Privacy Policy

This policy explains what information Nalanda collects, why, who we share it with, how long we keep it, and the choices and rights you have. We have written it to describe what the app and our servers actually do — including the parts that are less flattering to us. Where a setting does less than its name suggests, we say so.

Nalanda is operated by Nalanda Guru LLC, a California limited liability company (“Nalanda,” “we,” “us”). We decide how and why your information is used, which makes us the “controller” or “data fiduciary” of it under the privacy laws that use those terms. You can reach us at privacy@nalandaguru.com, by phone at (510) 736-0225, or by mail at Nalanda Guru LLC, 2108 N St, Ste N, Sacramento, CA 95816, USA.

1. Who this policy covers

This policy applies to the Nalanda iPhone app, the website at nalandaguru.com, and the accounts and subscriptions we manage (together, the “Service”). It does not cover what other companies do on their own account — for example, what Apple does with your Apple Account when you sign in with Apple, what Google does with your Google Account when you sign in with Google, or what our payment reseller does as the seller of your subscription. Those are governed by their own policies.

Nalanda runs on iPhone only. There is no iPad, Mac, Apple Vision Pro, Apple Watch, Android, or web version of the app, so everything below describes what the iPhone app, our website, and our servers do. Section 15 explains where Nalanda is currently offered.

2. Information we collect

Account information

• Email and password. If you sign up with email, you give us your email address and a password. Passwords are stored only as salted cryptographic hashes; we never see or store the password itself.
• Sign in with Apple. We receive a stable identifier and the email address Apple shares. If you choose to hide your email, we receive only Apple’s private relay address and never learn your real one.
• Sign in with Google. We receive a stable identifier, your email address, your name, and, if you have one, the web address of your Google profile picture.
• Your profile. A username you choose, and optionally a display name, an avatar colour and initials, or a profile photo. If you upload a photo, it is stored in our image storage and is publicly viewable by anyone with its link, including other users who view your profile.

Age confirmation and agreements

• Age. When you first use the app, we ask for your date of birth to confirm you meet the minimum age. Your date of birth is checked on your iPhone and never leaves it. We store only the fact that you confirmed, when, and the app version and platform you used.
• Terms acceptance. When you accept our Terms of Service, we record which version you accepted, when, and the app version and platform.

Things you create

• Notes and highlights — the title and text you write, the passage you highlighted, the book and location it came from, and whether you made it public.
• Playlists and folders — names, the verses and passages you added, cover images, pinned state, and whether you made them public.
• Guru conversations — covered separately in Section 4.

Anything you make public is visible to other Nalanda users, including on your profile. Treat it as published, not private.

Reading and usage activity

While Personalization is on (it is on by default), the app records events describing how you use it. An event can include the book, chapter, and specific verse or passage; how far you scrolled and how much you completed; how long you spent; which screen you came from; a session identifier; your time-zone offset; and, for searches, the text you searched for. This is the most detailed information we hold about you: it describes your reading in close to complete detail. When you turn Personalization off, the app stops recording these events and discards any it had not yet sent.

Profiles we build from your activity

From your activity we compute and store derived records: a summary of your reading taste per book, recommendation shelves, recently viewed items, and the personal Themes we generate for you (Section 4). Your activity also contributes, combined with everyone else’s, to library-wide popularity figures that do not identify you.

Social information

Who you follow and who follows you, and the related timestamps; your public profile, public notes, and public playlists; and the accounts you block.

Reports, moderation, and feedback

• Reports. If you report content or a profile, we record who reported it, what was reported, whose it was, the reason and any details you give, and a snapshot copy of the reported content so we can review it even if it later changes. If your content is reported, the same record is kept about it.
• Moderation notices. If we act on your content or account, we store the notice we send you and whether you have read it.
• Feedback you send. If you send feedback from the app, we receive your rating, category, and message; whether you agreed to be contacted; any screenshots you choose to attach; and your app version, iOS version, device model, and language setting, so we can reproduce problems.
• Messages to us. If you email, call, or write to us, we keep the message and our reply.

Device and technical information

• Push notification tokens — with the app version, environment, and your notification preferences, if you allow notifications.
• Device attestation keys — a key identifier, public key, and counter created through Apple’s App Attest, which lets us confirm requests come from a genuine, unmodified copy of the app. They identify an app installation, not you personally, and cannot be used to track you across other companies’ apps.
• Integrity signals — indications that a device or the app appears to have been modified or that its secure connection to us is being intercepted, which we log to protect the texts and the Service.
• IP address and request information — seen by our hosting providers when your device connects, and used for security, rate limiting, and abuse prevention.

The app does not collect your precise location, contacts, photos (other than a profile photo or screenshot you choose to upload), microphone, camera, or health data, and it does not use the advertising identifier.

Security and abuse records

We log requests to the servers that deliver the texts — what was requested, when, the outcome, and the device key involved — along with short-lived request counters and records of accounts that exceeded our limits. If an account is restricted or banned, we store the reason and the supporting evidence. These records exist to stop bulk copying of the texts and to protect the Service and its users.

Usage limits and the free Guru allowance

• Daily counters of how many Guru questions and Theme refreshes you have used, to enforce daily limits.
• Your free-question allowance. Free accounts get a limited number of Guru questions. To stop that allowance being reset by deleting and re-creating an account, we store a one-way cryptographic hash of your normalized email address together with how many free questions have been used. The hash is not your email address and is not linked to your account, but anyone who already knows an email address could check it against the hash. This record is kept after you delete your account (Section 12).

Subscription and payment information

We never receive or store your full card number. Subscriptions are sold through Stripe’s Link service, which acts as the reseller and merchant of record and processes your payment on its own systems under its own privacy policy. We receive what we need to give you access and to support you, such as your email address, your country and postal code for tax, your plan, subscription status, renewal date, and a transaction reference.

Our website

nalandaguru.com does not use advertising cookies, analytics trackers, or tracking pixels. Our hosting provider, Cloudflare, processes the IP address and request details of visitors to deliver the site and protect it from attacks, and may set strictly necessary security cookies to do so.

3. Religious and philosophical information

This deserves its own section, because it is the most sensitive thing we hold.

Nalanda is a library of religious and philosophical texts. What you read, search for, save, and ask the Guru can reveal your religious or philosophical interests, and the profiles we build from that activity are, in effect, inferences about them. Many privacy laws — including California’s and those of several other US states, the European Union’s GDPR, and similar laws elsewhere — treat information revealing religious or philosophical beliefs as a special or sensitive category, and some treat inferences about it the same way as things you state directly.

We want to be plain about the implication: using Nalanda while signed in creates a record of your spiritual reading life, held by us. So:

• We use it only to run the Service for you as described in this policy: to answer your questions, to personalize what you see, to keep your library in sync, and to protect the Service.
• We never sell it, never use it for advertising, and never share it with anyone except the service providers who help us run Nalanda (Section 6) or where the law requires.
• We do not use it to draw conclusions about your health, mental state, politics, or anything outside the app’s purpose, and our recommendations are not judgments about what you believe.
• You can stop the app recording your reading activity by turning Personalization off (Section 10), and you can delete your account at any time (Section 12).
• Where the law of the place you live requires your explicit consent to process this kind of information, we will ask for it before doing so, and you can withdraw it at any time.

4. The Guru, Themes, and how AI handles your information

The Guru answers questions by finding relevant passages in the texts and generating a short summary of them with artificial intelligence. It is software, not a person, and not a spiritual, medical, legal, or mental-health adviser. Its answers can be wrong. We use Google’s Gemini API as our AI provider.

What happens to a question you ask

1. Search. Your question text is sent to Google, which converts it into a numerical representation used to find matching passages.
2. Summary. The passages found are sent to Google to generate the summary you see. The summary step receives the passages, not your question. You can turn AI summaries off in Configurations.
3. Your chat history. Your question, the answer, the passages cited, and the chat’s title are saved so you can return to them.
4. Question log. Your question is also recorded in a log linked to your account, which we use to run and improve the Guru, to enforce limits, and to prevent abuse.
5. Shared cache. To avoid paying to answer the same question twice, we store a normalized copy of the question text and its results in a cache shared across all users, and count how often each question has been asked. The cache has no link to any account and is never shown to other users, but the text you typed persists in it.

Two things you should know

Questions are logged even when Personalization is off. Personalization controls the recording of your reading activity. It does not stop us logging your Guru questions, because we need that log to operate the Guru. If you do not want a question recorded, do not ask it.

Question text outlives your account in the shared cache. It is not linked to you, but please do not put names, contact details, health information, or anything else that identifies you or someone else into a Guru question.

Personal Themes

To create the personal Themes shown on your Home screen, we send Google a selection of your recent Guru questions and the verses you have engaged with most, and ask it to name themes that connect them. The resulting Themes are stored with your account.

What Google may do with it

Google processes this information on our behalf as a service provider, under the terms that apply to paid use of its API, which do not permit Google to use it to train or improve its own products. We do not use your questions or content to train AI models either.

5. How and why we use information

Some privacy laws require us to state a “legal basis” for each use. We list those too, for the places they apply.

Where we rely on legitimate interest, we have weighed it against your rights, and you can object (Section 11). Where we rely on consent, you can withdraw it at any time; this does not affect anything we did before you withdrew it.

Our recommendations are generated automatically, but we do not make decisions based solely on automated processing that produce legal or similarly significant effects on you. Automated systems also help detect bulk copying and abuse; if one restricts your account, a person will review it on request (see our Terms of Service).

6. Who we share information with

We share information with service providers who process it on our behalf, under contract, and only for the purposes we direct:

We may also disclose information when the law requires it, when needed to establish, exercise, or defend legal claims, or to protect someone from serious harm. If Nalanda is acquired or merges with another company, information would transfer as part of that transaction; we would tell you before it became subject to a different privacy policy.

Other Nalanda users see what you choose to make public: your username, display name, avatar or profile photo, public notes and playlists, and follower counts.

7. What we do not do

• We do not sell your personal information, and we never have.
• We do not share it for targeted or cross-context behavioural advertising. There are no advertising SDKs, ad networks, or third-party analytics trackers in the app or on our website.
• We do not use your reading, notes, or Guru questions to infer anything about your health, mental health, or politics.
• We do not read your private notes or Guru chats except where necessary to operate the Service, investigate a problem you reported, respond to a credible report of abuse, or comply with the law.
• We do not use your content to train AI models, and our AI provider may not either (Section 4).

8. Where your information is stored and processed

Our database and servers are in the United States (in the eastern United States, on Amazon Web Services, through Supabase). Our other providers may process information in the United States and in other countries where they operate.

If you use Nalanda from outside the United States, your information will be transferred to and processed in the United States, whose data protection laws may differ from those where you live. Where the law requires a safeguard for such a transfer, we rely on appropriate mechanisms, such as the Standard Contractual Clauses approved by the European Commission and their equivalents, as included in our providers’ data processing terms. You can ask us for more information about these safeguards.

9. How long we keep things

We would rather tell you “indefinitely” than claim we keep things “only as long as necessary” when our systems do not work that way.

10. Your controls in the app

• Personalization — turn it off in Configurations and the app stops recording your reading activity and discards any it has not yet sent. It does not stop Guru questions being logged (Section 4).
• AI summaries — turn them off in Configurations to see Guru results without an AI-generated summary.
• Public and private — every note and playlist is private unless you make it public, and your profile has its own public or private setting. You can change these at any time, but anything already seen or copied by someone else cannot be recalled.
• Blocking and reporting — report content or profiles, and block other users.
• Notifications — in the app and in your iPhone’s settings.
• Deleting individual items — any note, playlist, or Guru chat.
• Account deletion — see Section 12.

11. Your privacy rights

Wherever you live, we will honour these requests, subject only to limits the law allows:

• Access — know what personal information we hold about you and how we use it.
• Copy and portability — receive a copy in a commonly used, machine-readable format.
• Correction — fix information that is wrong or incomplete.
• Deletion — have it deleted, as described in Section 12.
• Objection and restriction — object to, or ask us to limit, uses based on our legitimate interest, including personalization.
• Withdrawing consent — wherever we rely on your consent.
• Limiting sensitive information — ask us to use it only as needed to provide the Service you requested.
• Opting out of sale, sharing, or targeted advertising — we do none of these, so there is nothing to opt out of.
• Non-discrimination — we will not degrade your service or charge you more for exercising any of these rights.

How to make a request. Email privacy@nalandaguru.com from the address on your account, or use the in-app tools, which are usually faster. We may need to verify that you are the account holder before acting; we will ask only for what we need to do that. You can authorize someone else to make a request for you, and we will ask for proof of their authority. We respond within the time the law where you live requires, and in any case within 45 days; we may extend that once where the law allows, and will tell you if we do.

If we say no. If we decline your request, we will explain why. You can appeal by replying to our decision or emailing privacy@nalandaguru.com with the subject line “Appeal”; we will respond to an appeal within 60 days. You may also complain to the data protection or consumer protection authority where you live.

12. Deleting your account

You can delete your account from inside the app: tap your profile photo, then Configurations, then Delete account. Account deletion is not available on our website. If you no longer have the app, email privacy@nalandaguru.com from the address on your account and we will delete it for you. Our account deletion page explains the steps.

Deletion removes your account, profile, profile photo, notes and highlights, playlists and folders, Guru chats and your Guru question log, reading events, derived recommendation, taste, and Theme records, follows, push notification tokens, and device keys. If you signed in with Apple, we also ask Apple to revoke Nalanda’s access to your Apple Account.

Some things survive deletion, and you should know about them before you rely on it:

• A de-identified archive, kept indefinitely. Before deleting, we copy your reading activity, recommendation and taste records, and settings into an archive under a new random identifier, with written text removed and no record linking it back to you. We keep it indefinitely to understand and prevent abuse. Your notes are never copied into it.
• The shared Guru question cache, which was never linked to you (Section 4).
• The free Guru allowance record (a hash of your email address and a count), so deleting and re-creating an account does not reset the free allowance (Section 2).
• Security records — request logs for their normal 90-day period, and ban records where an account was restricted for abuse. After deletion these refer only to an identifier that is no longer connected to any account details.
• Reports and moderation records where needed to protect other users.
• Billing and tax records held by our payment reseller as the law requires.

Deleting your account also cancels any paid subscription; see our account deletion page for details.

13. Children and teenagers

Nalanda is not for children under 13, and where local law sets a higher minimum age for using an app like ours without a parent’s permission, that higher age applies. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children below the applicable age. If you believe a child has created an account, email privacy@nalandaguru.com and we will delete it and the associated information promptly.

If you are under 18, please read this policy with a parent or guardian before using Nalanda. We do not sell teenagers’ information or use it for advertising.

14. Security

We have built more protection than most apps of this size: access to your information is restricted per user at the database level, requests for the texts must come from an attested, unmodified copy of the app, content stored on your device is encrypted, connections are encrypted in transit, and we monitor and rate-limit for bulk copying.

No system is perfectly secure, and we cannot promise ours will never be breached. If a breach affects your information, we will notify you and the relevant authorities as the law requires. To report a security problem responsibly, email support@nalandaguru.com with “Security” in the subject line.

15. Additional information for your region

Nalanda is currently offered in the United States, on the United States App Store. Before we offer it anywhere else, we will add to this section the rights, contacts, and details that apply there, and update the rest of this policy as needed. This section is also where you will find information specific to where you live.

15.1 United States

California. The categories of personal information we collect, the sources, our purposes, and the categories of recipients are set out in Sections 2, 5, and 6, which together serve as our notice at collection; retention periods are in Section 9. In the terms of the California Consumer Privacy Act, we collect identifiers, customer records, commercial information (subscription records), internet or other electronic network activity information, inferences, and sensitive personal information (account log-in credentials and information revealing religious or philosophical beliefs). We use sensitive personal information only to provide the Service and for other purposes the law permits without a right to limit. We do not sell or share personal information, as those terms are defined in that law, and have not done so in the preceding 12 months. We do not knowingly sell or share the personal information of consumers under 16.

Other states. Residents of other states with comprehensive privacy laws — including Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Oregon, Texas, Utah, Virginia, and others — have rights similar to those in Section 11, including to appeal our decision on a request. Where one of those laws applies to us and requires your consent before we process sensitive information, we will ask for it.

16. Changes to this policy

We will update this policy as Nalanda changes and as we launch in new places, and will change the date at the top when we do. If a change materially reduces your privacy or expands how we use information you already gave us, we will tell you in the app or by email before it takes effect, and where the law requires your consent, we will ask for it rather than assume it.

17. Contact

Nalanda Guru LLC
2108 N St, Ste N
Sacramento, CA 95816, USA
Telephone: (510) 736-0225

Privacy questions, requests, and appeals: privacy@nalandaguru.com
Security reports: support@nalandaguru.com (subject “Security”)
Everything else: support@nalandaguru.com