmation is recorded as assisted and naming whose device it was taken on — it is genuine consent, but it is recorded as weaker evidence than a tap on the worker’s own device.

2. What we collect

• Identity: phone number (your account identity), name, city, profile photo, and the languages and skills you choose to list.
• Verification data: Aadhaar number and e-Shram UAN, PAN details where a check requires them, and the result of police-verification checks — collected only when you consent to a specific check.
• Employment data: the households you work with, salary amounts and payment records, and tenure dates — entered by the household you work for.
• Reputation data: ratings, written and optional audio testimonials a household records about you (“vouches”).
• Consent and audit records: every consent you give or withdraw, and every disclosure of your verification result to a household.

We never generate a placeholder phone number for a real person. If a household records someone who works for them before knowing their number, that person is held as a draft with no account, no login and no profile until a real number exists for them.

3. One verification, many disclosures — each one consented

Your identity check runs once. Every household that wants to see the result afterwards is shown the stored result rather than a re-run — but you consent to each household seeing it, separately, one tap at a time. A second household reading your result is a fresh disclosure of your personal data, whoever paid for the check, and it does not happen without your say-so. You can see every household currently holding your verification, and withdraw any of them, from your account.

Verification results have a validity window before they must be re-run: Aadhaar and PAN checks for 24 months, face match for 12 months, and police verification for 6 months. You can refresh your own Aadhaar check free of charge at any time.

4. Your phone number is never public

Your phone number does not appear in any list, search result or public profile without an explicit access grant that you approve. Your public profile shows your verification badges, tenure and ratings — never your number.

5. How we keep this data safe

• Login codes (OTP) are hashed before storage and are never kept in plain text.
• Every payment webhook is signature-verified before an order is marked paid; an unsigned or forged request is rejected.
• Every administrator action — advancing a check, revealing a phone number, removing a vouch, merging two accounts — is written to an append-only audit log.
• Phone numbers are masked by default in every internal, administrative view.

6. Your rights

From your account’s privacy screen, signed in, you can export a copy of your data, withdraw any consent you have given, and request erasure of your account. An erasure request is honoured by removing your personal identifiers; a minimal record may be retained where the law requires it for audit or fraud-prevention purposes, but it is never a cosmetic soft-delete that leaves your data intact under the hood.

7. Who this is for

StandByMe is built for adults entering employment relationships in India. It is not directed at children, and we do not knowingly collect data from anyone under 18.

8. Changes to this policy

If we make a material change to how we collect or use your data, we will update this page and, where the change affects consent already given, ask for it again.

9. Contact

Questions about your data, or a grievance under the DPDPA, can be raised through WhatsApp support, reachable from every screen in the product.