Privacy policy

The short version

The website is a shop window. It collects an email address or a mobile number if you choose to leave one, and whatever you type into the trade or contact form. It uses that for one thing: to write back. There is no advertising, no third-party analytics, no profile built about you, and nothing is sold to anybody.

Who is responsible for it

Pova Pearls is a pre-launch venture run by six founders in Gurgaon. There is no registered company yet and none is being registered, so there is no entity name, registered address, GSTIN or food licence number to print here. Those details will be printed on these pages before any order is taken.

Until there is a published mailbox, the contact page is the way to reach the people who hold this data. It is read by a person.

What you can give us, and what happens to it

There are four places on this website where you can type something. All four go to one place — a row in our own database — and no further. Nothing below is shared, sold, or sent to an advertising network.

The launch list — the sign-up panel.

• What it takes: an email address or an Indian mobile number, either one, and your first name if you want to give it.
• What it also records: the page you were on when you signed up, and which product you were looking at.
• Why: to send one message when batch one is ready, and so that the message makes sense in reply.

The pop-up — the one that asks if you would like to hear from us.

• What it takes: the same — an email address or an Indian mobile number, and a first name if you give one — plus the box you tick.
• Why: with that box ticked, to send you launch news, offers and new flavours from Pova by email, SMS or WhatsApp. Nothing is sent to anyone who did not tick it.
• Stopping it: every message carries a way to unsubscribe, and writing to us through the contact page works too. Stopping takes effect at once and we keep a note that you stopped, so we do not ask again.

Club sign-up.

• What it takes: your name, and an email address or a mobile number.
• Why: to tell you when batch one is ready.

The trade enquiry, on the café page.

• What it takes: your business name, an email or mobile number, your city, what kind of business you are, a volume range, and your message.
• Why: so a person can reply about stocking Pova Pearls. It lands in a queue a person works through.

The contact form.

• What it takes: your name, your email address, the subject you picked from the list, and your message.
• Why: to answer you. It lands in the same queue, marked as a website enquiry.

The contact form also has a field that is hidden from people and only ever filled in by automated spam, and it counts how many messages have come from a caller recently so that nobody can flood it. That count is kept against a one-way scrambled form of the network address the message arrived from, held in memory, and it cannot be turned back into an address.

We do not ask for your date of birth, any government ID, or anything else. We do not take payments, so no card, UPI or bank details reach this website at all.

What is kept in your browser

These are stored by your own browser, on your own device. They never reach us and we cannot read them.

Clearing your browser's site data removes all of them. Nothing here is an advertising cookie and none of it is shared with anyone.

Analytics

Analytics is off. The page-view counter only runs when the site is built with NEXT_PUBLIC_ANALYTICS_ENABLED set to true, and it is not set. While it is off, no page views are recorded at all.

If it is ever switched on, what it would record is: the page address with anything after a "?" stripped off, the kind of device, where you arrived from, any campaign tags on the link you followed, and a one-way scrambled form of your network address that cannot be turned back into it. No name, email or phone is stored with any of it, it is our own code writing to our own database, and there is no third-party analytics product on this website. The password-reset page is never recorded at all.

Messages

Nothing is sent to you unless you asked for it and sending has been switched on. Both have to be true: leaving an address does not opt you in to anything, and the sending system is switched off at the moment, so no automatic sequence can start by itself.

The one message the launch list exists for is: one message when the first batch is ready. Not a newsletter, not a series, not an offer. A trade enquiry gets a reply from a person about your enquiry.

Who else sees it

• Our database — a managed Postgres database. The rows above live there and nowhere else.
• Our host — Vercel, which serves the website and, like every web server, sees the requests made to it.

That is the whole list. There is no courier, no payment provider, no email or messaging provider, no advertising network and no analytics company involved, because the website does not do any of those things yet. When one is added, it will be named here before it is used. We would share data with an authority only if the law required it.

Some of the servers involved may be outside India.

How long we keep it

Launch-list and enquiry rows are kept until you ask us to remove them, or until the launch list has done the one job it exists for. Ask us through the contact page and we will delete what we hold about you and tell you when it is done.

Your choices

Through the contact page you can ask to see what we hold about you, correct it, or have it deleted. You can ask us not to write to you. If you are unhappy with how we have handled it you can take it further with the consumer forum or, once it is operating, the Data Protection Board of India.

Children

This is a food product for general sale. We do not knowingly collect anything from anyone under 18; if we find we have, we delete it.

Security

The site is served over HTTPS. The database is access-controlled and only the founders can read it. No system is perfectly secure; if there were a breach affecting you we would tell you, and the authorities, as the law requires.

Changes

When this changes, the date at the top changes. It is still a working draft and a lawyer has not read it.