Privacy policy

Reading a lesson that is open to everyone needs no account, so we collect nothing about you until you decide to sign in. After that, information reaches us at three moments.

When you create an account

Sign-in is handled by Firebase Authentication, a Google service. What it holds depends on the method you pick:

• Your mobile number, if you sign in with a one-time password sent by SMS. Indian numbers only, the ones starting +91.
• Your email address and the name on your Google account, if you sign in with Google.
• Your email address and a password, if you sign in that way. The password is stored by Firebase in a scrambled form. Nobody at Pensieve Labs can read it, and we cannot tell you what it is.

Once, on the welcome form

Straight after your first sign-in we ask eight questions, one time only: your age group, your gender, your state, your district, your education level, what you do, the language you prefer, and how you heard about the programme. We also record the date you agreed to this. Every answer is picked from a list, except the district, which you type. Gender includes a prefer not to say option.

While you read

When you tick a lesson as finished, we save that. What we keep is a plain list of the lessons you have marked done in each course, and nothing more. We do not record how long you spent on a page, how far you scrolled, or anything you typed into an AI tool while following a lesson. Those tools belong to other companies and your conversations there never come to us.

What we never ask for

No payment details, because there is nothing to pay for. No Aadhaar or any other government identity number. No caste, religion, health, biometric or financial information. No contacts, no photographs, no files, and no location beyond the state and district you type yourself. If a page ever asks you for any of this in our name, it is not us.

Separately, the company that hosts this site keeps the ordinary records any web server keeps: the internet address a request came from, which page was asked for, and the time. That is described under the other companies involved, below.

Each thing we collect has one purpose, and only that purpose.

• Your mobile number or email address is how we know it is you when you come back, and how we open the lessons past the free opening ones. Every course is free of charge, so this is never about billing you.
• The eight answers on the welcome form tell us who the courses are actually reaching: which states, which age groups, how much schooling, which languages people would rather read in. We look at these as counts and groups, not one learner at a time, and they decide what we write next.
• Your finished-lesson list lets you stop in the middle of a course and pick it up later, on the same phone or a different one.

We do not use any of it to show you advertisements, because there are none on this site. We do not build a profile of you to sell or to share, and we pass nothing to a data broker, a lender, an employer or a college.

India has a privacy law: the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023, usually called the DPDP Act. Under it, Pensieve Labs is the Data Fiduciary, which means we decide what is collected and we are answerable for it. You are the Data Principal, which means the information is about you and the rights over it are yours.

Our legal basis for all of this is your consent. There is no other basis hiding behind it. Nothing is collected before you give that consent, and you give it at two separate moments: once when you choose to create an account, and once when you send the welcome form. The form says what it is for and asks you to agree before it will submit.

Consent covers the purposes written on this page and nothing else. If we later want to use your information for something new, we will ask you again. What you give us is ordinary personal data under the Act, not the categories that need special handling.

You can take your consent back at any time by asking us to delete your account. How to do that is under your rights, below. Taking consent back stops any further use from that moment. It cannot undo something already done while the consent was in place, such as a count your state had already been added into.

Your information sits in two different places, and the difference matters, so please read this section slowly.

Your profile, meaning the eight answers from the welcome form, and your progress in each course are stored in Cloud Firestore, a Google database service. Our database is pinned to the region Google calls asia-south1, which is Mumbai. Pinned means the data is held on machines in India and is not moved to another region. We chose that on purpose, so that information about Indian learners stays in India.

The identity record is different, and we cannot pin it. Firebase Authentication holds the mobile number or email address you sign in with, together with the scrambled password if you use one, on Google infrastructure that Google runs across the world. Google offers no way to tie that record to a single region. So your mobile number or email address may be stored and handled on servers outside India. We are saying this plainly because it is true, and because you should be able to decide with the facts in front of you. If keeping your number inside India matters more to you than an account does, read the opening lessons of any course without signing in. They ask nothing of you at all.

One more copy exists, on your own phone. Your finished-lesson marks are also written to your browser storage, so a page can show your ticks straight away without waiting for the network. That copy never leaves your device, and clearing the site data in your browser deletes it.

• A small number of people at Pensieve Labs who run the programme. They look at your record only to do the work: fixing an account that has broken, answering an email you sent us, or counting how many learners are in each state. Nobody browses out of curiosity.
• Google, as the company operating Firebase Authentication and Cloud Firestore on our behalf. It holds and handles the data so that we can run the site, as our processor. It is not allowed to use your information for its own purposes.

Nobody else. We do not sell your information, we do not rent it, and we do not trade it for a service. No advertising network is involved, because there is no advertising.

Other learners cannot see anything about you. There is no public profile on this site, no leaderboard, and no way for one learner to look up another.

If a court order or a law compels us to hand something over, we will comply, because we must. We will tell you that it happened unless the law forbids us from telling you. Questions about any of this can go to expanse@pensievelabs.org.

• Your profile and your progress are kept for as long as your account exists. They are there so that the account works.
• When you ask us to delete your account, we act within 30 days, and usually much sooner. After that the profile, the progress and the sign-in record are gone from our systems.
• We do not yet delete unused accounts on our own. We are working out a fixed rule for that and will write it on this page once it is in place. Until then you can ask us to delete yours whenever you like.
• Counts that have been added up, for example the number of learners in Bihar, are kept. Once your answer has been added into a total it is no longer information about you and cannot be traced back to you.
• The web server records described below are kept by our hosting provider for a short period, usually a few weeks, to keep the site working and to deal with attacks.

The DPDP Act gives you these rights, and we honour all of them.

• Access. Ask us what we hold about you and what we have done with it, and we will send you the whole record.
• Correction. If something is wrong, out of date or incomplete, tell us and we will fix it. You can also change most of your answers yourself on your account page.
• Erasure. Ask us to delete your data and we will delete your profile, every progress record, and your sign-in account. This is also how you take your consent back.
• Nomination. You can name another person to use these rights for you if you die or become unable to act yourself.
• Grievance. If we handle your information or your request badly, you can complain to us and expect an answer.

To use any of them, write one email to expanse@pensievelabs.org. Send it from the email address on your account, or, if you signed in by mobile, tell us that number. Say which of the rights above you want. You do not need legal wording, and you do not have to explain why.

We will reply within 7 days to say we have your request, and finish the work within 30 days. If we cannot do what you asked, we will tell you the reason. Please be sure before you ask for erasure: your progress through every course goes with it, and we cannot bring it back.

For a complaint, use the same address and put the word grievance in the subject line, so that it is not treated as an ordinary question. We are the first place to complain to. If we have not sorted it out to your satisfaction, you may take the complaint to the Data Protection Board of India, which is the authority set up under the Act.

Our courses are written for a reader who has passed class 8, so we know that some of our readers are 14, 15 or 16 years old. We have to be straight with you about what that means here.

The DPDP Act treats anyone under 18 as a child. Before a child gives personal data, the Act requires consent from a parent or guardian that can be verified. It also forbids tracking a child, watching a child behaviour by behaviour, and advertising aimed at children. We do none of those three things, for anyone of any age, and never have.

What we have not built yet is the verifying. There is no step on this site that checks a parent has really agreed. We do not ask your age before you sign in, and a website cannot tell who is actually holding the phone. So today this is handled by policy and by asking you honestly, not by a technical check. We would rather write that down than pretend otherwise.

Until the proper step exists, this is our position. If you are under 18, use these courses together with a parent or guardian, and ask them before you create an account or fill in the welcome form. The opening lessons of every course need no account at all, so a younger reader can learn from them without giving us anything. If you are a parent or guardian and your child has made an account you did not agree to, write to expanse@pensievelabs.org and we will delete it. We will not argue with you about it.

This site sets one cookie. It is called __session, it is created when you sign in, and it exists for one reason: to keep you signed in, so that you are not asked to sign in again on every page.

• It is HttpOnly. That means no script running on the page, ours or anybody else, can read it. Only our server can.
• It is sent only over an encrypted connection, and only back to this site.
• It lasts 14 days. After that it stops working and you sign in again. Fourteen days is the longest Firebase allows, and we use the maximum, so that you are not signed out in the middle of a course.
• It is removed when you sign out.

There are no advertising cookies, no analytics cookies and no tracking pixels on this site. Nothing here follows you to another website.

Two other things are kept in your browser storage, which is not a cookie and is never sent to our server: your finished-lesson marks, and whether you chose the light or the dark theme. Both stay on your phone. Clearing the site data in your browser removes them.

• Google, through Firebase Authentication and Cloud Firestore. Firebase Authentication handles sign-in and holds the identity record. Cloud Firestore holds your profile and your progress in the asia-south1 region. Google acts on our instructions, as our processor.
• Our hosting provider, which serves these pages to your phone. It sees what any web server sees: the internet address the request came from, which page was asked for, which browser asked, and the time. It keeps that briefly, for security and for keeping the site up. It does not receive your profile or your progress.

That is the whole list. No analytics service, no advertising network, no chat widget, and no social media buttons that report your visit. The two typefaces the site uses are downloaded when the site is built and served from this domain, so your browser never has to ask another company for them.

When we change this policy we change the date at the top of the page. That date is the honest test of whether you are reading the current version.

For a small change, such as clearer wording or a new address, we simply update the page. For a real change, meaning a change to what we collect, why we collect it, where it is stored or who can see it, we will do more: a notice on the site, and an email to the address on your account if we have one, before the change takes effect. If a change needs your consent again under the DPDP Act, we will ask you again rather than assume the old consent stretches to cover it.

If you want to read an earlier version of this policy, ask Pensieve Labs for it at expanse@pensievelabs.org and we will send it to you.

Pensieve Labs, for the Pensieve Expanse programme. Questions about this policy, requests to see or correct or delete your data, and complaints all go to one place: expanse@pensievelabs.org. A person reads it, and that address is also our grievance contact.

You may also want to read the terms of use and the about page, which explains who we are and why the courses are free.