This Privacy Policy applies to all users of Pep including both the website www.thepepaap.com and the mobile application “Pep”. We may collect certain information including but not limited to your personal information when you register and utilise our services. We take your privacy seriously. This document provides you with an insight on the information we collect from you and the purpose behind such collection. This Privacy Policy forms part of the Terms of Service and all the definitions and abbreviations used herein are the same as those mentioned in the ToS. You may stop using our services if you do not agree with our privacy policy.
- What do we collect?
The method by which we collect information can be broadly classified into 2:
- Voluntary Information: these are the information that is collected through your input. You are required to provide, and we collect from you the following information:
- Your mobile phone number
- Your full name
- You may also provide a nickname as your username (optional). However, this is in addition to your full name.
- Your age, gender and city
- Your e-mail ID (optional)
- Involuntary Information: these information are collected by us in the background without your intervention except providing app permission when you install our App.
- Your IP address and your location. We do not collect your exact location but limits it to your country of residence.
- Permission to use your camera and microphone.
You may refuse to provide any of the above information which are marked as optional. However, the other information are mandatory and we shall not be able to provide you with the services in the event you fail to provide the required information.
- Why do we collect your information?
We collect only the necessary information from you to provide you with our services. You name, phone number and age are required for identification purposes. Moreover, your gender and age are absolutely necessary for the Provider(s) during counselling session. You may use a nickname in case you wish to mask your identity and only your nickname will be visible to your Provider. In such scenarios, we shall not share your real name with the Provider with the exception of events mentioned in point 3 below.
Your phone number is collected so that we can provide you with notifications, reminders and OTP services. We may send you such information via email also if an email ID is provided to us, which is optional. We collect your IP address for the purpose of determining your country of residence and state in order to provide you with a list of your nearest available Provider(s). We require permission to use the camera and microphone of your device (mobile phone, tablet, computer system) without which we cannot provide a video or audio counselling session.
Any session notes made by the Provider is also stored in our database which is absolutely necessary to provide you with a seamless experience on your next session.
All your payment transaction is being carried out by third party payment aggregator Razorpay (https://razorpay.com) We do not collect or store your financial information, your credit card or bank details.
- Sharing your information
We may share some of your information with our affiliated third party service providers to bring the service to you. We share your phone number with our bulk SMS provider and 2factor (https://.2factor.in) only for the purpose of sending you notification and OTP services. We may share your IP address with IP stack (https://ipstack.com/) to determine your approximate location and the country of residence.
We value your privacy and other than what is stated above, we do not share your information with any third party. However, we may be forced to share your data with law enforcement and other state/national authorities under the following circumstances:
- When required by a judicial or quasi judicial authorities under a warrant.
- When required by law enforcement authorities
- When required by national agencies under national/state security
- When determined by us that it is necessary for best interest of the country, state and or general public.
- Storing your information
Safe storage and adequate data security is absolutely important when it comes to protecting your privacy. Our application Pep and all its data including the data we collect from you are stored on third party cloud service – Microsoft’s Azure, which boast of a three layer security in protecting your data:
- Accepts only HTTP requests over a secure socket layer(SSL).
- A JWT based authentication mechanism is being used to allow access to Pep – Token is mandatory for each request.
- A postgres database authentication exists to access the database which is blocked for external access using IP binding
Additionally, an OTP based sign in mechanism is used to validate user authenticity.
However, we shall not in any way be liable for reasons beyond our control including but not limited to Force Majeure events like fire, flood, earthquakes, explosions, epidemics, pandemics, lockdowns, quarantine restrictions, embargoes, government actions, war, strikes, disruptions; hacking, virus and other malicious codes etc.
Your Rights
- To view your personal data which has been collected by us.
- To modify or request us to update your data in case there is a change or the information we collected has an error
- To request deletion of any or all of your data with us. However, in such case, we may not be able to provide our services to you.
If you have any queries please contact us through [[email protected]] [7025917700]