Privacy Policy

1. Who We Are

Courtship is a private matchmaking service for unmarried adults in India seeking a life partner for marriage. Our purpose is matrimonial — not casual dating. We operate with a high bar for identity verification and data stewardship.

The Data Fiduciary for your personal data — the company that decides why and how it is processed, and that is answerable for it — is:

2. Data We Collect

We collect personal data that you provide directly, as well as data generated through your use of the platform.

2.1 Identity and Dossier Data

• Full legal name
• Date of birth
• Gender
• Phone number
• Email address (optional)
• Hometown and organisation name / employer (both encrypted at rest with AES-256-GCM)
• Current city
• Educational background
• Height, and other self-reported attributes

2.2 Photographs, Selfie and Identity Documents

• Profile photographs you upload. Location data embedded by your camera is stripped before the photograph is stored.
• A selfie, used to check that your profile photographs are of the same person. The selfie and the facial measurements taken from it are biometric information. The selfie is held in a private storage area and is never shown on your profile or to another member; the facial measurements taken from it are held only in the memory of our servers, are never written to disk or to a database, and are never used more than five minutes after they are taken.
• One government identity document, photographed by you. We accept a passport, a driving licence, a PAN card or a voter ID. We do not accept Aadhaar. An Aadhaar card is refused on your phone before anything is sent to us, and refused again on our servers if one reaches them.

How the document is processed. The photograph of your document is sent to Google Cloud’s Gemini service on servers in Mumbai, India, which reads three things from it: your name, your date of birth and your gender. Google commits that this machine-learning processing takes place within India and that your image is not used to train any model. The image is held only in memory for the few seconds this takes.

We never store the document image. It is never written to disk, never placed in any log, and never shown to another member. We do not read, extract or store the document number, your address, or anything else printed on the document. The photograph printed on the document is not extracted and is not compared with anything.

We keep only your verification status, your Verification Trust Score, and the name, date of birth and gender read from the document — all three of which are encrypted at rest. You can withdraw your verification consent at any time in Settings → Privacy; we then delete those fields and your verification status returns to unverified.

2.3 Preferences and Matching Data

• Partner preference settings (age range, location, etc.)
• Connection requests sent and received
• Connection status (pending, accepted, closed)

2.4 Communication Data

• Chat messages exchanged with your connections — stored securely and accessible only to the participants
• Any content you share within the platform’s private Sanctuary space

2.5 Technical and Usage Data

• Device type, OS version, and app version
• Session identifiers and authentication tokens
• Product analytics through PostHog (feature usage, screen views). These events carry your member ID, which is a random identifier rather than your name. That makes them pseudonymous personal data, not anonymous data, and they are covered by this policy. Analytics events never carry your name, phone number, email address, photographs or free-text answers.
• Error and crash reports through Sentry. These carry your member ID, your onboarding stage and the technical details of the fault. Request bodies, headers and cookies are stripped before an error report leaves the server.
• On the courtship.club website: Vercel Analytics and Vercel Speed Insights, which record page views and page-performance measurements.
• If you fill in a form on the courtship.club website — the waitlist form or the survey — what you type is submitted to Google Forms and Google Apps Script respectively and is held in the associated Google spreadsheet, not in the app database. The waitlist form collects a name and an email address. This is website data and is separate from any member account.

2.6 Verification Data

• Verification Trust Score — a numeric score derived from your completed verification steps
• Verification status and tier stored in your member record, and the record of each verification attempt

3. Purpose, Legal Basis and Consent

Our legal basis under the DPDPA is your consent. We ask for it at the point of collection, screen by screen, with a separate and distinct agreement for:

• your selfie and the facial measurements taken from it — biometric information, which today also requires your prior consent under the Information Technology (Reasonable Security Practices and Procedures and Sensitive Personal Data or Information) Rules, 2011; and
• your identity document.

Each of those screens appears before the camera opens and tells you what is collected, why, where it is processed and by whom, how long we keep it, and how to withdraw. You may decline either one. If you do, you remain unverified and nothing else about your membership changes.

Product analytics is switched on by default when you install the app. You can turn it off yourself in Settings → Privacy → Share usage analytics. Turning it off stops analytics on your account and deletes what we have collected: this phone stops sending at once, and your other phones stop the next time the app starts; our servers stop sending within 15 seconds; and our nightly run asks our analytics service to erase the data it holds (the analytics service deletes the events themselves in a weekly batch). The analytics service, PostHog, is hosted in the European Union.

We do not use your data for advertising, profiling for commercial purposes unrelated to matchmaking, or any purpose not listed above.

4. Data Retention

We retain your personal data only as long as necessary to fulfil the purposes described in this policy:

• Active accounts: All personal data is retained while your account is active and your membership is in good standing.
• Account deletion: When you request account deletion in the app (see how to delete your account), your data enters a 30-day grace period during which your profile is withdrawn from the member gallery and the account is still recoverable. At the end of the 30 days a scheduled job deletes your profile photographs and your selfie from storage, your dossier, your verification records, your connections and your login record, and asks our analytics service to erase your analytics data; the analytics service deletes the events in a weekly batch, so they go within about a week after that. When you delete your account, all your information is deleted, except records the law requires us to keep for a fixed period, listed below.
• Identity document images: never stored. The image is read in memory and discarded within seconds. There is no deletion period because there is nothing to delete.
• Verification records: the name, date of birth and gender read from your document, together with your verification status and score, are retained until you delete your account or withdraw your verification consent (Section 5). There is no other fixed expiry.
• Chat messages: retained while your account exists and deleted when your account is deleted. Closing a connection ends the conversation and makes it unreachable to both members; it does not by itself delete the messages.
• Payment records: the law requires us to keep the record of a payment. After you delete your account it no longer identifies you.
• Error reports: carry only your member ID and the technical details of the fault, and expire automatically.
• Processing logs: where the Digital Personal Data Protection Rules, 2025 require logs of processing to be kept, we keep them for the one-year period the Rules set.
• Reports and moderation records: retained while your account exists. Where we remove content or restrict access to it, the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021 require us to keep the associated information for at least 180 days.

5. Your Rights Under the DPDPA

As a Data Principal under the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023, you have the following rights. Most you can exercise yourself in the app, as set out below. For a complaint, or for anything the app cannot do, contact the Grievance Officer named in Section 11 and tell us the phone number registered to your account, so we can identify you.

• Right of Access: You may download the personal data we hold about you in the app, from Settings → Privacy → Download my data. The purposes for which it is processed are set out in Section 3.
• Right to Correction: You may request correction of inaccurate or incomplete personal data. Most fields you can edit yourself in the app, from your profile. Your name, date of birth and gender are checked against your identity document and are locked once your dossier is sealed; we do not edit them by hand. Before your dossier is sealed, if your name is wrong, verify again with your document and the name on it replaces the one you entered. After it is sealed, a name that differs from your document is not changed automatically; the app tells you it will be reviewed with you. If your date of birth or gender is wrong, delete your account and register again (see how to delete your account). Section 2 of our Terms of Service sets out the same route. This right is given to you by the Act and nothing in our Terms overrides it.
• Right to Erasure: You may delete your account yourself in the app, as set out in how to delete your account. Deletion is carried out at the end of the 30-day grace period described in Section 4.
• Right to Grievance Redressal: You may file a complaint with our Grievance Officer (Section 11). We acknowledge within 24 hours and resolve within 15 days.
• Right to Withdraw Consent: You may withdraw consent at any time in Settings → Privacy, as easily as you gave it. You do not have to delete your account to withdraw. Withdrawing your verification consent deletes the name, date of birth and gender read from your document, returns your status to unverified, and is confirmed to you in the app. Withdrawal does not affect processing already carried out before you withdrew.
• Right to complain to the Data Protection Board: If you are not satisfied with how we have handled your grievance, you may complain to the Data Protection Board of India.

To exercise any right, contact grievance@courtship.club.

6. Data Sharing and Disclosure

We never sell your personal data. We do not share your data with third-party advertisers, data brokers, or marketing platforms.

We share your data only in the following limited circumstances:

• With your connections: When you accept a connection, a limited portion of your profile (as configured by you) is shared with that connection.
• With our Curator: A Curator is a person authorised by us to review reported content, photographs held for review, and profiles flagged for checking. Today that is the founder; Courtship is a single-person company. A Curator can see profile data and reported content for that purpose only, and is bound by confidentiality obligations and access controls. A Curator does not choose who you meet — you choose.
• With service providers (Data Processors): We use the following providers, who process data on our behalf under data processing agreements and may not use your data for their own purposes:
  • Supabase — database, authentication, and private file storage for your dossier, photographs and selfie. Hosted in the Mumbai region.
  • Google Cloud — two roles. It hosts our application servers in the Mumbai (asia-south1) region. It also performs the identity-document reading described in Section 2.2, through Google’s Gemini service in that same Mumbai region, under Google Cloud’s data processing terms.
  • Cloudflare — the network edge through which requests to our API travel. Encrypted traffic terminates at Cloudflare’s network before being re-encrypted to our servers.
  • Vercel — hosting for the courtship.club website, and the website analytics and performance measurements described in Section 2.5.
  • Google Workspace — the waitlist form and the survey on the courtship.club website submit to Google Forms and Google Apps Script, and the answers are held in Google Sheets. This is website form data only; no member dossier, photograph, selfie or identity document goes there.
  • PostHog — product analytics, hosted in the European Union.
  • Sentry — error and crash monitoring, hosted in the United States.
  • Expo — delivery of push notifications to your device.
  • Apple and Google — process purchases made through the App Store and Google Play. We never receive your payment card details.
• For legal compliance: We may disclose data when required by a court order, government authority, or applicable law. We will notify you of such requests where legally permitted.

Transfers outside India. Some of these providers process personal data outside India: PostHog in the European Union; Sentry, Vercel and Expo in the United States; Apple and Google in the countries where they operate their stores; Google Workspace, for the website form data described above, in the regions Google operates that service in. Those transfers are made under each provider’s standard data processing terms. Indian law currently permits a transfer to any country that the Central Government has not restricted by order, and no such order has been made. That is the whole of the legal position; we are not claiming any assurance stronger than it.

Your identity document, your selfie and your dossier are not part of any of those transfers. They are processed in India.

7. Security Measures

We implement technical and organisational measures commensurate with the sensitivity of the personal data we process:

• Encryption at rest: Hometown, organisation name, and the name, date of birth and gender read from your identity document are encrypted using AES-256-GCM before storage.
• Encryption in transit: All data in transit is protected using TLS 1.2 or higher.
• Private storage: Profile photographs and your selfie are held in private storage areas. Your selfie is never sent to any device — it is read by our servers only, to run the photograph check. Profile photographs are served through signed links that expire after one hour. A small number of photographs uploaded before that storage area was made private are held as ordinary web addresses instead; where one of those is shown to another member it is served only if its host is on a fixed allow-list, and dropped otherwise.
• Row Level Security (RLS): Database access is governed by Supabase RLS policies that ensure each user can only access their own data and data explicitly shared with them.
• Immutability trigger: Your identity-anchor fields are protected by a database trigger that rejects any change to them while your dossier is sealed. There is no way to edit them by hand; Section 5 sets out how a wrong one is corrected.
• Authentication: Requests for personal data are validated with signed JWT tokens; no endpoint returns personal data without a verified user identity. The few endpoints that need no sign-in return only dropdown reference lists and a server health check.
• Content screening and behavioural firewall: Uploaded photographs are screened before they are stored, and a content moderation layer screens messages for harmful patterns. Audit logs record the event type and affected field — never the content that triggered the flag.

Despite these measures, no system is completely secure. If a breach affects your personal data, we will tell you without delay, in plain language, describing: the nature, extent and timing of the breach; its likely consequences for you; the measures we have taken or are taking to limit the harm and to prevent a recurrence; the steps you can take to protect yourself; and the contact details of the person who can answer your questions about it. We will also notify the Data Protection Board of India without delay, and give the Board a detailed report within 72 hours.

8. Cookies and Tracking

The Courtship mobile application does not use browser cookies. The courtship.club website sets no cookies of its own: there is no sign-in on the website, and the two measurement tools it carries — Vercel Analytics and Vercel Speed Insights, which measure page views and page performance — are operated by Vercel without cookies. We do not use advertising cookies and we do not sell or share website data with advertisers.

Two pages store something in your browser’s local storage rather than in a cookie, and it stays on your own device: the waitlist form remembers the email address you submitted so it does not ask you twice, and the survey saves your answers as you go so they are not lost. Clearing site data in your browser removes both.

In the app we use PostHog for product analytics. It is not anonymous: as Section 2.5 explains, app analytics events are tied to your member ID and are treated as personal data throughout this policy.

9. Age and Children’s Privacy

Courtship is for adults aged 18 and above, and we do not knowingly collect personal data from anyone under 18.

Your date of birth is one of the first things we ask when you join. If the date you enter puts you under 18 you cannot go further: the app will not accept the answer, and the server refuses the dossier. We do not rely on a self-declared “I am over 18” checkbox. Where you complete identity verification, your date of birth is also confirmed against a government document.

If we learn through a report that a member is under 18, we close the account at once and delete it at the end of 30 days, by the same purge described in Section 4. If you believe a minor has created an account, contact grievance@courtship.club immediately.

10. Changes to This Policy

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. When we do, we will update the version number and the “Last updated” date at the top of this page. A material change is shown to you in the app, and you accept it to continue using Courtship. We record your acceptance.

Where a change affects something you have consented to, we will ask for your consent again rather than rely on your continued use of the app. You may withdraw consent (Section 5) or delete your account at any time.

11. Grievance Officer and Contact

In accordance with the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 and the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021, we have appointed a named Grievance Officer resident in India.

The same person is the contact who can answer your questions about how we process your personal data. We are not a Significant Data Fiduciary and are therefore not required to appoint a Data Protection Officer; if that changes, this section will name one.

The Digital Personal Data Protection Rules, 2025 require us to answer a Data Principal’s grievance within 90 days. The 24 hour / 15 day commitment above is stricter, and it is the one we operate to. If you are not satisfied with our response, you may complain to the Data Protection Board of India.