What we keep, and what we don’t

This is the notice you see when you sign up. Nothing here is a summary of something longer that says otherwise.

• We use your phone number to create your account and to stop fake accounts. We never show it to other users, and we never sell it.
• We check your location only when you open or post on something nearby. We keep it as a rough area of about a kilometre — never your exact position — for 30 days, then delete it.
• Your name, username, picture and what you post are visible to the people a post is for: a topic’s area or group, your followers, or everyone.
• Chat photos and videos are deleted from our servers once everyone in the chat has them (at the latest after 30 days). Calls are never recorded.
• You can download or delete everything from Settings at any time.
• Questions or complaints: [email protected]

• Burst Out is run by Harshal Pawle (sole proprietor, trading as Burst Out) (“Burst Out”, “we”, “us”). Under the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 we are the Data Fiduciary for the personal data in this policy, and you are the Data Principal.
• Grievance Officer: Harshal Pawle, [email protected]. We acknowledge every complaint within 24 hours and resolve it within 15 days, or sooner where the law requires.

• People create topics (yes/no questions) limited to an area, a city, a country or a private group, and people inside that scope take a side and post ("bursts"), with photos, videos and evidence links. A live meter shows how they are split.
• You can also post photos and short videos (Bytes), share stories that last 24 hours, go live, follow people and pages, chat and call one-to-one or in groups, and message, call or book an appointment with business pages.

• Phone number — to create your account, check it is yours with a one-time code, and stop duplicate and fake accounts. Encrypted; kept until you delete your account, then for 190 days only to answer lawful requests (section 10).
• Email address (optional) — saved for account recovery, which is not available yet; we send nothing to it today. Encrypted; kept until you remove it or delete your account, then for 190 days only to answer lawful requests (section 10).
• Name, username, profile picture and bio — so other people know who they are talking to. Until you change them or delete your account.
• Birth month and year (never the day) — to confirm you are 18 or over. Until you delete your account.
• Approximate location — a rough area of about a kilometre, to confirm you are inside a topic’s area, to show nearby topics and videos, and to show others a rounded distance. Kept 30 days, then deleted. Your exact position is turned into that area the moment it arrives and is never stored.
• What you post — topics, bursts, sides, votes, replies, reactions, evidence, photos and videos. Until you delete it or your account; meter totals keep anonymous counts so past results are not falsified.
• Chat messages — to deliver them and keep them on every phone you sign in on. Until you or the other person delete them, or you delete your account.
• Chat photos and videos — only until everyone in the chat has received them, and at the latest 30 days; then deleted from our servers and kept only on members’ phones. If a message is reported, a copy is held for as long as the report and the law require (section 10).
• Messages to a business page — read by the page’s staff, who reply as the page. If the page uses its automatic assistant, the answers you give it (for example the service you want and a time) are kept for the page in its enquiries, until the page deletes them or you delete your account.
• Appointments — the page, time and any note you add, shared with that page’s staff. Kept as long as your account exists.
• Group expenses — Expenses and settlements you record in a group are kept as the group’s shared record, visible to its members, including after you leave or delete your account, with your name removed. Amounts and notes are not used for anything else.
• UPI ID (optional) — If you add a UPI ID, it is shown only to members of groups where you record expenses, so they can pay you. You can remove it any time. We never process payments.
• Calls — who called whom, when, how long, and connection-quality measurements, to run and improve calls. Calls are live between the phones and are never recorded.
• Touch to connect — when you and someone else hold your phones together, you start following each other. We keep a record that you connected (who and when) for one day, so either of you can undo it; then we delete it, or straight away if either of you deletes their account. You can turn Touch to connect off in Settings → Privacy.
• Device information — phone maker and model, Android version, app build and a push-notification token, to deliver notifications, keep the app working and show you your logged-in phones in Settings → Devices. Kept with each login, and removed after it ends.
• Login activity — sign-ins, wrong codes, locks, sign-outs and passkey changes, with the phone model and a coded tag for the network (it changes every month and is never the address itself), so you can spot a login that was not you. Shown to you in Settings → Devices. Kept 90 days, and deleted with your account. Staff can see it only by giving a reason, and each view is logged.
• Passkeys (optional) — we keep only a public key. App lock and passkeys are checked by your phone: your fingerprint, face or PIN never reaches us.
• Stories — shown for 24 hours, then deleted unless you keep them in a highlight.
• Live video — passes through our servers to viewers as it happens and is deleted when the live ends; we do not keep a recording. The record of the live (who, title, when) is kept 30 days after it ends, longer only if a moderation hold requires it.
• Printed cards — if you order cards, we keep the order and its design. Payment and the delivery address are arranged with you directly, not in the app.
• Usage — what you open, watch, like, save and follow, to rank your feeds and send relevant notifications; reports and blocks you make, to act on them.
• Insights for creators — when someone plays your Byte or sees your post or topic, we add it to totals: plays, people, watch time, where it was found, followers or not, and cities (only with 10 or more people). Only you, or your page’s team, see them; we never keep or show who watched. Daily totals are kept 90 days and monthly totals 2 years, and they go when the post goes.
• Consent records — what you agreed to, when, on which version, in which language and how. As long as your account exists, and longer where the law requires.
• Crash reports, app performance and app-use statistics (screens opened and a fixed list of actions) — only with Settings → Privacy → Send diagnostics on (it is on by default); they carry an internal id, never your name, number or location.
• We take no payments in the app, so we hold no card or bank details.
• We do not collect: your contacts, your exact position (stored), your location in the background, your browsing outside the app, fingerprints or face data, or advertising identifiers.

• Who a post is for decides who sees it: a topic’s area or group, your followers, or everyone. They see your name, username, picture, what you posted, the side you took, and a rounded distance from a topic (never a position).
• Never visible to anyone: your phone number, email, exact location, device details, or how you voted on a single burst — only totals are shown.
• Public topics and posts also have a read-only page on the web, under the same rules.
• When you watch a Byte or see a post or topic, its creator sees you only inside totals, never by name. Your city is counted only when 10 or more people from it did the same.
• When you message a page, its staff see your name, username and the chat. You see the page as the sender, never which member of staff replied.

• Text you post — topics, bursts, posts and replies — is checked against the community rules by an AI service (Google Gemini). For photos and videos in bursts, Bytes, topics and page notices we send a small copy of each photo and a few still frames from each video, not the whole file. Stories, posts, profile pictures and covers are checked on our own servers only. Chat photos and videos get only a virus scan and a match against known illegal files. Private chat messages are not checked.
• Bursts are read to estimate the side they take and whether they make a claim; evidence links are opened and the page or document they point to is sent for reading, to label the source. Summaries and evidence checks are labelled “Written by AI”. Captions and voice-overs you add while editing are made on your phone.
• A business page may turn on an automatic assistant that answers customers from the page’s own information. The text of your messages to that page (the last few) goes to our AI provider for that, without your name or number attached — but whatever you write in them, including any names, is sent as written. Its replies are labelled as automatic, it never asks for your number, email, codes, Aadhaar or payment details, and it hands you to a person when asked.
• These systems affect what weight a burst carries, what appears first and what is held for review. They make no decision with legal effect on you; a person reviews disputes and appeals.

• We do not sell personal data and we show no advertising. These providers process data only on our instructions, to run the service:
• Hostinger — our servers and database, in Mumbai, India.
• Cloudflare — file storage and delivery for photos and videos, the network connection to our servers, and relaying calls. It runs worldwide, so this data can be processed outside India.
• Message Central — sends and checks sign-in codes by text message. It receives your phone number for that.
• Google — Firebase delivers notifications, checks that requests come from the real app, and collects crash reports, performance and app-use statistics (if Send diagnostics is on); Gemini runs the automated checks and the page assistant (post text, small copies of photos, still frames from videos and page-chat messages, as described in section 5 — never your account, phone number or email; depending on our plan with Google, Google may use what it receives through Gemini to improve its products); Maps finds places you search for.
• Expo — delivers push notifications to your phone.
• Giphy — returns GIFs for what you type in GIF search.
• YouTube — plays a YouTube video when you open one that someone has linked. Hugging Face — your phone downloads the on-phone captions model from there; none of your content is sent.
• Zoho — receives the email you send us.
• Government authorities and courts — only what the law requires, when legally compelled under the IT Act and IT Rules.
• Where a provider processes data outside India, we do so only as the DPDP Act and Rules permit.

• Phone numbers and emails are encrypted in the database, with keys kept separately: a copy of the database on its own does not reveal them.
• Exact positions are never written to storage. Every connection uses TLS, and file storage is encrypted. In backups, phone numbers and emails stay encrypted as they are in the database.
• Access rules are enforced inside the database, so one person’s data cannot be read through another person’s request.
• Attachments are stored privately and served through links that expire. Photo and video metadata, including any embedded location, is removed before storage.
• Chat photos and videos are scanned like any upload, delivered, then deleted from our servers. On your phone they are kept in the app’s private storage, excluded from backups, and deleted when you sign out, delete your account or clear them in Settings.
• Staff access to personal data goes through named, audited actions.
• If a breach is likely to harm you, we will tell you and the Data Protection Board of India in the form and time the DPDP Rules require.

• See what we hold: Settings → Privacy → Download my data (including your consent records).
• Correct it: edit your profile.
• Withdraw consent: Settings → Privacy has the switches, and location is turned off in your phone’s settings (linked from there). Without location you can still watch, and post on group and country topics, but not on nearby ones.
• Erase it: Settings → Privacy → Delete account, or burstout.cc/delete-account without the app. Your account is hidden at once and deleted after 30 days. Your posts go with it; meter totals keep anonymous counts. Only your registration details are kept after that, as section 10 says.
• Nominate someone to exercise these rights for you if you cannot: write to [email protected].
• Complain to us first; if that does not resolve it, to the Data Protection Board of India.
• We will never treat you differently for exercising any of these.

• Burst Out is only for people aged 18 and over. You confirm your age when you sign up, and we delete accounts we learn belong to anyone younger. If you think a child is using Burst Out, tell us at [email protected].

• Burst Out is an intermediary under the Information Technology Act, 2000 and the IT Rules, 2021. Every post, profile and page has a Report button.
• We remove content on a lawful order or where the IT Rules require, and keep records of removed content and related account data for at least 180 days (we keep 190 days), or longer if ordered.
• When an account is deleted, its registration details — the encrypted phone number and email, and when it signed up and was deleted — are kept for that period (190 days) only to answer lawful requests, then erased. They are never used to stop the same number signing up again.
• AI-written summaries, checks and automatic replies are labelled as such.

• Our web pages use only what is strictly necessary — for example remembering a language choice. There is no advertising and no cross-site tracking.

• A change is a new version with a new date, published here with its date.

• Harshal Pawle (sole proprietor, trading as Burst Out). Grievance Officer: Harshal Pawle · [email protected].