Privacy policy

What we hold, and what we cannot.

Most privacy policies describe how carefully a company guards what it collected. This one is mostly a list of things that were never collected, because the design refused them. Where we do hold something, it is named here.

Last updated 19 August 2026. This policy applies to the KnownSquare mobile application and to knownsquare.com, both operated by SSDittah Innovations LLP, No 60A, Artha Reviera, Chandapura Anekal Main Road, Marasur, Anekal, Bangalore 562106, Karnataka, India ("we", "us").

1. What the app asks you for

No identifier of any kind. Creating an account generates a cryptographic key on your device. There is no phone number, no email address, no username, no password and no social login. Nothing you type is checked against a directory, because there is no directory.

A name and a photograph, held on your device. The app asks you once for a name and a picture of your face, so that people you connect with can see who they are talking to. These are stored on your phone and shared, encrypted, only with people you have accepted. They are never uploaded to us in any form, encrypted or otherwise. We made that choice deliberately: our servers must already know which anonymous account talks to which in order to deliver anything, and adding real names and faces to that would turn a set of meaningless identifiers into a map of who knows whom.

Permissions we do not request. The app does not ask for access to your contacts, so it cannot read your address book. It does not ask to read SMS. It does not ask for your location. Camera, microphone and storage access are requested only at the moment you use a feature that needs them, such as scanning a code, recording a voice note or attaching a document.

2. What our servers hold

This is the complete list. If it is not here, we do not have it.

• An anonymous account identifier, generated randomly. It is not derived from you, your device or anything you typed.
• Public keys for your account and your device, so that messages can be routed and signatures verified.
• Connection records: which account identifiers have an accepted connection, and which belong to a group. We need this to deliver anything at all. It is pseudonymous, meaning it links one random string to another, and it is the single most sensitive thing we hold. We say so plainly rather than leaving it out.
• Messages awaiting delivery, as encrypted blobs we cannot read, deleted as soon as the recipient's device confirms receipt, and in any case after three days.
• A push notification token for your device, used to wake your phone when something is waiting.
• Invitation codes you have created, which expire and are then deleted.
• Subscription status, if you subscribe: an expiry date and a reference from the app store. See section 5.
• Operational logs, including IP addresses at the moment of connection, retained for 30 days for security and abuse prevention.

3. What we cannot hold, as a matter of design

These are not promises of restraint. They are consequences of how the system is built.

• Message content. Everything is encrypted on your device with keys we never possess. This includes text, voice notes, photographs, documents, plans, guest lists, lists, polls and expense records.
• Your Locker. Documents you save are encrypted on your phone and are not uploaded to us.
• Names and faces. Neither yours nor those of people you connect with.
• Nicknames you give people. They never leave your phone.
• Your address book, your SMS and your location. We never had permission to look.

The practical consequence is worth stating: if we are compelled to disclose what we have about a user, what exists is the list in section 2. We cannot produce message content, because we do not have it and cannot decrypt it.

4. Notifications, and what that means

To wake your phone when a message arrives, the app uses Firebase Cloud Messaging on Android and the Apple Push Notification service on iPhone. We send a signal containing no message content, but the fact that a signal was sent, and its timing, is visible to Google or Apple as the operator of that service. This is true of essentially every messaging app on both platforms, and it is a limit of the phone rather than a choice of ours. We mention it because a privacy policy that omitted it would be incomplete.

5. Payment

Paid features are sold through Google Play and the Apple App Store. Your payment is made to them, using details you have already given them, and they act as merchant of record. We never see your name, billing address, card or bank details. What reaches us is a purchase reference we use to verify that an anonymous account identifier is entitled to the paid feature, and the date that entitlement ends. Refunds, cancellations and renewals are handled by the store under its own policies and privacy terms.

6. This website

knownsquare.com serves its own fonts and images and calls no third party. There are no advertising trackers, no analytics scripts and no cookies set by us. The site does keep one thing on your device: your choice of dark, light or automatic theme, stored by the browser so the page does not change under you on the next visit. It is a preference, it goes nowhere, and it is why this site has no consent banner to click through. Our hosting provider, Cloudflare, processes standard request logs, including IP addresses, in order to serve the site and defend it from attack. If we ever add analytics, this section will say so, and it will say what is collected.

The contact form is the one place this website collects anything. When you write to us we store the name, email address, subject and message you send, and email them to the team so that a person can reply. We keep a one-way hash of your IP address, never the address itself, purely to stop one sender flooding the form. Messages are kept for 12 months and then deleted. They are not used for marketing, not shared with anybody, and cannot be linked to any account in the app, because the app gives us nothing to link them to.

Worth stating plainly, because the rest of this policy might suggest otherwise: the app asks for nothing, and this website has an ordinary contact form. A website that answers bug reports has to know where to send the answer. The two are different things and we would rather say so than blur it.

7. How long things are kept

• Undelivered messages: until delivery, and at most three days.
• Connection records: for as long as the connection exists. Delete a connection and the record goes.
• Account record: kept while the account exists. We do not delete accounts for inactivity, because an account here is an identity your family depends on, and a quiet expiry would take it away at the worst possible moment. Deleting an account from inside the app is being built and is not available yet; until it ships, write to us and we will remove the record by hand.
• Operational logs: 30 days.
• Subscription records: for as long as tax and accounting law requires, which in India is currently at least six years.

8. Your rights, and an honest limit on them

Depending on where you live, you may have rights to access, correct, delete or export your personal data, including under India's Digital Personal Data Protection Act 2023 and, where it applies to you, the GDPR.

There is an unusual wrinkle here, and it works in your favour. Because we hold no identifier for you, we cannot find your account from a name, an email or a phone number, and neither can anyone claiming to be you. A request is proved by your device signing it, which is done from within the app. Deleting an account from inside the app is being built and is not available yet. Until it ships, write to us and we will remove the records in section 2 by hand. Data held about you by people you talked to lives on their phones, and is beyond our reach, in the same way that a letter you posted is.

To exercise a right, or to ask what is held, write to [email protected]. If you are in India and we have not dealt with a complaint properly, you may raise it with the Data Protection Board of India after first putting it to our Grievance Officer, named below.

9. Sharing

We do not sell personal data and we do not share it for advertising. We use a small number of processors to run the service: Cloudflare for hosting, servers and storage, Resend to deliver the email a contact form message becomes, and Google and Apple for push notifications and, when paid features exist, payment. Resend is based in the United States, so a message you send through the form is processed there as well as here. We may disclose the information in section 2 where we are legally required to, and we will resist requests that exceed what the law requires.

10. Children

KnownSquare is not intended for children under 13, and anyone under 18 needs a parent or guardian's agreement, who should also be a guardian on the account. A younger family member's account may be set up and watched over by a parent as a guardian, in which case the parent is responsible for that consent.

11. Changes

If this policy changes in a way that affects what we collect, we will say so in the app before the change takes effect, and the date at the top will change. Previous versions will remain available at knownsquare.com/privacy/archive/.

12. Contact

SSDittah Innovations LLP, No 60A, Artha Reviera, Chandapura Anekal Main Road, Marasur, Anekal, Bangalore 562106, Karnataka, India. Privacy enquiries: [email protected]. Grievance Officer, as required under India's Information Technology Rules 2021: Sukesh Shetty, [email protected], No 60A, Artha Reviera, Chandapura Anekal Main Road, Marasur, Anekal, Bangalore 562106, Karnataka, India. Complaints are acknowledged within 24 hours and resolved within 15 days.

Draft for legal review. It must be checked against the Play data safety declaration and the Apple privacy labels before publication, because a store reviewer compares them line by line.

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