Privacy Policy

Welcome to Piqd. We respect your privacy and are committed to protecting your personal data. This Privacy Policy will inform you as to how we look after your personal data when you visit our website (regardless of where you visit it from) and tell you about your privacy rights and how the law protects you.

1. Important Information and Who We Are

Purpose of this Privacy Policy

This privacy policy aims to give you information on how Piqd collects and processes your personal data through your use of this website, including any data you may provide through this website when you sign up, post an idea, vote, comment, or interact with our services.

It is important that you read this privacy policy together with any other privacy policy or fair processing notice we may provide on specific occasions when we are collecting or processing personal data about you so that you are fully aware of how and why we are using your data.

Contact Details

If you have any questions about this privacy policy or our privacy practices, please contact us at: privacy@piqd.in

2. The Data We Collect About You

Personal data, or personal information, means any information about an individual from which that person can be identified. It does not include data where the identity has been removed (anonymous data).

We may collect, use, store and transfer different kinds of personal data about you which we have grouped together as follows:

• Identity Data includes first name, last name, username or similar identifier, and title. When you sign up using Google OAuth, we receive your name and profile photo.
• Contact Data includes email address.
• Profile Data includes your username, bio, city, state, college, company, LinkedIn URL, ideas you have posted, votes, comments, direct messages, and your role (e.g., Founder, Explorer).
• Usage Data includes information about how you use our website and services, such as total views, engagement metrics, and interaction timestamps.
• Technical Data includes internet protocol (IP) address, your login data, browser type and version, time zone setting and location, and other technology on the devices you use to access this website.
• Transaction Data includes details about micro-donations you make through the platform (excluding full payment card details which are securely handled by Razorpay).
• Investor Data (if applicable) includes firm name, investment thesis, sector interests, stage preferences, and ticket size.

3. How Is Your Personal Data Collected?

We use different methods to collect data from and about you including through:

• Direct interactions. You may give us your Identity, Contact, and Profile Data by filling in forms or by corresponding with us by mail, email, or otherwise. This includes personal data you provide when you create an account, post an idea, or contact us.
• Automated technologies or interactions. As you interact with our website, we will automatically collect Technical Data about your equipment, browsing actions and patterns. We collect this personal data by using cookies, server logs and other similar technologies.
• Third parties or publicly available sources. We will receive personal data about you from various third parties, such as authentication providers (Clerk) and payment providers (Razorpay).

4. How We Use Your Personal Data

We will only use your personal data when the law allows us to. Most commonly, we will use your personal data in the following circumstances:

• To register you as a new user and manage your account.
• To display your public profile, ideas, and engagement activity to other users of Piqd.
• To process and deliver platform features, including voting, commenting, gamification points, badges, and investor connections.
• To send you notifications regarding votes, comments, milestones, and direct messages.
• To administer and protect our business and this website (including troubleshooting, data analysis, testing, system maintenance, support, reporting, and hosting of data).
• To use data analytics to improve our website, products/services, marketing, customer relationships, and experiences.
• To prevent abuse, spam, and maintain the overall integrity of the platform.

5. Disclosures of Your Personal Data

We do not sell your personal data. Your public profile information (name, username, bio, city, linked URLs) and activities (ideas posted, comments, votes depending on platform settings) are visible to other users. Your email address is strictly kept private and is not displayed publicly.

We may share your personal data with internal third parties (e.g., our employees) and external third parties acting as processors, such as:

• Clerk for secure authentication and identity management.
• Supabase (PostgreSQL) for secure database hosting and storage.
• Upstash (Redis) for temporary rate limiting and caching.
• Razorpay for processing micro-donations securely.
• Vercel for application hosting.

We require all third parties to respect the security of your personal data and to treat it in accordance with the law.

6. Data Security

We have put in place appropriate security measures to prevent your personal data from being accidentally lost, used, or accessed in an unauthorized way, altered, or disclosed. Your data is stored securely on our managed database providers with encryption at rest. Authentication is securely handled by our third-party provider, which complies with strict industry security standards.

In addition, we limit access to your personal data to those employees, agents, contractors, and other third parties who have a business need to know.

7. Data Retention

We will only retain your personal data for as long as reasonably necessary to fulfill the purposes we collected it for, including for the purposes of satisfying any legal, regulatory, tax, accounting, or reporting requirements. We may retain your personal data for a longer period in the event of a complaint or if we reasonably believe there is a prospect of litigation in respect to our relationship with you.

To determine the appropriate retention period for personal data, we consider the amount, nature, and sensitivity of the personal data, the potential risk of harm from unauthorized use or disclosure, the purposes for which we process your personal data, and applicable legal requirements.

8. Your Legal Rights

Under certain circumstances, you have rights under data protection laws in relation to your personal data. These include the right to:

• Request access to your personal data (commonly known as a "data subject access request").
• Request correction of the personal data that we hold about you. You can update most of this directly in your profile settings.
• Request erasure of your personal data. This enables you to ask us to delete or remove personal data where there is no good reason for us continuing to process it.
• Object to processing of your personal data where we are relying on a legitimate interest.
• Request restriction of processing of your personal data.
• Request the transfer of your personal data to you or to a third party.
• Withdraw consent at any time where we are relying on consent to process your personal data.

If you wish to exercise any of the rights set out above, please contact us at privacy@piqd.in. We try to respond to all legitimate requests within one month.

9. Cookies and Tracking Technologies

We use essential cookies strictly necessary for the operation of the platform, primarily managed by our authentication provider to keep you logged in securely. We do not use third-party advertising cookies or cross-site tracking cookies. You can set your browser to refuse all or some browser cookies, but note that if you disable or refuse essential cookies, some parts of this website may become inaccessible or not function properly.

10. Changes to the Privacy Policy

We keep our privacy policy under regular review. Any changes we make to our privacy policy in the future will be posted on this page and, where appropriate, notified to you by email or via a platform notification. Please check back frequently to see any updates or changes.

Contact Us

For any questions, concerns, or requests regarding this Privacy Policy or our data practices, please reach out to us at:

Email: privacy@piqd.in