Privacy policy.

01What we collect

• Identity & residency — your phone number (verified by OTP), your name, and the society, tower and flat you claim.
• Residency confirmations — residency is confirmed by people in your society: two neighbours from different flats, or a Hoodzy Champ (a volunteer neighbour appointed with our team). A neighbour can confirm you through a link you send them, or in person using a one-time code shown in the app. You choose to show that code; it works only for that confirmation, expires within minutes, and is not a sign-in code. A Champ sees your name, your flat and a masked phone number showing only the last few digits, so they can check with you on the intercom or against the society register. We record who confirmed whom, when, and how (by link, in person, or the basis a Champ gives, such as the intercom or the register, with an optional short note that only our team sees). Your full phone number is never shown to the people who confirm you. We do not collect identity or ownership documents.
• Seller profile — if you sell, your shop name, category, description, the items you list, prices and photos you upload.
• Activity — posts, orders, order status and self-attested payment confirmations, reviews and ratings (both directions), follows, saves and reports you file.
• Device & diagnostics — push-notification tokens, and technical logs (including app error reports) used to keep the service reliable. Error reports are scrubbed of personal data where feasible and retained only as long as needed for debugging.
• App usage — which screens you open and for how long, and actions such as opening a post, searching, placing an order or finishing a sign-up step, with your device model, operating system, app version and approximate location (city and PIN code) worked out from your IP address. These events are tied to a random account identifier, never to your phone number, name or flat, and never include what you type: for a search we record how long the search was and how many results came back, not the words. Crash reports record what the app was doing when it failed and the same random identifier.
• Sign-in records — each time a sign-in code is requested or used, the phone number, time, IP address, device and app version. Used to protect accounts from misuse and to help people who started signing up but couldn’t finish — we may contact you about that. Deleted after 90 days.
• Society requests — if you ask us to bring your society onto Hoodzy before it is live, the name, phone number and society details you submit. We use them to gauge demand, to contact you about your request — for example to learn more about your society or help bring it onto Hoodzy — and to tell you when your society goes live. Each person’s share link carries a random tag, and if you sign up through a neighbour’s link we note whose link it was, so we can see how word of the society spread.
• Society page visits — when you open a society’s page on our website, we count the visit with a random identifier kept in your browser, the day, and which share link you came from. It holds no phone number, name or IP address and is not linked to you.

We do not collect financial data. Payments happen directly between buyer and seller by UPI or cash — money never passes through Hoodzy, and we never see bank details, UPI PINs or card numbers.

02How we use it

• Recording neighbours’ confirmations that a member lives at the flat they claim, asking for them again where needed, and reviewing them where neighbours’ confirmation is unavailable or disputed.
• Showing sellers and posts only to residents of the same society.
• Routing orders between neighbours and sending order and post notifications.
• Computing trust signals — delivered-order counts, ratings and badges. “Verified” comes only from neighbours’ confirmations; “Established seller” comes from orders neighbours received over time. Neither can be bought.
• Moderation: reviewing reports and restricting accounts that break the rules.
• Debugging, security and service improvement.
• Understanding how the app is used — where people get stuck signing up, ordering or setting up a shop — so we can fix it. Usage data is never sold, and never used to target ads at you. City- and PIN-level totals help us decide where to bring Hoodzy next and where to advertise.

03Who sees your data

• Your neighbours — your name, block/flat context and seller profile are visible to members of your society, because that visibility is the product. A neighbour who confirms your residency sees your name and flat, not your phone number. Nothing is publicly listed on the open internet except pages a seller explicitly shares.
• Your phone number stays private. It is never shown on the feed. A seller sees a buyer’s number only after the seller accepts that buyer’s order, and vice-versa — never before both sides commit.
• Service providers — we host on Google Cloud (India-serving infrastructure) for computing, storage of uploaded images, and delivery of SMS/push notifications. These providers process data only on our instructions.
• Usage analytics and crash reporting — app usage events are processed by PostHog and crash reports by Sentry, both on servers in the European Union. Both receive the random account identifier described above, never your phone number, name or flat, and process the data only on our instructions. The analytics provider works out your approximate location from your IP address and then discards the address; it never stores your IP address or precise coordinates. Crash reports never store your IP address either, though they may note the approximate city it came from.
• Nobody else. We do not sell or rent personal data, and we do not share it with advertisers.

04Retention

We keep your data while your account is active. Order and review history is retained to preserve the trust record of both parties. If you delete your account, we remove or anonymise personal data within a reasonable period, except where we must retain a minimal anonymised record to comply with law, prevent fraud or resolve disputes. You can complete deletion immediately from Settings in the app or from our public account-deletion page, including after uninstalling Hoodzy. Active sessions and notification tokens are revoked when deletion completes.

App usage events are kept for up to 12 months and crash reports for up to 90 days. Deleting your account also deletes your usage history from our analytics provider.

If you register interest in bringing your society onto Hoodzy before it launches, we keep your phone number and the details you submit until the society launches or the request is closed, after which they are deleted or anonymised. Visit counts for a society’s page are kept with its request. Write to us at hello@hoodzy.in any time to have your number removed from a waitlist.

05Your rights

Under the DPDP Act you may request access to the personal data we hold about you, ask us to correct or erase it, nominate someone to exercise these rights on your behalf, and raise a grievance. Write to us at hello@hoodzy.in and we will respond within the timelines the law prescribes. If you are unsatisfied with our response, you may escalate to the Data Protection Board of India.

06Children

Hoodzy is for adults. You must be 18 or older to create an account.

07Changes & contact

We will notify you in the app of material changes to this policy. Questions, requests or complaints: hello@hoodzy.in.