Privacy Policy

Last updated 16 September 2026

This policy explains what CulturalPanvel collects about you, why, who can see it, and what you can do about it. It covers the CulturalPanvel mobile app and the services behind it.

1. The short version

• We collect what the app needs to work: who you are, what you post, and what your device needs to receive notifications.
• We do not sell your data, and we do not use it for advertising.
• Your mobile number is never shown to other members unless you explicitly turn it on for a listing.
• Content you post is checked by an automated system before it appears.
• You can pause or delete your account from inside the app.

2. What we collect

Account information

• Your display name, which is required, and which other members see.
• Your email address, from your Google account when you sign in that way.
• Your mobile number, when you sign in by one-time password. It is held by Firebase Authentication as your sign-in credential.
• Optionally, a profile photograph, a cover photograph, and the Panvel area you associate yourself with.
• When your account was created and when you last signed in.

Content and activity

• Posts, comments, likes and follows in the community feed.
• Listings you create — a Homepreneur business, music group or social group — including the contact person, mobile number, address, area and description you enter, and whether you consented to the number being shown.
• Events you organise, and competition entries you submit, including their photographs, video and description.
• Your daily quiz attempts, scores and points.
• Reports you make about other people’s content, including the reason and any note, and a snapshot of what you reported.

Device and technical information

• A notification token for each device you sign in on, with the platform and app version, so notifications reach the right phone.
• A record of errors the app hits — an error reference, which operation failed, the message, and which screen you were on. This is used to diagnose a problem you report, which is why the app shows you the reference rather than the raw error.

CulturalPanvel does not collect your location, does not read your contacts, and does not include advertising or third-party analytics trackers.

3. Why we use it

• To create your account and sign you in.
• To show your content to the community, and other people’s content to you.
• To review content against the community rules, and to act on reports.
• To send you notifications about activity that involves you, in your chosen language.
• To verify that a listing’s contact number is real, by one-time password.
• To keep an administrative record of privileged actions — role changes, suspensions, removals, ownership transfers — so those decisions can be accounted for.
• To diagnose faults, keep the service secure, and prevent abuse.

4. What other people can see

Public to every member of the app:

• Your display name and profile photograph, wherever your content appears.
• Your posts, comments, published listings, events and published competition entries — including any photographs and video in them.
• Your listing’s contact number, but only if you turned on contact consent for that listing. It is off unless you switch it on.

Not shown to other members:

• Your email address.
• Your sign-in mobile number.
• Your quiz scores, your reports, and content of yours that is awaiting review, was rejected, or was removed.

Two exceptions are worth stating plainly. Administrators and moderators can see your name and email address when reviewing your content, handling a report, or looking up an error you reported. And if you transfer ownership of a listing to another member, you and they each see the other’s name and email address, because a transfer needs both of you to know who the other is.

5. Automated content review

Posts and comments are held briefly and reviewed by an automated system before they are published. Images are reviewed when you upload them, before they are attached to anything.

To do this, the text or image is sent to Google’s Gemini service, which returns a verdict. We keep a record of that verdict — the outcome, the categories it raised, the model used and how long it took — so that decisions can be reviewed and overturned by a person. Image verdicts are remembered by a fingerprint of the image, so the same picture is not sent for review twice.

Automated review can be wrong. A moderator can publish something it blocked, or remove something it allowed, and you can appeal a decision by writing to culturalpanvel@gmail.com.

6. Notifications

Notifications are sent through Firebase Cloud Messaging to the devices you have signed in on. You choose English or Marathi in the app, and you can switch off notifications for CulturalPanvel in your phone’s settings at any time. Signing out or pausing your account stops them.

7. Who we share it with

We do not sell your data and we do not share it for advertising. We do rely on service providers to run the app:

• Google Firebase — sign-in, the database, server functions and push notifications. Your account and content are stored in Google Cloud’s Mumbai region (asia-south1).
• ImageKit — stores and serves the photographs in the app. Uploads are authorised by our server, not by the app itself.
• Amazon Web Services — stores competition entry videos, in the Mumbai region (ap-south-1), in a private bucket that is not publicly readable.
• Google Gemini — the automated content review described in section 5.

We may also disclose information where the law requires it, or where it is necessary to investigate a serious breach of the Terms of Service or to protect someone’s safety.

Contacting a Homepreneur or group may open WhatsApp or your phone’s dialler. What happens there is governed by those apps, not by this policy.

8. On your device

The app keeps a copy of recently viewed content on your phone so it opens quickly and still shows something when you are offline. It also holds competition entry drafts, including the photographs and video you picked, until they finish uploading.

This local copy is cleared when you sign out, and when your role changes. Content that depends on who you are — moderation queues, administrative screens — is never written to it.

9. Security

Access to your data is enforced on our servers rather than in the app, so it cannot be bypassed by a modified client. Ownership is always taken from your verified sign-in, never from something the app sends. Server keys are held in Google Secret Manager. Competition videos are served through short-lived links issued only to people entitled to watch them.

No service can promise perfect security, and we do not. If you believe your account has been accessed by someone else, write to culturalpanvel@gmail.com.

10. How long we keep it

Your account and content are kept while your account exists.

Pausing your account hides your listings, posts, comments and events and stops notifications. Nothing is deleted, and reactivating restores it.

Asking for deletion starts a thirty-day window. During it your content is hidden and your pending transfers are cancelled, and signing in and cancelling undoes all of it. After thirty days:

• your name, email, photographs, area, points and badges are permanently replaced with anonymous placeholders;
• your sign-in credential is deleted, so the account can no longer be used;
• your likes and follows are deleted outright, so they stop counting towards other people’s content; and
• your listings are marked as having no owner and passed to an administrator, rather than being destroyed, so that a business or group the community relies on is not lost.

Three things are kept on purpose. Reports made about content are kept, including the snapshot of what was reported, because a report is still a report after the person who made it has left. The administrative record of privileged actions is kept, because a record that erases its own subject is not a record. And your posts, comments and events are hidden rather than erased, because they are woven into other people’s conversations. All of these point at an anonymised account, not at you by name.

Because the account row is anonymised in place rather than deleted, this step cannot be reversed — there is nothing left to restore from.

11. Your choices

• Edit or delete your own posts, comments, listings, events and entries at any time.
• Turn a listing’s contact number on or off whenever you like.
• Change your notification language, or switch push off.
• Pause your account, and reactivate it when you want to.
• Delete your account, and change your mind within thirty days.

For anything else — a correction, a question about what we hold, or a complaint about how your data has been handled — write to culturalpanvel@gmail.com and we will respond.

12. Children

CulturalPanvel is not intended for children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect their information. If you believe a child under 13 has an account, write to culturalpanvel@gmail.com and we will remove it.

13. Changes to this policy

When this policy changes, the date at the top of this page changes with it, and significant changes will be announced in the app.

14. Contact

Questions about this policy, or about your data: culturalpanvel@gmail.com