Privacy Policy

The short version

KarmaVaani is a place to read the Bhagavad Gita, the Valmiki Ramayana and the Mahabharata, to browse temples, deities, festivals and a glossary, and to write and discuss with other readers.

Most of the site asks nothing of you. You can read all 701 verses of the Gita, all 23,291 verses of the Valmiki Ramayana, all 2,114 sections of the Mahabharata, the 3,490-temple atlas, the essays and the glossary without an account, without signing in, and without giving us your name.

You only give us information when you choose to: when you make an account, when you write something, when you become a Supporter, or when you ask one of the scripture companions a question.

This page explains each of those, in the order they happen.

Who is responsible for your data

KarmaVaani is operated by [LEGAL ENTITY NAME], at [REGISTERED ADDRESS].

For anything on this page — a question, a correction, a request to see or delete your data — write to editor@karmavaani.in.

What we collect, and why

If you never make an account

KarmaVaani's own code does not read, record, or store your IP address, a device fingerprint, or a visitor profile, and we set no advertising cookie of our own.

Two qualifications matter as much as that sentence, and we would rather you met them here than found them out later.

• Our host and our database provider keep the ordinary operational records any web server keeps — request logs and error traces. A search you run does reach them; see Search, below.
• Whether a third-party measurement or advertising tag is loaded on the site is answered under Cookies and things stored in your browser, below — not here.

When you create an account

You can sign up with an email address and a password, or with your Google account.

• With email and password: we store your email address. Your password is handled entirely by Supabase, our authentication provider. KarmaVaani's own code never sees it, receives it, or stores it.
• With Google: Google tells us your email address and the name on your Google account. We do not receive your Google password, your contacts, or anything else from your Google account.

Signing up creates one row for you, with your email address, a display name and a username. Two things happen alongside it that are easy to miss, so we will say them here rather than bury them:

• Email updates start switched on. The onboarding flow offers you a switch, and Settings carries the same one. See Emails, and how to stop them, below.
• That row later collects badges. They are awarded automatically by the database as you use the site — a first essay, ten essays, a first comment, a first discussion thread. Badges are public and appear on your profile, so a "Prolific Writer" badge tells anyone who looks that you have published ten essays or more.

Your profile

When you finish setup, or later in Settings, you may add: a display name, a username, a short bio, an avatar image URL, a location, a website, a spiritual path, a list of interests, and a preferred reading language.

All of this is optional except the display name and username, and all of it is public. Your profile page is readable by anyone, signed in or not. Please do not put anything in these fields you would not want on the open web.

Your email address is not displayed on your profile page, and no page on this site renders it. We will not go further than that, because the truth stops there: your address is stored on the same profile row as your public fields, and that row is at present readable by anyone holding the site's public key — which every browser that loads the site receives. So your address is not shown, but a determined person can currently reach it. Correcting that is a database change, not a wording change, and it is the one thing on this page we would ask you to weigh before signing up.

What you write

Posts, comments, claps, discussion threads and replies, questions and answers, and temple reviews and temple events are stored with your account, your display name and the time you wrote them. Almost all of it is public by design — that is the point of a community.

Who you follow, and who follows you, is public too. The follow list is readable by anyone, and following someone sends them a notification carrying your name.

An essay saved as a draft is stored on our servers, not just on your device. If you press "Save draft" rather than publish, the essay is written to our database like any other essay and is visible only to you until you publish it. Deleting it removes it, and it goes with your account if you close it. This is separate from the automatic draft autosave described under Cookies, which never leaves your browser.

Three things are private and visible only to you: your saved items (bookmarks of essays, shlokas and discussion threads), your reading streak, and your notifications.

If you report a post or a comment, we store the report, what you reported, and your reason. Reports are visible to you and to site moderators, not to the person reported.

Membership and donations

If you become a Supporter or send a donation, payment is handled entirely by our payment provider — Razorpay, or Stripe where it is offered.

KarmaVaani never sees your card number, CVV, UPI PIN, or bank details. Those are entered on the provider's own checkout, on the provider's own systems. There is no field anywhere on this site that asks for them.

What we store after a payment succeeds is: which plan you are on, whether it is active, which provider was used, the provider's reference for the payment, and when the current period ends. For a donation we store the amount in rupees, the provider's payment reference, and the optional message you attached to it.

What the provider receives from us is the amount, and an identifier for your account so the payment can be matched back to you. Where Stripe is used, your email address is passed along so the provider can send you a receipt. Their handling of that is governed by their own privacy policies.

What you are charged and how to stop it is set out on the Refund Policy.

Notifications

If you turn on browser push notifications, we store the push endpoint your browser gives us and the two keys needed to reach it. Our push messages carry no content — they are a signal to your device to show a standard alert. You can turn this off in Settings or in your browser at any time.

Cookies and things stored in your browser

We set no advertising cookie of our own and no third-party tracking cookie of our own.

Session cookies. When you sign in, Supabase sets cookies whose names begin with sb-. They hold your session so that you stay signed in and so that pages can be rendered for you on the server. They are what makes "signed in" mean anything. If you sign out, or clear them, you are signed out.

Local storage. Two things are kept in your own browser and never sent to us:

• your chosen reading language, so the site remembers it; and
• a draft autosave of anything you are writing, so that closing the tab mid-sentence does not lose your work. This autosave stays on your device until you publish or discard. (Pressing "Save draft" is a different thing, and does reach our servers — see What you write, above.)

Third-party tags. The site is built to load Google Analytics and Google Ads (gtag) when a measurement ID is configured, and to load nothing when it is not. A Google Ads conversion tag is, by design, an advertising identifier and cross-site tracking, so we will not make a blanket denial here.

[ANALYTICS STATUS — state plainly whether a Google tag is live in production; if it is, say whether it is an analytics tag, an advertising tag, or both, and what it measures. If an advertising tag is live, add googletagmanager.com to "Other services your browser talks to" below and do not restore any "no cross-site tracking" wording.]

[COOKIE CONSENT — the site shows no consent banner. Decide whether one is required for your audience, and either add it or record here why it is not needed.]

Search

Search on KarmaVaani works in two halves, and only one of them stays on your device.

The reference half stays with you. The scriptures, the temple atlas, the deity, festival and glossary pages, the journal essays and the site's chapter and book pages — 29,709 documents — are indexed as static files your browser downloads. Matching against them happens on your device as you type. Those keystrokes are not sent anywhere.

The community half does not. Pressing Enter loads a results page, and your query travels in that page's address (/search?q=...) so we can also look for matching community essays, discussions and questions in our database. That request is handled by our host and our database provider, and, like any web request, the query can appear in their ordinary operational logs, in your browser history, and in a referrer header.

We do not build a search history against your account, and we do not read those logs to see what anyone searched for. But we are not going to tell you nobody can see what you searched for, because for community results that is not true.

The AI companions

You can put a question to the Gita, the Ramayana, the Mahabharata, or all three at once. Here is exactly what happens.

• We do not store your questions. There is no table in our database that holds AI conversations. Nothing you ask a companion is written to your account, attached to your profile, or kept after the reply is sent.
• Your conversation lives in the browser tab. It is held in the page while you use it, and lost when you leave or reload.
• Your question is sent to the model provider. Up to the last twelve messages of the conversation — your questions and the companion's replies, each truncated at 4,000 characters — are sent to Anthropic's API together with the retrieved passages, so the companion can follow the thread. That is a whole session, not a single question. Anthropic's handling of that data is governed by Anthropic's own policies.
• Your question is also used to find passages. The text of your question is converted into a numerical representation so we can retrieve the most relevant verses to ground the answer. That happens through our hosting provider's AI service.
• Errors do not carry your question. When a request fails, the error message is logged. The question text is not.

Two cautions. First, please do not put anything sensitive — health details, financial details, anything about another person — into a question to a companion, because it travels to a third party the moment you send it. Second, the companions are study aids, not advisers: they are not a substitute for medical, legal, or mental-health help.

You should see a short form of that warning beside the question box itself, because a warning at the bottom of a privacy policy reaches nobody in time. [AI NOTICE AT POINT OF USE — /ask and /gita currently show one line beneath the chat that says answers are grounded in the text and to consult a qualified person for serious matters. It does not say the answer is machine-generated, that it can be wrong, or that the question leaves the site. Ship that notice above the input on both pages before publishing this sentence, or delete this paragraph.]

This is separate from the community Q&A. A question you post to the Q&A section is written by you, stored by us, and public.

Other services your browser talks to

Some pages load things directly from other sites. When that happens, that site can see your IP address, in the ordinary way any site you visit can.

• Temple pages fetch summaries and images from Wikipedia and Wikimedia, and map tiles from CARTO.
• Membership loads the Razorpay checkout script when you choose to pay.
• Fonts are served from our own domain, not from a font provider, so no requests leave the site for those.
• Google tag — add it to this list if one is live; see [ANALYTICS STATUS] above.

Where your data lives

• Accounts, profiles and everything you write are in a Supabase Postgres database, in the region [SUPABASE PROJECT REGION].
• The site itself runs on Cloudflare Workers, and is served from Cloudflare's network worldwide. Scripture text, the temple atlas and the search index are static files delivered from that network — they contain no personal data.
• AI answers are generated by Anthropic, and the retrieval step runs on our hosting provider's AI service.
• Emails are sent through Resend.

If you are reading this outside the region named above, your data is stored outside your country. Using the site involves that transfer.

Emails, and how to stop them

There is one switch, in Settings, called "Email me updates". It controls everything we send: the verse of the day, the weekly digest of new essays and questions, and notifications about replies and follows. Turn it off and all of it stops. Every email we send links back to that setting. As noted above, that switch starts on when you create an account.

The only email address we hold for you is the one on your account. We do not sell it, rent it, or share it for anyone else's marketing.

[NEWSLETTER FORM — the homepage shows a "Weekly Dispatch" sign-up. It validates the address, tells the visitor it worked, and then discards it: no list is created and nothing is ever sent. Do not publish this page while that is true. Either remove the form (the weekly digest already reaches account holders through the switch above) or wire it to real storage — and if you wire it up, describe that list here and how to leave it.]

How long we keep things

We are being plain here rather than reassuring: KarmaVaani has no automatic deletion schedule. What you create stays until you remove it or ask us to.

• Content you can delete yourself — posts, comments, threads, replies, questions, temple reviews, temple events, bookmarks, notifications — is gone from the live site as soon as you delete it.
• Your account and everything keyed to it stays until you ask for deletion.
• Backups are held by our database provider for [BACKUP RETENTION PERIOD], so a deleted row can persist in a backup for that long before it ages out.
• Records of payments. The two kinds behave differently today, and we would rather say so than promise a single rule. Donation records survive account deletion, no longer linked to you. Membership records are deleted along with the account — they are keyed to it and go with it. If [FINANCIAL RECORD RETENTION PERIOD, AND THE OBLIGATION THAT REQUIRES IT] requires us to keep membership records for longer, we will change how they are stored and say so here.

Your rights

You can:

• See what we hold. Most of it is already visible to you — your profile, your posts, your saved items, your streak, your follows, your membership. For anything else, ask.
• Correct it. Everything on your profile is editable in Settings.
• Take it with you. Ask and we will send you a copy of the data associated with your account.
• Delete it. See below.
• Object, or ask us to stop. Turn off email in Settings, turn off push in Settings or your browser, or write to us.

To use any of these, write to editor@karmavaani.in from the address on your account. There is no export button and no delete button in the product, so each of these is done by hand. We will respond within [RESPONSE WINDOW].

If you are not satisfied with how we handle a request, you may complain to the data protection authority for [JURISDICTION].

Deleting your account

There is currently no delete-account button in the product. Deletion is done by asking: email editor@karmavaani.in from the address on your account and say you want your account deleted.

Be clear about what deletion means here, because it is not partial:

• Your profile, your email address, your settings, your badges, your reading streak, your follows (in both directions), your saved items, your notifications and your push subscriptions are removed.
• Your public writing goes too — your posts and drafts, comments, discussion threads, replies, questions, answers, temple reviews and temple events are removed along with the account, not anonymised and left standing. Replies other people made to a thread you started go with the thread.
• Your membership record goes with the account.
• Records of donations are kept, with your account no longer linked to them.

If you want your account closed but a particular essay left up, say so in your email and we will talk about it before doing anything irreversible.

[ACCOUNT DELETION — this describes the manual process as it stands. If a self-service delete flow ships, update this section.]

Children

Reading KarmaVaani needs no account, and we collect nothing from a reader who does not have one — a parent reading the Ramayana aloud to a child is giving us nothing at all.

Accounts are different. You must be at least [MINIMUM AGE] to create one, and we do not knowingly keep information about anyone younger. Nothing in the product checks an age today; this is a rule we enforce on request rather than at signup. If you believe a child has made an account, write to us and we will remove it.

Security

Access to the database is restricted by row-level rules, so that your saved items, your reading streak and your notifications are readable only by you, and content you own is writable only by you. Payment card details never reach our systems at all.

Your profile row is world-readable, including the email address stored on it. That is a defect, not a design choice, and it is described in full under Your profile above.

We are not going to make claims we cannot back. This is a small project. We hold no security certification, we have not been independently audited, and we make no claim about any particular encryption standard beyond what our providers do on our behalf. If you find a weakness, please tell us at editor@karmavaani.in before telling anyone else, and we will fix it.

Changes to this policy

If we change how data is handled in a way that matters, we will update this page, change the date below, and tell registered members before the change takes effect — the same way we announce a change to the Terms of Use. Small corrections of wording we will simply make.

The rest of the fine print

About KarmaVaani · Terms of Use · Refund Policy · Contact

Contact

editor@karmavaani.in

[LEGAL ENTITY NAME] [REGISTERED ADDRESS] [GRIEVANCE OFFICER NAME AND CONTACT, if required in your jurisdiction]

Last updated: [EFFECTIVE DATE]. Governed by the laws of [JURISDICTION / GOVERNING LAW].

This document is a draft. It has not been reviewed by a lawyer.