What we collect, why, and what we never touch.

01 Introduction & Scope

This Privacy Policy explains how Wedding Bharat collects, uses, shares, and protects information when you use weddingbharat.com — whether you're a couple searching for vendors or a vendor listing your business. It applies to everyone who visits the site, creates an account, submits a lead, or registers a listing.

We wrote this the way we'd want a privacy policy written for us: describing what this specific platform actually does, not a generic list of things a website might theoretically do. Where we don't do something — like run ad trackers — we say so directly rather than leaving it ambiguous. This Policy should be read together with our Terms of Service, and, for vendors specifically, our Vendor Agreement, which has its own short privacy-related section (Section 13) covering how vendors must handle Client information they receive through a Lead.

02 Who We Are

Wedding Bharat is the operator of this Platform and, under Indian data protection law, the "Data Fiduciary" responsible for personal data processed here. We're a small team building this from Chandigarh, India.

Questions about this Policy or your data can go to contact@weddingbharat.com at any time — see Section 15 for our Grievance Officer contact specifically.

03 Information We Collect

What we collect depends entirely on how you use the Platform. We don't collect information "just in case" — each item below maps to a real feature.

If you're a couple (Client)

• Account information (if you sign in): full name, email address, phone number, and city — used to create your account, let you sign in, and personalize search.
• Lead information (if you use "Book Now," the AI assistant, or a similar contact action): your name, phone number, and optionally email, plus the budget band, guest band, and event date you provide — used to pass your request to vendors listed in the category and city you chose, and shown to those vendors as part of the introduction.
• Wishlist (if signed in): which vendors you've saved, synced to your account so it's available across devices.
• Reviews (if you leave one): your rating, comment, and — internally only, never shown publicly — the phone number used to compute whether you were a genuinely contacted lead.
• Budget Planner data (if you use it): your saved plan — guest count, city, style tier, and line-item allocations. We deliberately do not collect or store any personal contact information as part of a saved budget plan.
• Vendor alerts (if you use "Notify me"): your email address and the category and/or city you asked about — used only to send you one email when a matching vendor joins Wedding Bharat. Every alert email has an unsubscribe link.

If you're a vendor

• Account information: full name, email, password (handled by our authentication provider, never stored by us in plain text), and phone/WhatsApp number.
• Business/listing information: business name, category, city (and up to four additional cities depending on your plan), description, price range (shown to signed-in visitors), cover photo and other images, contact details, and — where applicable — your GST number, which is shown publicly on your listing as standard practice for verified Indian businesses.
• Verification information (only if you choose to get verified): either your GST number, or two identity documents of different types (PAN card, Voter ID, Driving licence or Passport — we do not ask for or accept Aadhaar), a live photo taken in your browser while holding a one-time code, and one piece of business evidence (for example an Udyam registration, a shop licence, a bank proof in the business name with the balance hidden, or a public portfolio link). We use these only to confirm that you are who you say you are and that you run the listed business. A Wedding Bharat reviewer looks at them; they are stored privately in India, are never shown on your listing, and are never shared with couples or other vendors. We record your consent, the document types, the decision, the reviewer and the date, plus a fingerprint (hash) of each file used only to detect the same document being used on more than one listing.
• Payment reference information: for the manual UPI activation/subscription flow, we collect the UPI transaction reference (UTR) number or screenshot you submit to verify payment — never your UPI PIN, bank login, or card details, which never pass through our systems at all.
• Leads received: the Client contact information described above, delivered to your dashboard once a couple's request is sent to your listing.

What we do not collect

We don't run any advertising tracker on this site (no Meta/Facebook Pixel, Google Ads, or ad retargeting). The only analytics we use — Microsoft Clarity — is optional and loads only with your consent (see Section 7); if you decline, no analytics run at all. We don't collect precise device location, browsing history outside this site, or any payment card/bank credential, because our current payment flow never asks for one.

04 How We Use Your Information

We use the information above to:

• Create and maintain your account, and let you sign in securely.
• Show couples vendor listings for the category and city they search, and show vendors the requests sent to them.
• Deliver Leads and, where a vendor has automated WhatsApp notifications enabled, send an automatic message about a new enquiry.
• Send the one-time vendor alert you asked for, when a matching vendor joins.
• Verify vendor identities and businesses (GST register check, or review of identity documents, a live photo and business evidence) and protect the integrity of listings, reviews, and the "Contacted via Wedding Bharat", "GST verified", "Identity verified" and "Business verified" badges. Verification is voluntary; a declined or withdrawn application does not affect your listing.
• Process and verify activation/subscription payments.
• Respond to support requests, grievances, and account issues.
• Detect and prevent fraud, fake reviews, and abuse of the Platform.
• Comply with legal obligations, and enforce our Terms of Service and Vendor Agreement.

We do not use your information for third-party advertising, and we do not sell personal information to data brokers or advertisers.

05 How We Share Information

We share information only in these specific circumstances:

With a vendor you contact

When you submit a Lead — through "Book Now," the AI assistant, or a similar action — we share your name, phone number, and the details you provided with the vendor(s) your request is sent to, since that's the entire purpose of the introduction. See Section 6 for how this often happens via WhatsApp specifically.

Publicly, on a vendor's own listing

If you're a vendor, your business name, description, photos, city/cities and GST number are shown publicly on your listing; your price range and package prices are shown to signed-in visitors. That's the point of being listed. Your login email and password are never shown publicly.

With service providers who help us run the Platform

We use a small number of providers to operate the Platform, each only for the specific job below, and none of them are permitted to use your data for their own purposes:

Provider	What they do for us
Supabase	Hosts our database and handles secure sign-in (authentication)
Vercel	Hosts and serves the website itself
Resend	Delivers account emails (password reset, confirmation, admin alerts) and the vendor alerts you ask for
Meta / WhatsApp Business Platform	Delivers automated lead-notification messages to vendors who have this enabled — see Section 6
Microsoft Clarity	Optional, consent-based analytics (heatmaps, masked session replay) to improve the site — loads only if you accept analytics cookies, and only on public pages
Cashfree Payments (Secure ID)	Checks a vendor’s GST number against the government GST register when the vendor asks to be GST-verified; receives the GST number and business name only
Have I Been Pwned (Pwned Passwords)	When you choose a password, checks it hasn't appeared in a known data breach. Your password is never sent: your browser scrambles it and sends only the first 5 characters of that scrambled code, and the match is made on your device

For legal reasons

We may disclose information where required by law, to respond to a valid legal request, or to protect the rights, safety, or property of Wedding Bharat, our users, or the public.

In a business transfer

If Wedding Bharat is ever acquired, merged, or transfers substantially all of its assets, your information may be transferred as part of that transaction — we'd notify affected users of any such change and any resulting change to how their data is handled.

We do not sell personal information, and we do not share it with advertisers or data brokers.

06 Leads & WhatsApp Messaging

A core part of how Wedding Bharat works is connecting you with a vendor (or a couple) directly on WhatsApp. When you tap "Book Now," use the AI assistant, or message a vendor, we may open a WhatsApp conversation pre-filled with your inquiry details, or — where a vendor has automated notifications enabled — trigger an automatic WhatsApp message to the vendor on our behalf via Meta's WhatsApp Business Platform.

Once a conversation moves to WhatsApp, it's happening on Meta's platform, governed by WhatsApp's own Privacy Policy, not this one. We only see and store what's needed to make the introduction (your name, phone number, and inquiry details) — we don't monitor, store, or have access to the actual WhatsApp conversation that follows.

07 Cookies & Local Storage

We don't use advertising cookies or cross-site trackers. Our only analytics — Microsoft Clarity — is optional: it loads only if you accept it in our cookie banner, and then sets its own cookies (_clck, _clsk) and records masked usage and session replays to help us improve the site; decline and it never runs. It is also limited to our public pages, never the sign-in, account, or vendor-app screens. Separately, a handful of features are saved directly in your own browser's local storage — never sent to our servers, never shared, and cleared if you clear your browser data:

• Dark mode preference
• Your wishlist and comparison list, before you sign in (once signed in, wishlist syncs to your account so it's available across devices — see Section 3)
• Planning checklist progress
• An in-progress Budget Planner draft, before you save it

Your sign-in session itself is also kept in your browser's local or session storage (depending on whether you chose "remember me"), not in a tracking cookie — it exists only to keep you signed in, and it's cleared when you sign out.

For the full detail — including the third-party requests (fonts, our database provider) that happen when the page loads — see our dedicated Cookie Policy.

08 Data Security

We protect your information with layered, database-level access controls, not just application-level checks that a bug could bypass:

• Row-level security on every table holding personal data, so a query can only ever return rows a user is actually entitled to see, enforced by the database itself.
• Column-scoped access on sensitive fields specifically — for example, a reviewer's phone number is never included in any publicly readable response, even though it's used internally to compute review-verification status.
• No plain-text passwords — authentication and password storage is handled by our authentication provider using industry-standard hashing, never stored or visible to us directly.
• No payment credentials ever reach us — our current payment flow is a manual UPI transfer you complete in your own UPI app; we only ever see a transaction reference number you choose to share with us.

No system is perfectly secure, and we can't guarantee absolute security — but where we find a real gap in how data is protected, we fix it and, where required by law, notify affected users.

09 Data Retention

We keep your information for as long as your account is active, or as long as needed to provide the Platform to you. If you close your account, we remove or de-identify personal information within a reasonable period, except where we're required to keep it longer — for example, financial records for tax purposes, or a review's underlying record where needed to investigate fraud or a dispute, consistent with Section 13 of our Vendor Agreement on review integrity. Vendor alert requests are kept until you unsubscribe or ask us to delete them. Verification files are kept only briefly: identity documents and business evidence for 90 days after our decision and the live photo for 30 days, after which they are deleted automatically; the decision, reviewer, date, document types and file fingerprints are kept while the listing is live and for one year after, and a verification badge expires after 12 months unless renewed. You can withdraw an application at any time or ask us to delete your documents sooner by email.

10 Your Rights & Choices

Under India's Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023, and as a matter of how we want to operate regardless of what the law strictly requires, you can:

• Access the personal data we hold about you.
• Correct inaccurate or outdated information — for most fields, directly through your account settings; for identity-locked vendor fields (business name, verified GST), through the review process described in our Vendor Agreement.
• Request deletion of your account and personal data, subject to the retention exceptions in Section 9.
• Withdraw consent for anything we process based on your consent, at any time — this may limit or end your ability to use certain features.
• Raise a grievance about how we've handled your data — see Section 15.

To exercise any of these, email contact@weddingbharat.com. We'll respond within a reasonable time and, where we can't act on a request in full, explain why.

11 Children's Privacy

Wedding Bharat is intended for adults planning or working in weddings, and isn't directed at children. We don't knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 18. If you believe a child has provided us information, contact contact@weddingbharat.com and we'll remove it.

12 Third-Party Links

Vendor listings and other pages may link out to third-party sites (a vendor's own website or social profile, WhatsApp, and similar). We're not responsible for the privacy practices of any site we don't operate — check their own policy before sharing information there.

13 International Visitors

Wedding Bharat is built for the Indian wedding market and operates primarily under Indian law. If you access the Platform from outside India, you do so understanding that your information will be processed in India, in accordance with this Policy and Indian law.

14 Changes to This Policy

We may update this Policy as the Platform changes — a new feature, a new service provider, or a change in applicable law. When we do, we'll post the updated version here with a new "Last updated" date, and where a change is material, we'll make a reasonable effort to notify registered users directly before it takes effect.

15 Contact & Grievance Officer

For any question, request, or grievance about this Policy or your data, reach us at:

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