Privacy Policy

1. No account, and what stands in for one

The first time you open Kahaani, the app generates a random identifier on your device — a string of digits and letters that means nothing outside this app. We call it your player id. It is not derived from your device, your phone number, or anything about you; two people installing the app on identical phones get different ids.

The player id exists because gems, unlocked episodes and purchases have to belong to somebody, and there is no account for them to belong to. It is sent to our wallet service along with a token that proves requests are coming from your copy of the app.

Because the id lives on your device and nowhere else, it does not follow you to a second phone, and uninstalling the app or clearing its data loses it. That is a real cost — it also loses the balance attached to it — and it is the trade we made deliberately rather than asking you to create an account.

2. What is stored on your device

Most of what the app remembers never leaves your phone. It is kept in the app’s own local storage:

• Your wallet — the player id, your last known gem balance, which episodes and premium story choices you have unlocked, and any purchases that are still active.
• Your progress — which episodes of which shows you have finished, your daily streak and the day you last played, and the choices you made at story branches so that later episodes can call back to them.
• Advertising pacing — counters recording when you were last shown a full-screen ad and how many you have seen today, so that the app can stop showing them.

None of this is transmitted anywhere for analysis. It is the app remembering where you were.

3. What is sent to our servers

One service: the wallet. It holds your gem balance and a record of every change to it, so that a balance survives a reinstall on the same device and so that a purchase you paid for cannot be lost by an app crash. It receives:

• your player id and its token;
• each gem credit or spend, with a short reason such as an ad reward or an episode unlock;
• the purchase token Google gives us when you buy something, so we can confirm the purchase with Google before crediting it.

Our servers also record ordinary request logs — the time of a request, the route, and the network address it came from — for a short period, for security and debugging. We do not use them to build a profile of you.

We do not sell your data, and we do not share it with anyone except the service providers named in the next section, each of which is doing a specific job on our behalf.

4. Advertising

Kahaani shows ads through Google AdMob. There are four kinds: a rewarded video you choose to watch in exchange for gems; a full-screen ad between episodes; a rewarded full-screen ad at an episode transition, which always offers you a way to skip it; and an ad when you return to the app. There are no banner ads and no ads disguised as shows.

Google, not us, selects and delivers those ads, and to do it Google may use your device’s advertising identifier and information about your device, along with data Google already holds. Depending on where you live, the app will ask for your consent before Google uses that data to personalise ads; you can withdraw or change that choice at any time from your device’s Google settings, where you can also reset or delete the advertising identifier.

Google’s handling of this data is governed by its own policies, which you can read at policies.google.com/technologies/partner-sites.

When you watch a rewarded ad, the app sends Google a one-time random value, and Google tells our wallet service that the ad was genuinely watched before any gems are credited. That value is a receipt for one ad view. It identifies nothing about you.

5. Analytics

The app uses Google Firebase Analytics, and it is there for a narrower purpose than most apps use it for: to record what an ad impression earned, because Google’s own reporting cannot tell us whether an ad in one place in the app is worth more than an ad in another. Around that one measurement sit a small number of supporting events — an episode started or finished, a paywall shown, an episode or story choice unlocked, a purchase completed — so the revenue figure has something to be measured against.

These events carry which show and episode, and what something cost. They do not carry anything about you, because the app holds nothing about you to put in them. Firebase assigns its own installation identifier and collects standard device information such as your device model, operating system version and approximate region.

6. Purchases

Gem purchases are handled entirely by Google Play Billing. Your payment details go to Google and never reach us — we do not see, receive or store a card number. What we receive is a token confirming a purchase happened, which we check with Google before adding gems to your balance. Prices are set by Google for your region and currency.

Refunds for Play purchases are handled through Google Play. See the Terms for what a gem is and is not.

7. Story content

The shows, artwork and dialogue are packaged inside the app when you install it. The app does not fetch story content over the network while you read, and it does not report what you are reading to us. Which episodes you have finished is kept on your device (section 2), and reaches our servers only in the form of an unlock when one costs gems.

8. Children

Kahaani contains dramatic content written for adults and is not directed to children. We do not knowingly collect data from a child. If you believe a child has been using the app and you would like their data removed, write to support@bhands.in and we will remove it.

9. Deleting your data

There are two separate actions in the app, and they do different things.

• Settings → Reset Progress clears your streak, your episode progress and your remembered story choices. It deliberately keeps your player id, your gem balance and anything you have purchased — resetting where you are in a story should not destroy something you paid for.
• Settings → Delete My Data is the full deletion. It removes your record from our wallet service — the player id, the balance, the ledger of changes to it, your unlocks and your entitlements — and then clears everything the app kept on your device. This cannot be undone, and it does not refund purchases.

Deletion runs on our servers first. If that request fails, the app leaves your device untouched and tells you, rather than clearing the identifier that is the only way we could find your record afterwards.

You can also uninstall the app, which removes everything held on your device but leaves the server-side record, since nothing left on the phone can name it. To have that removed too, use Delete My Data before uninstalling, or write to support@bhands.in.

10. How long we keep things

Your wallet record is kept for as long as the app is installed and in use, because it is what your balance is. The ledger behind it is retained so that a disputed or duplicated purchase can be reconciled. Request logs are kept for a short operational period. All of it goes when you use Delete My Data.

11. Your rights

Depending on where you live, you may have the right to access, correct, or delete the data we hold about you, to object to some processing, or to complain to a data protection authority. In practice the app already gives you the strongest of these directly: the delete is a button, and takes effect immediately.

For anything else, write to support@bhands.in. Because there is no account, we may not be able to identify which record is yours unless you can supply your player id, which is shown in the app’s Settings.

12. Creators using the studio

This section applies only to people invited to author shows in the Kahaani studio, not to players.

The studio generates character art and backgrounds using a third-party image generation provider. To do this it uploads the reference images you supply — and artwork it has already generated — to that provider, because the model fetches its reference material by URL. Material you upload therefore leaves our systems.

Do not upload a photograph of a person who has not agreed to it being used this way. If you would like to know the provider’s retention terms before uploading anything, ask at support@bhands.in.

13. Changes

If we change how the app handles data, we will update this page and move the effective date at the top. Material changes will also be surfaced in the app.

14. Contact

Bhands — support@bhands.in