Privacy

chipinkart is run by Abhijith H R, an individual based in India. It is a personal project, not a company. For anything on this page — including a request to see or delete your data — write to hello@chipinkart.in. That address is read by a person, and it is the grievance contact for the purposes of India’s Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023.

Two different things, and the difference matters.

About you. When you sign in with Google we receive your name, email address and profile picture. We keep those, plus your reminder settings — how many days’ notice you want, and your timezone.

About the people you add. Whatever you type in: their name, birthday, how you know them, the interests you tag, an optional budget, and any notes. If you use group gifting, we also store the group, who joined it, the amounts people pledged, what they voted for, and anything the birthday person put on their wishlist.

We keep a record of which reminder emails were sent, so the same birthday cannot be emailed to you twice.

We do not store payment details, because no money ever moves through chipinkart. A pledge is a number people agreed on, nothing more.

This is worth saying plainly, because most privacy policies skip it. When you add your sister’s birthday, your sister did not sign up for anything. So we hold that information narrowly:

• Only you can see the people you have added. This is enforced by the database itself, not by the app remembering to filter.
• We never email the people you add. Reminders go to you, about them.
• We never sell, rent or share this with anyone, and there is no advertising built on it.
• Please only add people whose birthday you would reasonably be expected to know.

Group gifting is the one place other people see something. Anyone you send an invite link to can see the group’s name, the recipient’s first name, the shortlisted gifts and the pledge total. The birthday person’s own link shows them only their wishlist — never the group, the members, the pledges or the votes.

To do the one thing the app is for: remind you before a birthday, and suggest gifts that suit the person. Your email address is used to sign you in and to send those reminders. Your timezone decides which day counts as today, so a reminder does not arrive a day early.

The legal basis is your consent, given when you sign in and when you type someone’s details in. You can withdraw it at any time — see below.

chipinkart is a small project and does not run its own infrastructure. These companies process some of your data on our behalf:

• Google — signs you in. Google tells us your name, email and profile picture. We never see your password.
• Supabase — stores the database and manages your session.
• Vercel — hosts the site and keeps standard server logs, including IP addresses, for security and diagnostics.
• Resend — delivers the reminder emails. They receive your email address and the contents of the email.
• Amazon — when you click a gift idea you leave this site and land on Amazon, where their own privacy policy applies. See “Gift links and earnings” below.

Some of these companies are based outside India, so your data may be stored or processed abroad.

We use as few as we can, and none of them are for tracking you around the web.

• A sign-in cookie, so you stay signed in between visits. Without it the app cannot work.
• A group membership cookie, set when you join a group through an invite link. It is what proves you are a member — the link itself is not enough.
• A record of whether you chose the light or dark theme.

Advertising. We plan to show ads from Google on the public gift-guide pages — never on your own screens, and never on an invite, group or wishlist link. When that starts, Google and its partners may set cookies there to serve and measure ads, including personalised ones. You can control this at myadcenter.google.com and read how Google uses data from sites that use its services at policies.google.com/technologies/partner-sites. If you are in the EU or UK you will be asked for consent before any personalised ad is shown. This paragraph describes what is coming; today there are no ads anywhere on the site.

chipinkart is a participant in the Amazon Associates programme. When you click a gift idea, the link carries a tag that tells Amazon the visit came from us, and we may earn a small commission if you buy something. It costs you nothing extra, and it does not change which gifts we show you — suggestions are matched to the interests you tagged, by a plain rule that has no idea what anything pays.

Clicking the link tells Amazon you came from chipinkart. It does not tell them who you are, and it does not tell us what you bought — only how many purchases followed, in total.

For as long as you have an account. Delete a person and their details go immediately. Delete your account and everything goes with it: your profile, every person you added, every group you made, and the record of reminders sent.

Emails already delivered are not recallable, and our hosting providers keep their own server logs for their own retention periods.

Under the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 you may ask us for a copy of your data, ask us to correct it, or ask us to erase it. You do not have to give a reason.

Email hello@chipinkart.in from the address you signed in with and we will do it within 30 days. Self-service export and account deletion are being built; until they land, the email route is the one that works, and it works.

You can turn reminder emails off at any time without deleting anything, using the unsubscribe link at the bottom of any reminder.

chipinkart is not intended for anyone under 18, and we do not knowingly create accounts for children. You may of course add a child’s birthday to your own list — that is your record about them, held under your account, and it is covered by everything above.

Every table in the database denies access by default, and permission is granted per row to the signed-in owner. Invite and wishlist links are the exception by design: whoever holds one can use it, so treat them like a key and only send them to people you mean to include. We ask search engines not to index those links and tell browsers not to leak them when you click through to another site.

No system is perfectly secure, and this one is built by one person in his evenings. If you find a problem, please write to us before telling anyone else, and we will fix it.

If this policy changes in a way that matters, we will update the date at the top and, for anything significant, email you. Continuing to use chipinkart after that means you accept the new version.