Privacy Policy

Khojwise is run by The InHouse Marketers Private Limited, a company registered in India, at [OWNER TO FILL: registered office address]. We decide why and how your personal data is used (the “Data Fiduciary” under India’s Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023).

Our Grievance Officer is [OWNER TO FILL: Grievance Officer's name], who you can reach at [OWNER TO FILL: Grievance Officer's email address] about anything in this policy.

Anyone can read Khojwise’s public pages: the home page, Explore, search, products, design ideas and the page that finds what a link is about. If you do, we use the country and postcode of the network you connect from to estimate delivery and pick your currency, for that page only. We don’t store them, we don’t set cookies, and we don’t record what you look at or which store you go to. Our host keeps its usual request logs (see “Who else receives it”).

If you ask the assistant before you sign in. Your first question to the assistant needs no account. When you send it, Khojwise begins a guest session: a short-lived account with no email address, a cookie that keeps it, and the IP address and browser details recorded for any session. It keeps your question and the answer, encrypted like any chat message, and what the assistant started for you, such as a trip shortlist. Nothing else is kept for a guest: no memory, projects, reminders or watches, no photos, and none of your words go to an outside AI service. If you sign in, the conversation moves to your account. If you don’t, the guest session and everything in it are deleted three days after it began. To keep the free answer from being used by scripts, we count how many guest sessions begin and how many guest questions are sent from one network address in a day. The count is stored only in a scrambled form of the address that can’t be turned back into it, and is deleted after a day.

• Your email address, to sign you in with a one-time code and to know it’s your account. Codes expire after 10 minutes.
• Your sign-in session: a cookie that keeps you signed in, and the IP address and browser details recorded when you sign in. Sessions last 7 days unless you use Khojwise again, and end when you sign out.
• Where things should be delivered: your country and postcode, so we show only what reaches you and what delivery costs. If you haven’t told us, we use the country and postcode of the network you connect from. We don’t keep your city, region or precise location. An address you type is never replaced by one from your connection.
• Your currency, number format and time zone, set from your delivery country.
• Your age range, if you give it (never your birth date), so Discover can show what’s popular with people your age; and your home city, if you give it, to start a new trip from. What’s shown as popular with an age range comes from searches shared by at least ten different people of that age in the last month, so nobody’s own search can be picked out.
• Your taste: the interests, sizes, brands and price limits you tell us, what you never want to see or want to see less of, and what we learn from your saves and “less like this” choices. You can see and change all of it in Profile.
• What the assistant remembers: only what you tell it or say yes to, which is your vehicles (year, make, model, and a trim, engine, mileage, what it is for, service date or note if you add one), your diet and allergies, the sports you play and your level, whether you rent or own your home, and things you have. It uses them to suit what it shows you, for example to leave an allergen out of the recipes it finds. When you say something like “I drive a 2019 Civic”, the assistant offers to remember it and saves nothing until you tap Remember; if you tap Not now, it keeps a switched-off note of the fact so it doesn’t ask again. You can see, change or delete every one of these on the memory page (in Profile and in Settings), and deleting a row deletes it for good.
• What you choose: the kinds of place, the cuisines and the diets you ask the assistant for, the words of style you use (“quiet”, “cheap”, “romantic”), the places and Google Maps searches you open on its cards, the flights, stays and cruises you look up (where to, where from, the month, how many, nonstop or the kind of stay) and the trips you plan (where, the month, who goes and what for). We keep these as short facts, never your sentence, and never the name of a place you opened. From them the assistant learns a few preferences by fixed rules, for example that you usually go for Japanese or usually fly from Delhi, and then leads with them and says so (“You usually go for Japanese, so I’ve put any Japanese places first”); it never narrows a list without saying it and never overrides what you asked. It never learns a diet that could say something about your faith or your health, never learns a dislike, and what you tell it always comes first. Profile shows everything it learned under “What I’ve learned about you”, with why: you can keep each one, remove it (it is never learned again) or forget all of it. Switch “Places, food and trips you choose” off in “What shapes your feed” and nothing is recorded or used; while learning is paused nothing new is recorded. Nothing is recorded if you have no account or are under 18.
• What you do in Khojwise: what you search for, things you save, projects and their budgets, what you view, save, mark “less like this” or click through to a store, and which picks we showed you and why. We use this to suggest better picks: Discover shows more of what you searched for and opened in the last month, and says so on each row.
• A link you share or paste: we read only the product words in it, we never open it and we don’t save it in our database. It does arrive in the page’s address, so our host’s request logs (see “How long we keep it”) can show it. The words are kept as a search like any other, which you can clear in Profile, and they aren’t recorded while learning is paused or if you have no account.
• Your chat messages, so the assistant can answer and you can see your history. The assistant is Khojwise’s own and runs on our servers. No outside AI service receives your messages. We count how many messages you send to keep the service fair. Messages older than 12 months are deleted.
• Reminders you set: the words you wrote (“call Mum”), the day and time you chose, your time zone and how often it repeats, so that Khojwise can tell you at that minute: in the bell, and by push or email if you allowed them in Settings, even in your quiet hours, since you asked for that minute. The words are stored encrypted. You can change, tick off or delete a reminder on the Reminders tab of Watching; one you have finished with is cleared a month later, and all of them go when you delete your account.
• How well Khojwise reads your requests: Khojwise’s own model reads your requests on our servers and nothing is sent to anyone else. A request its rules could not read is kept for 30 days, with any email address, number or link taken out, to improve how Khojwise understands people; for a request they could read we keep only labels and times.
• Counts that stop misuse: how many sign-in codes were asked for and how many searches were made in the last few minutes, and how many guest sessions and questions came from one network in a day, by account, email address or network address. The email or network address is stored only in a scrambled form that can’t be turned back into it, and the counts are deleted after a day.
• A record of sensitive actions on your account, such as downloading your data: what was done and when. It is deleted with your account.
• A choice stored in your browser: whether the chat panel is open and, if the assistant asked you to sign in, the message you had typed, until you sign in or close the tab. It stays on your device.

When you report a design idea as “Not a match”, we record the reason and how many times it was reported, not who reported it.

We don’t use analytics, advertising or tracking tools. We don’t buy data about you, and we don’t ask for your name, phone number, payment details or government ID.

We use your personal data with your consent, which you give when you create your account, for the purposes above. You can withdraw it at any time by deleting your account (see below). That stops our use of your data from then on, but doesn’t make earlier use unlawful. Some features can’t work without it: we can’t sign you in without your email address.

Khojwise is for people aged 18 and over. Please don’t use it if you’re younger. If you tell us you’re under 18, Khojwise stops learning from what you do straight away, deletes the searches and products it recorded, and asks you to delete your account.

If you tap “Use my location” and your device agrees, Khojwise can suggest a place near you when you open it at a mealtime, chosen from what you’ve told us and what you’ve picked before.

• Your device rounds your position to about a hundred metres before sending it, and it is read only while Khojwise is open.
• We use it for that one suggestion and never store it. Geoapify, our map provider, is only asked about an area about a kilometre wide around it.
• You can stop this at any time in your device or browser settings, and “Not now” ends the suggestion for that meal.
• Khojwise may also ask once about something your searches suggest, such as whether school bags you looked at are for your kids. Nothing is kept unless you say yes, and we never read anything into searches about health, a baby or a relationship.

We share personal data only with the services that run Khojwise for us:

• Vercel hosts Khojwise. It handles every request, including your IP address, and works out your country and postcode from it.
• Neon runs our database, where the data above is stored.
• Resend sends the email with your sign-in code, so it receives your email address and the code.

Their servers are outside India, including in the United States. They may use your data only to provide their service to us.

Others receive less, or nothing from us:

• Shopify, whose catalogue of independent shops we search for products, receives your search words (or the topic you’re looking at), the country and postcode things should ship to, and your currency. Our server asks it, so it never gets your account details or IP address. What it returns isn’t stored.
• Stores that publish their own catalogue for shopping assistants (today Decathlon in the US and the United Arab Emirates) receive the same: your search words, country, postcode and currency, from our server, and only when you’re in a country they sell to. What they return isn’t stored.
• Tavily, a web search service, receives the name of a product you open, the marketplaces to look on and your country, so we can link to the same product on them. Our server asks it, so it never gets your account details or IP address. We keep the links it finds for a week, by product, not by person.
• eBay receives your search words or the item you open, and your country and postcode, so it can show what ships to you with its delivery dates. Our server asks it, so it never gets your account details or IP address. What it returns isn’t stored.
• SerpApi, a service that reads Google Shopping, receives your search words or the product you open, and your country and language, so we can show the same products’ prices at other shops. Our server asks it, so it never gets your account details or IP address. We keep its answers for up to 12 hours, by search, not by person.
• Booking.com and Ticketmaster, for stays and events on a trip, receive the trip’s place, dates and number of travellers (Booking.com also your country and the trip’s currency), from our server. They never get your account details or IP address, and what they return isn’t stored. If you book a stay through a Booking.com link, Khojwise may earn a commission.
• Openverse, Unsplash and Pexels, the picture libraries our ideas come from, receive search words only (your search, or your interests’ topics), never your account details or IP address: our server asks them, not your browser. The pictures themselves load from those libraries’ servers in your browser, as they require, so they see your IP address the way any website you visit does.
• Trips. The place you search for goes to Wikivoyage (and the guide’s own place names to Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons, to find their photos), and the place’s coordinates (not yours) go to MET Norway for the weather, all from our server so neither sees your account details or IP address, while the booking links open Google, Booking.com and Airbnb in your browser with the trip’s place, dates and number of travellers, where those sites’ own policies apply, and nothing else about the trip is shared. The trip map’s tiles come from OpenFreeMap: when you open a trip’s map your browser asks it for the tiles of the area you look at, so it sees your IP address and that area (it asks for no account or key, and says it sets no cookies), and we send it nothing about you or your trip.
• Know before you go. To show a trip’s holidays, time zone and official travel advice, our server asks Wikidata for the place’s country, state and time zone (it sends the place’s article name, nothing about you), and the UK government’s GOV.UK and the US State Department for a country’s published travel advice (it sends no trip or account details at all). The public holidays are worked out on our server from a built-in list, and your time zone, from your account or your browser, is used on our server to say how far the place’s clocks are from yours and is not sent anywhere. Their answers are kept in server memory for up to a day and are never stored.
• Everyday answers. When you ask the assistant for the weather, the place you name, or your home city when you name none, goes to Wikivoyage as you typed it, and only its coordinates go to MET Norway, both from our server, so neither sees your account details or IP address. A currency, a time somewhere else, a holiday or a long weekend and a conversion between units are worked out on our server, with no request to anyone: the day’s exchange rates are in our database, brought once a day from the European Central Bank’s reference rates, and the holidays come from the open-source date-holidays list for your country, or the one you name. Your conversation keeps only what you asked (a place, days, an amount, two currencies), never what was worked out.
• Recipes. The dish words of a cooking request, such as “dal makhani”, go to Wikibooks’ search, and its recipe pages are read, all from our server, so Wikibooks never sees your account details or IP address. The rest of your message stays with us, and an email address, web address, phone number or postcode in it is taken out before anything is sent. What Wikibooks returns is kept in server memory for up to a day and is never stored; your conversation keeps only the name of the page. The recipes are written by Wikibooks contributors and shared under CC BY-SA 4.0: they are shown adapted, credited, with a link to the original and to the licence.
• Vehicles and recalls. When you ask about a vehicle’s recalls, or pick a make and model on the memory page, our server asks NHTSA, the United States’ road safety agency, for its lists and its recalls, and sends it the make, model and year, never your account details or IP address. If you look up a VIN, the VIN goes to NHTSA for that one lookup so it can say the year, make and model: we never store it, keep it in memory or write it to a log. What NHTSA returns is kept in server memory for up to a day and is never stored. NHTSA lists recalls for vehicles sold in the US; for one sold elsewhere, use the maker’s own recall page. A service reminder comes only from a date you type on a vehicle: we make no schedule of our own, and a mileage you type is only shown back to you. What a vehicle is for, if you say, adds a word such as “off road” to the searches we make of the shops for its parts.
• Sports and events. When you ask for places to play a sport, or for a garage, our server sends Geoapify, a mapping service, the kinds of place that sport is played in (or the kind of garage you ask for: a mechanic, vehicle shops, a car wash) and a point, your home city’s, a trip’s or a city you name, rounded to about a kilometre, never your account details or IP address. What it returns (the names, kinds and addresses of grounds, courts, pools and garages) comes from OpenStreetMap contributors and is kept in server memory for an hour for each area and never stored; each place has a link to OpenStreetMap that your browser opens only if you press it. When you ask what is on in a city, our server sends Ticketmaster the city’s coordinates and the days (and the kind of event, if you named one), and where Ticketmaster lists nothing it reads the city’s things to see and do from Wikivoyage and its country from Wikidata, to which the city’s name goes. A kit for a sport is made on our server and sends nothing anywhere; it becomes a project only when you press the button, and what you told us you have is left out of it. Tours are not listed yet, so nothing is sent for them.
• Image hosts such as Wikimedia Commons, Flickr, Shopify and stores’ image servers: your browser loads pictures straight from them, so they see your IP address and browser details, as any website you visit would.
• Stores. When you choose “Go to store”, your browser opens the store’s page, sometimes through an affiliate link so the store knows the visit came from Khojwise. We send the store nothing about you. What you do there is covered by the store’s own privacy policy.

We don’t sell your personal data, and we don’t share it for advertising that follows you across other sites and apps. Stores may pay us a commission when you buy after clicking through; we send them no personal data to earn it.

• Sign-in codes: 10 minutes.
• Sessions: until they expire (7 days without use) or you sign out.
• A guest session, and the question and answer in it: 3 days from the day it began, unless you sign in, when the conversation moves to your account.
• Chat messages: 12 months, then deleted automatically.
• Counts that stop misuse: one day.
• What you choose: one year, then deleted; what was learned from it lasts while it is still used, and a preference you remove is kept switched off (what it was, nothing more) so it is never learned again.
• Everything else tied to your account (delivery address, taste, saves, projects, activity): until you change or remove it, or delete your account. Deleting your account deletes all of it.
• Vercel’s request logs: for the period Vercel keeps them.

Under India’s Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023, you can:

• get a summary of the personal data we hold about you and who we’ve shared it with;
• have it corrected, completed or updated;
• have it erased, and withdraw your consent;
• have a grievance about how we handle it resolved;
• nominate someone to use these rights for you if you die or can no longer use them yourself.

You can see and change your delivery address in Settings, your taste and your recent searches in Profile (where you can clear them), your saves in Watching and your projects in Projects. On Discover, “Not interested” forgets a search or a product you opened. In Profile, “What shapes your feed” switches each source off, and “Pause learning” stops anything new being recorded or learned; “What I’ve learned about you” lists what was learned from what you choose, to keep, remove or forget. Under “Your data” in Profile you can download everything we hold about you as one file, and delete your account, which deletes all of it at once. For anything else, email our Grievance Officer at [OWNER TO FILL: Grievance Officer's email address] from the email address you sign in with. We reply within [OWNER TO FILL: how many days we take to reply to a request].

If you’re not satisfied with our answer, you can complain to the Data Protection Board of India.

In the past 12 months we have collected these kinds of personal information, from you and your device, for the purposes above:

• identifiers: your email address and IP address;
• approximate location: country and postcode (never your precise location);
• activity in Khojwise: what you save, view and click through to, and your chat messages;
• preferences and inferences: the taste you tell us and the taste we learn.

We don’t sell personal information or share it for cross-context behavioral advertising, and we haven’t done so in the past 12 months. We don’t knowingly collect information from anyone under 16. We don’t collect sensitive personal information.

Depending on where you live, including California, you can ask to know what we hold, to get a copy, to correct it and to delete it. You won’t be treated differently for asking. Email [OWNER TO FILL: Grievance Officer's email address] from the email address you sign in with. Someone you authorise can ask for you; we’ll check with you first.

Khojwise is served only over HTTPS. Your session cookie can’t be read by scripts on the page. Our database provider encrypts stored data, and each of your chat messages is also encrypted on its own with a key kept apart from the database, tied to your account so it can’t be read under another one. We limit how often sign-in codes can be sent and how many searches can be made in a short time, so nobody can flood an inbox or the stores we search.

When we change this policy we’ll update the date at the top. If a change affects how we use data you’ve already given us, we’ll tell you in Khojwise before it takes effect.

See also our Terms of Use.