How your personal information is handled.

Annmaya Foundation runs this website so that people can give towards meals for children. This policy explains what personal information we collect when you use the site or make a donation, why we collect it, who processes it on our behalf, how long we keep it, and the choices and rights you have. It applies to this website and to the email we send you about a gift you have made.

We have written it in plain language on purpose. If anything here is unclear, or you want to know exactly what we hold about you, write to us and a person will answer.

Who is responsible for your information

Annmaya Foundation decides how the personal information described here is used, and is responsible for it. You can reach us at annmayafoundation@gmail.com or on +918004783575. Any question, correction or complaint about your personal information can be sent to that address, and it will be handled by the person named at the end of this policy.

What we collect

We collect only what a donation, a receipt or a reply actually needs. Some of it you give us; a small amount is recorded automatically when your browser loads a page.

Information you give us:

• Your name, so we know who the gift is from and can address you correctly.
• Your email address, so we can send you confirmation of your donation and the photographs from the distribution it funded.
• Your mobile number, when you choose to provide one, so we can reach you about a gift or a delivery date.
• The details of the gift itself: the cause or package you chose, the quantity, the amount, and whether the gift is anonymous.
• For an occasion or memorial gift, the occasion, the date you would like it served on, and the name you would like it recorded in, if you give one.
• Anything you write to us in a message, a volunteer enquiry or a partnership enquiry, including the contact details you put in it.
• If you create an account, the identifier you sign in with, which is an email address or a linked Google account.
• Where you ask us for a tax receipt, the additional particulars a receipt requires under Indian law.

Information recorded automatically:

• Your internet protocol address, browser type and version, operating system, and the pages you viewed, kept in server and security logs.
• A basket identifier stored on your device so that the gift you were assembling survives a page reload.
• A session identifier if you sign in, so that you stay signed in between pages.
• Aggregate performance measurements, such as how long a page took to become usable, with no identifier attached to them.
• Anti-abuse signals on forms, so that automated submissions can be separated from real ones.

What we never collect

We never see or store your card number, your card expiry, your card verification value, your bank credentials, or your payment PIN or one-time password. Those are entered on the payment gateway and stay with the gateway and your bank. What comes back to us is the outcome of the payment, the amount, and a reference the gateway generates. We also never ask for your Aadhaar number, and you should not send it to us.

Why we use it

• To take your donation, confirm it, and record it against the cause you chose. Without this we cannot complete a gift you have asked to make.
• To send you the confirmation, the receipt where one is available, and the photographs and updates from the distribution your gift funded.
• To answer your questions and to resolve a problem with a payment, a refund or a delivery date.
• To keep the financial and donation records that Indian law requires a charitable organisation to keep.
• To keep the site secure, to detect and prevent fraud and automated abuse, and to investigate an incident if one occurs.
• To understand, in aggregate, which pages are slow or failing, so that we can fix them.
• To send you news about our work, but only if you have separately asked us to.

We rely on your consent where you have given it, on the necessity of performing the gift you asked us to make, on compliance with our legal obligations for financial records, and on our legitimate interest in keeping the site secure. We do not sell your personal information, and we do not rent or trade it. We do not make automated decisions about you that have a legal effect.

Payments

Donations on this site are processed by a payment gateway licensed to operate in India. When you pay, you are handed to the gateway, you enter your payment details there, and the gateway tells us whether the payment succeeded, how much was paid, and what its own reference for it is. The gateway is responsible for your payment credentials and handles them under its own privacy policy and under the card network rules it is certified against. We store the amount, the outcome, the gateway reference and the time, because that is what a donation record and a refund need.

Cookies and similar storage

We use the smallest set of browser storage the site can work with. Nothing we set is used to build an advertising profile of you.

• Strictly necessary storage: your basket identifier, your sign-in session if you have one, a token that protects forms against cross-site request forgery, and your recorded cookie preferences. The site does not work without these.
• Advertising measurement storage: one cookie, and only if you reached this site by clicking one of our advertisements. It holds the click identifier the advertising platform itself put in the link you followed, and nothing else. It is set for thirty days, no script on the page can read it, and if you did not arrive from an advertisement it is never set at all.
• Analytics storage: none. No analytics or advertising script runs on this site, and nothing here builds a profile of you or follows you to other sites.

You can clear this storage in your browser at any time. Clearing it will sign you out and empty your basket.

Advertising measurement

We advertise on Meta, which runs Facebook and Instagram, and we need to know which of those advertisements actually lead to a donation. Otherwise we are spending money that could have bought meals on advertisements that do not work.

So when a donation completes, we tell Meta that a gift of that amount happened. That message is sent from our own server to Meta directly, never by a script in your browser, and it carries the amount, which step of giving was reached, and one or two identifiers described below. That is the whole message.

It does not contain your name, your email address, your phone number, your PAN, your donation reference, or anything you typed into this site. Those fields do not exist in the message we build, so we could not send them by mistake, and we do not send Meta a list of our donors.

The two identifiers, and what each one can do

The first is the click identifier, and you only have one if you arrived by clicking one of our advertisements. Meta created it, Meta put it in the link you followed, and Meta already knows whose click it was. Sending it back is how a gift is matched to the advertisement that led to it.

The second is a pseudonym, and every completed donation carries one. We take your email address, mix it with a secret key held only on our own servers, and send the scrambled result. It is not your email address and it cannot be turned back into it. Meta cannot use it to identify you, and it cannot be matched against you in anybody else’s records, because nobody else has our key. It does one thing only: it lets Meta see that two messages from us are about the same person, so a gift is not counted twice.

We also send the network address and browser description of the request when you are on the site giving, because Meta uses them to tell one visitor from another. We do not send those with the final donation message.

We do not send your email address or your phone number to Meta, scrambled or otherwise, in a form that Meta could match against its own records of you. If that ever changes we will ask you first, on the donation form, and it will be yours to refuse.

Why every donation and not only the ones from an advertisement: an advertisement that is working and an advertisement that is wasting money look identical unless Meta can see the whole picture. Reporting only some gifts taught it the wrong lesson and cost us money that should have bought meals.

What you can do if you would rather not be measured this way. Write to us at the address at the end of this policy and ask, and we will delete the record and stop reporting anything further about you. If you arrived from an advertisement, deleting the cookie described above, or removing the tracking parameter from the address bar when you arrive, keeps the click out of it from the start. None of this affects your gift, your receipt or the photographs you get back.

Analytics

There is no analytics on this site. No analytics script is loaded, no page-view or behaviour data is sent to an analytics provider, and we do not measure how you move around the site. We do collect anonymous page-performance timings on our own servers, to find pages that are slow or failing; those carry no identifier and are not tied to you or your gift.

Who else processes your information

We use a small number of service providers, each for one job, each under contract, and each able to use your information only to do that job for us:

• A payment gateway, to take and settle your donation and to process a refund.
• A cloud hosting provider, which runs the application and the database that hold your donation record.
• An email delivery provider, to send donation confirmations, receipts and the replies we owe you.
• An identity provider, to run sign-in if you choose to create an account.
• A network security and media delivery provider, which serves images and screens forms for automated abuse.
• An advertising platform, Meta, to be told that a gift happened and, where you arrived from one of our advertisements, that the click it already knows about led to it. It receives the amount, the step reached, a pseudonym it cannot resolve to you, and the click identifier it created if there is one — never your name, email, phone, PAN or donation reference. Unlike the providers above, Meta is not acting only for us when it receives this, which is why it is described in full in its own section.

Beyond those, we disclose personal information only where we are legally required to — to a court, a regulator, a tax authority or a law enforcement agency acting under valid authority — or where it is necessary to establish or defend a legal claim. We tell you when we can lawfully do so.

Where your information is held

Our application and database are hosted in Singapore, and some of our service providers process information in other countries. Your information therefore leaves India. When it does, we require the provider to protect it under contractual terms at least as protective as this policy, and we transfer only what the provider needs to do its job. By using the site and making a donation you understand that this transfer takes place.

How long we keep it

• Donation, payment and receipt records: for as long as Indian financial and tax law requires a charitable organisation to keep them, and no longer than necessary after that.
• Enquiry and support messages: until the matter is closed, and then for a short period in case you write again about the same thing.
• Account information: while your account exists, and for a short period after you close it so that we can honour the record of gifts made through it.
• Server and security logs: a limited period, kept short deliberately, and then deleted.
• Marketing consent: until you withdraw it, and a record of the withdrawal itself so that we can prove we stopped.

When a retention period ends we delete the information or remove what identifies you from it. Where a record must survive because the law requires it, we keep the record and strip everything the law does not require.

How we protect it

• The site is served only over an encrypted connection, and information travels encrypted in transit.
• Access to donor records is restricted to the people who need it, and every administrative action is written to an audit record.
• We separate sensitive material from ordinary material and store the sensitive kind in a private location that is not publicly readable.
• We collect as little as possible, and our logs and audit records are filtered so that identifiers, payment references and contact details do not end up in them.
• No system is perfectly secure. If a breach affects you and the law requires us to tell you, we will tell you, and we will tell the regulator.

Your rights

Whatever your location, you can ask us to do the following, and we will do it free of charge unless a request is repetitive or clearly excessive:

• Ask what we hold about you, and get a copy of it.
• Have anything inaccurate corrected, or anything incomplete completed.
• Have information erased where we no longer need it and no law requires us to keep it.
• Withdraw a consent you gave, including consent to measurement or to news about our work. Withdrawal does not undo what was lawfully done before it.
• Object to a use we base on our legitimate interest, and ask us to restrict a use while a dispute about it is open.
• Nominate another person to exercise these rights for you if you are unable to.
• Complain to us, and then to the appropriate authority if you are not satisfied with our answer.

To exercise any of these, write to annmayafoundation@gmail.com from the address you gave us, or tell us enough for us to find your record. We may need to verify who you are before we act, because acting on an unverified request is itself a risk to you. We aim to respond within thirty days.

Children

This site is intended for adults. We do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under eighteen, and a person under eighteen should not make a donation or create an account here. Where a child appears in a photograph we publish, we hold a recorded consent from the person responsible for that child and a recorded review of whether publishing the photograph is appropriate at all. If you believe we hold information about a child that we should not, write to us and we will remove it.

Photographs

The photographs on this site come from our own distributions. A photograph in which a person can be recognised is published only where a consent covering public use has been recorded and the photograph has passed a review of dignity, accuracy and risk. Consent can be withdrawn: if you are in a photograph on this site, or are responsible for someone who is, and you want it taken down, write to us and we will remove it.

Grievances

If you are unhappy with how your personal information has been handled, write to the Grievance Officer, Annmaya Foundation, at annmayafoundation@gmail.com, with "Privacy grievance" in the subject line. We will acknowledge your complaint and give you a substantive answer. If you remain dissatisfied, you may take the matter to the authority with jurisdiction over data protection complaints in India.

Changes to this policy

We update this policy when what we do changes, or when the law does. The version you are reading takes effect on the date shown above it, and it replaces every earlier version. Where a change materially affects you, we will say so on this page, and where the law requires your consent we will ask for it again rather than assume it.

Questions

Write to Annmaya Foundation at annmayafoundation@gmail.com, or call or message +918004783575. Our registered address is Kerakatpur, Lohta, Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh 221107, India. We aim to reply within three working days.