Privacy Policy

Who we are

Viharnika Enterprise LLP (LLPIN ACH-6769), 11, Ishwar Krupa Society, Jagatpur Road, Chandlodiya, Ahmedabad 382481, Gujarat, India, operates BuzVault (the “app”).

We decide why and how your information is used, which makes us the data controller (the words used in Europe) and the Data Fiduciary (the words used in India’s DPDP Act, 2023). You can contact us at help@buzvault.com .

The short version

• We store the links you save and the little you tell us about yourself.
• We do not sell your data.
• The app shows ads. If you use BuzVault free, you start seeing ads from Google AdMob once you have used up your free saves. Ad companies collect their own information when they show you an ad — see Advertising. Premium subscribers never see ads.
• Your vault is private by default. Nothing becomes public until you press Share.
• We send some text from your saves to Google’s Gemini API so the app can sort and search them. We never send your private notes — see AI features.
• You can delete everything yourself, at any time — see Delete your account.
• You must be 18 or over to use BuzVault.

What we collect

If you create an account

• Email address. Used to identify your account and to sign you in.
• Password. Stored only as a one-way hash (bcrypt). We never store or see your actual password.
• Google account identifier and email, if you use Google Sign-In. We store the verified Google subject ID — a number Google assigns you, not your password.
• Display name and, if you signed in with Google, your Google profile photo URL.
• @handle and bio — only if you choose to create a public profile.
• Referral code and which plan you are on.

Always, account or not

• A device identifier we generate (a random ID), your platform (Android or iOS), and when the device was last seen. BuzVault works without an account, so this is how your saves stay yours. This is not the Android advertising ID.
• A push notification token, if you enable reminders.
• Your timezone, so reminders and the weekly digest arrive at a sensible hour.
• What you save: the link itself, its title, thumbnail image URL, platform, creator name, the description or caption taken from the public page, how long a video is, your own notes, your tags, whether you favourited it, and any reminder you set.
• How you organise: your categories and collections (boards) — their names, descriptions and colours.
• Counters. How many saves you have made against your free allowance, how many AI requests you have made today, and how many ads are due. These are counts, not histories.

If you buy a subscription

See Payments. In short: Google Play handles the money. We never see your card.

If you report content

We store what you reported, the reason, any details you typed, and your IP address — the IP solely to stop the report form being abused. If you later delete your account, the report is kept but your identity and IP are removed from it.

What we still do not collect

• No precise location (no GPS). No contacts. No photos or files from your device.
• No browsing history — only the links you deliberately save.
• We run no analytics SDK, no crash-reporting SDK and no attribution SDK in the app, and no analytics or tracking scripts on this website.

The one third-party SDK in the app is Google’s AdMob, described next.

Advertising

If you use BuzVault for free, you get a set number of saves before ads start. After that, the app shows a full-screen ad from Google AdMob every few saves. Premium subscribers never see ads.

Ads are full-screen ads between actions only. There is no ad in your vault, no banner, and nothing you have to watch to use the app.

What Google collects when it shows you an ad

We do not receive this information — it goes to Google. Google uses it to choose and measure ads:

• your device’s advertising ID (a resettable ID Android gives to ad services);
• device and app information — model, operating system version, and that the ad was requested by BuzVault;
• your IP address, from which Google derives an approximate location (roughly, your city or region — not GPS);
• how you interacted with the ad — that it was shown, and whether you tapped it;
• diagnostic information, such as whether the ad failed to load.

Google explains this in its own words here: How Google uses information from sites or apps that use our services. Its general policy is the Google Privacy Policy.

Your choices about ads

• In the EEA, the UK and Switzerland, the app asks for your choice about personalised advertising before it requests an ad, using Google’s consent form (Google’s “User Messaging Platform”). You can change that choice later in the app, under Privacy choices in Settings.
• Anywhere, you can reset your advertising ID or turn off ad personalisation in Android: Settings → Privacy → Ads (the exact path varies by phone). Google’s instructions. Turning off personalisation does not remove ads; it makes them less specific to you.
• Subscribe to Premium and ads are switched off entirely.

Payments

Premium is sold as a subscription through Google Play. Google Play takes the payment and is the merchant.

• We never see or store your card, UPI ID, bank details or billing address. There is no payment form in BuzVault.
• What we receive from Google is a purchase token (an opaque string identifying the purchase), the product and plan you bought, the order ID, the status of the subscription (active, cancelled, on hold, in a trial, in a grace period) and when it expires.
• We check that with Google’s Google Play Developer API so we can unlock Premium for the right account, and Google sends us real-time developer notifications when your subscription renews, lapses or is refunded, so your access matches what you paid for.
• We store the purchase token only as a one-way hash, plus the status and expiry. That is enough to answer “is this account Premium?” and not enough to identify you to anyone else.

Refunds are covered on our Refund Policy page.

AI features — exactly what leaves our server

BuzVault uses Google’s Gemini API to suggest a category for a save, to write an optional summary and tags, to answer “Ask your vault” questions, and to build the search index that makes meaning-based search work.

What we send, per feature:

What we never send:

• Your private notes. Not for any feature. They are yours and the AI never sees them.
• The link itself. We send the text about a save, not its URL.
• Anything identifying you — no email address, no name, no @handle, no account or device ID.

We use the paid Gemini API. Under Google’s terms for the paid service, Google does not use the text we send, or the answers it returns, to improve or train its own products. Google processes it to give us a result and for its own abuse monitoring. Google’s terms are here: Gemini API Additional Terms of Service.

Only our server ever talks to Google’s AI service. Every AI request is made from BuzVault’s own server, with our own paid-tier API key. The app on your phone never calls the Gemini API, and that key is never sent to a device — so what reaches Google is a request from us, carrying the text in the table above and nothing that identifies you or your phone.

Google’s terms for the Gemini API also require anyone using the service to be 18 or over. Our own minimum age for BuzVault is 18 (see Age), so one rule satisfies both.

Category suggestions and the search index run on saves you create even if you never open the AI screens, because sorting and search depend on them. How many AI requests you can make depends on your plan and on a daily limit.

Checking links you make public

When you make a save public — by sharing a board, or by adding the save to a board that is already shared or that belongs to someone else — we check its link against Google Web Risk for malware, phishing and unwanted software.

• Only the link being made public is sent. A link you keep private is never sent to Google — not when you save it, not later, not by any background job.
• If Google flags it, the save is hidden from every public page and stays in your private vault, in full. Nothing is deleted.
• We store the result against a one-way hash of the link and its domain — not the full link — so we do not have to ask Google again every time.
• We also keep our own list of blocked domains. A link on one of those is hidden from public pages in the same way, and that check needs no outside service.

When our staff can see your content

Our rule is that staff see counts, not content. There are exactly two exceptions:

• Content you made public — a shared board or a public profile — can be seen by staff, because anyone with the link can see it already.
• A private save that someone has reported. A reviewer cannot judge a report without seeing what was reported, so they can reveal it — and when they do, they must type a reason first, the reveal is recorded in an audit log with who did it and why, and it lasts for one screen view only.

Nothing else gives staff access to a private vault. There is no browse, no search and no export of other people’s private saves.

Why we use your information

• To run the service — storing your saves, syncing them between your devices, and showing them back to you.
• To sign you in and keep your account secure.
• To organise and search your saves — see AI features above.
• To apply your free allowance, to show ads once it is used up, and to unlock Premium if you subscribe.
• To send reminders and the weekly digest you asked for.
• To keep public content safe — handling reports, blocking, link checks, and removing content that breaks our rules.
• To meet legal obligations and to respond to lawful requests.

If the GDPR applies to you, our legal bases are: performance of a contract (running the app you asked for), legitimate interests (security, preventing abuse, enforcing the free allowance, checking links we are about to publish), consent where you opt into something specific — reminders, and personalised advertising in the EEA, the UK and Switzerland — and legal obligation where we must keep or disclose something.

If India’s DPDP Act, 2023 applies to you, we process your personal data on the basis of your consent, given when you create an account or start using the app after being shown this notice, and for the certain legitimate uses the Act allows.

Who else handles your data

We use a small number of providers. We do not sell your data to anyone.

We may also disclose information if we are legally required to, or where it is necessary to investigate abuse or protect someone’s safety.

Email

We send only transactional email — messages you caused, such as a password-reset link you asked for, an address-verification link, or a notice about a report. We have no newsletter and send no marketing email. Delivery is handled by Resend, which processes the recipient address and the message in order to deliver it. Our emails contain no tracking pixel and no click-tracking links.

We keep a log of what was sent — the kind of message, when, whether it was delivered, and a one-way hash of the recipient address, never the address itself.

Backups

The database is backed up nightly. Backups are encrypted before they leave the server and stored with Cloudflare R2. They are kept for 14 days on the server, 35 days for the daily copies and 395 days for the monthly copies, then deleted automatically.

What this means if you delete your account: your data is removed from the live database immediately, but a copy can remain inside an encrypted backup until that backup expires on the schedule above. We do not restore a backup to bring back deleted accounts, and we do not use backups for anything except recovering from a failure.

What you choose to make public

Your vault is private. Two things change that, and only when you act:

• Sharing a board. Pressing Share creates an unguessable link. Anyone holding that link can see the board’s name, description and the saves on it — their titles, thumbnails, links, creator names, durations and tags. Your private notes, your AI summaries, your reminders, your favourites and your categories are never published. You can rotate the link (which kills the old one) or turn sharing off at any time.
• Creating a public profile. Setting an @handle makes /u/your-handle public: your handle, display name, bio, the first letter of your name as an avatar, your follower counts, and the boards you have shared. Clearing your handle takes it offline.

Shared pages are marked noindex so search engines do not list them, and they load no third-party scripts or fonts. The only off-site content is the thumbnail images, which load from wherever the original link hosts them.

How long we keep it

• Your saves and account — until you delete them, or delete your account.
• Link previews — we cache what a public link looks like (title, thumbnail) for a limited period. This cache is keyed by the link, shared between all users, and records nothing about who saved it.
• Sign-in tokens — stored hashed, and revoked when you log out or delete.
• Link safety results — kept against a one-way hash of the link, and only for as long as Google says the answer is valid.
• Reports you filed — kept, with you unlinked from them, so moderation decisions about other people’s content survive.
• Email log — the kind of message and a hash of the recipient. Pruned on a schedule.
• After you delete your account — we keep a one-way hash (SHA-256) of your email address and of your Google ID, plus the number of saves you had used, for 365 days. We cannot read an address back out of a hash. It exists only so that deleting an account and signing up again does not hand out a fresh free allowance. After 365 days those rows are deleted automatically.
• Backups — as described above.

Deleting your data

You can delete everything yourself, from inside the app, with no email to us:

• With an account: Settings → Account → Delete account.
• Without an account: Settings → Delete my data.

Either one is immediate and permanent, apart from the hash and the backups described above. Deleting your BuzVault account does not cancel a Google Play subscription — cancel that in Google Play, or you will keep being billed. Full detail is on Delete your account.

Your rights

If you are in India, under the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 you can:

• access a summary of the personal data we hold about you and what we do with it;
• correct or complete anything inaccurate, and update it;
• have it erased, unless we must keep it by law;
• nominate someone to exercise these rights for you if you die or cannot act yourself;
• complain to us through our Grievance Officer (below), and then to the Data Protection Board of India if you are not satisfied.

If the GDPR applies to you, you can ask for access, correction, erasure, a portable copy, or restriction of processing; you can object to processing based on legitimate interests; you can withdraw consent at any time; and you can complain to your local data protection authority.

The app already gives you direct access to everything you have saved, and deletion is a button. For anything else, email help@buzvault.com . We will respond within 30 days.

We do not use your data to make any automated decision that has a legal or similarly significant effect on you.

Security

Traffic is encrypted with HTTPS. Passwords are stored as bcrypt hashes and sign-in tokens as SHA-256 hashes — a database copy would not reveal either. Purchase tokens are stored hashed. Share links use 160 bits of randomness. Backups are encrypted before leaving the server. Administrative access requires a second factor, and administrative actions are recorded in an audit log. No system is perfectly secure, and we do not claim otherwise.

Age

BuzVault is for adults. You must be 18 or over to use it. We do not knowingly collect data from anyone under 18.

We do not ask for your date of birth and we do not verify your age. If you believe someone under 18 has created an account, tell us and we will delete it.

Where your data goes

Our server and database are in Helsinki, Finland (European Union). Google’s services (Sign-In, AdMob, Play, Gemini, Web Risk), our email provider and our backup storage operate globally and may process data outside your country, including outside India and outside the EEA.

Where the law requires it, those transfers rely on the safeguards those providers offer, such as the European Commission’s Standard Contractual Clauses.

Changes to this policy

If we change this policy we will update the dates at the top of this page and add a line to the list below. If a change materially affects you, we will tell you in the app before it takes effect.

Grievance Officer

If you have a complaint about content on BuzVault, about how we have handled your data, or about a decision we made, you can raise it with our Grievance Officer. We acknowledge a complaint within 24 hours and give you a written outcome within 15 days. The officer is Viralkumar Patel, Grievance Officer, Viharnika Enterprise LLP, 11, Ishwar Krupa Society, Jagatpur Road, Chandlodiya, Ahmedabad 382481, Gujarat, India, reachable at grievance@buzvault.com.

Full details, including what to put in a complaint and the faster timelines that apply to intimate imagery and to court orders, are on Grievance Officer.

Contact

Viharnika Enterprise LLP (LLPIN ACH-6769), 11, Ishwar Krupa Society, Jagatpur Road, Chandlodiya, Ahmedabad 382481, Gujarat, India — help@buzvault.com