Privacy Policy
Last updated: 15 August 2026
This policy explains what personal data PetCare Embrace collects through its mobile app and website, why we collect it, who else sees it, how long we keep it, and what you can ask us to do with it. It is written to meet the notice requirements of India's Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 (the "DPDP Act"), under which we are the Data Fiduciary and you are the Data Principal.
- Data Fiduciary
- PETCARE EMBRACE PRIVATE LIMITED
- CIN
- U62010NL2026PTC014177
- Registered office
- Mokokchung Town, Mokokchung, Nagaland – 798601, India
- Privacy contact
- Data protection contact, PetCare Embrace Private Limited — privacy@petcareembrace.com
- Grievance Officer
- Grievance Officer, PetCare Embrace Private Limited — grievance@petcareembrace.com
What we collect, and why
We collect different things depending on how you use PetCare. Nothing below is collected for advertising, and we do not sell personal data to anyone.
Everyone with an account
| What | Why we need it |
|---|---|
| Email address | To create your account, sign you in, and send service messages. |
| Password | To secure your account. Stored only as a cryptographic hash — we cannot read it. |
| One-time verification code | To confirm you control the email address. Stored hashed, with a limit on attempts. |
| Phone number (optional) | So providers can reach you about a booking. You can leave this blank. |
| Account role | Whether you use PetCare as a pet parent, service provider, farmer or NGO — this decides what the app shows you. |
| Device notification token | To deliver push notifications, such as a booking update or a vaccination reminder. |
| Basic technical data | Device type and app activity, to keep the service running and to investigate faults and abuse. |
Pet parents
| What | Why we need it |
|---|---|
| Pet profiles and health records | Vaccination history, medication, notes and photos you add — so your animal's records are in one place and reminders can be scheduled. |
| Precise location (only with permission) | To show vets and services near you and sort them by distance. We ask for precise GPS location; you can refuse or switch it off later in your device settings, and the app still works. |
| Bookings and service history | To manage appointments and give you and the provider a shared record of what was booked. |
| AI health assessment inputs | The symptoms you type, and a pet photo if you attach one. See AI health assessments below — this is sent to a third party. |
| Community content | Posts, comments, upvotes, lost & found notices and adoption listings you publish, including any images. This content is visible to other users by design. |
| Reviews and ratings | Feedback you leave about a provider, shown publicly alongside that provider. |
| Payment records | Amount, currency, method and the payment reference. Card and UPI credentials are entered with our payment partner and never reach our servers. Online payments are currently switched off — see Refunds & Cancellations. |
Service providers
| What | Why we need it |
|---|---|
| Business details | Business name, description, services offered, working hours and fees, shown on your public profile. |
| Business address and coordinates | So pet parents can find you and see how far away you are. This is displayed publicly. |
| Professional credentials | Veterinary council registration number, state and central licence numbers, degree, years of experience and specialisations — so we can check you are qualified, and so pet parents can see it. |
| PAN, and a photo of your PAN card (optional) | For tax records and provider payouts once paid bookings go live. Never shown to pet parents or other providers. |
| Verification and safety status | Whether your profile is verified, how many reports have been raised against it, and whether it is suspended. |
Farmers
| What | Why we need it |
|---|---|
| Herd and animal records | Livestock profiles, health records and treatment history, so you can manage a herd rather than individual pets. |
| Health alerts and tracking events | To notify you of outbreaks or due treatments relevant to your animals and area. |
NGOs
| What | Why we need it |
|---|---|
| Organisation profile | Name, description, contact details and DARPAN ID, to establish that the organisation is genuine. |
| Adoption listings | Animals you list for adoption, including photographs. Published publicly in the app. |
Our legal basis
We process your data on the basis of the consent you give when you create an account and when you grant specific permissions such as location, camera or photo access. You may withdraw consent at any time by turning off the relevant permission or by deleting your account. Withdrawing consent does not affect processing already carried out, and some features stop working without the data they depend on.
Where the DPDP Act permits processing for certain legitimate uses — for example responding to a medical emergency, or complying with a legal obligation — we may rely on that instead.
AI health assessments
An AI assessment is guidance, not a diagnosis, and it is not a substitute for examination by a registered veterinarian. In an emergency, contact a vet immediately.
Who else receives your data
We share personal data only with the service providers listed below, only to the extent each needs to do its job, and only for the purposes described in this policy. We do not sell personal data, and we do not share it for advertising.
| Who | What they receive | Where |
|---|---|---|
| AI health assessment inputs — symptom text and any attached pet photo | Outside India | |
| OpenStreetMap | Map tiles for the places screen. Sees which areas of the map your app requests, and your IP address. | Outside India |
| Cloudinary | Images you upload — pet photos, profile and clinic photos, community images, document photos | Outside India |
| Resend | Your email address and the content of service emails we send you | Outside India |
| DigitalOcean | Hosts our servers and database — all data described in this policy | Bengaluru, India |
| Razorpay | Payment details, once online payments are enabled. Card and UPI credentials go directly to them, not to us. | India |
| Google Firebase | Device tokens, for push notifications. Not yet in service. | Outside India |
| Vercel | Hosts this website. Sees standard web request data such as your IP address. | Outside India |
We also disclose data where we are legally required to — for example in response to a valid order from a court or a lawful authority.
Transfers outside India
As the table shows, some of our processors are located outside India, so your data is transferred and stored abroad. We transfer data only to processors bound by contractual confidentiality and security obligations, and only to countries not restricted by the Central Government under the DPDP Act.
Sharing with providers you book
When you book a service, the provider receives what they need to serve you — your name, contact details, the booking, and the relevant animal's profile and health records. They do not receive your other pets, your community activity, or your payment details.
Content you publish
Community posts, lost & found notices, adoption listings and reviews are public inside the app by design. Please do not put anything in them you would not want other users to see. Deleting a post removes it from the app, but we cannot recall copies other users may already have saved or screenshotted.
Messages
You can hold private conversations in the app — with a service provider you have booked with, or with another pet parent you have added as a friend. Nobody can message you out of the blue: a provider conversation needs a booking between you, and a direct message needs a friend request that you accepted.
We would rather be plain about how these work than let you assume:
- Messages are stored on our servers, not only on your phone. That is what lets you read a conversation on a reinstalled app, and what lets the other person receive it when their phone is off.
- They are not end-to-end encrypted. Traffic is encrypted in transit over HTTPS, and the database has restricted network access — but the message text is readable to us as the operator. Please do not send anything you would not want us to be technically able to read. We access message content only to investigate a report or where the law requires it.
- Messages cannot be edited or deleted once sent, by either person. This is deliberate. A conversation with a vet is often the record of what you were told about your animal, and a record that either side can quietly rewrite is worth much less to both of you.
- We record when you last opened a conversation, so the app can show you what you have not read yet.
- Blocking someone closes the conversation for both of you. They are not told that you blocked them.
Conversations are private between the two people in them. We do not use the content of your messages to advertise to you, and we do not sell it or share it with anyone outside the processors listed above who host it for us.
Sharing your location with friends
You can choose to let friends see roughly where you are and what you are doing — walking the dog, at a park, and so on. It is off unless you switch it on, and switching it on is a separate decision every time.
This is the most sensitive thing the app can do, so it is worth being exact about how it works:
- It always stops on its own. You choose how long — fifteen minutes up to twelve hours — and there is no option to share indefinitely. When the time runs out, sharing ends without you doing anything.
- Only accepted friends can see it. Not people who have sent you a request you have not answered, and nobody else at all. If you remove someone as a friend, or block them, they stop seeing you immediately rather than when your timer runs out.
- You choose how precise it is — your exact position, rounded to about a kilometre, or rounded to about ten kilometres. If you choose a rounded option, your exact position never leaves your phone: the rounding happens on your device before anything is sent, and our server rounds again on arrival as a safeguard. So we never receive it, never store it, and have nothing precise to lose or be compelled to produce.
- We do not keep a history. There is one record per person, replaced each time you share, and nothing accumulates. We cannot tell you where you were last Tuesday, and neither can anyone else.
- Stopping deletes it. Tapping stop removes the record rather than marking it finished, and expired records are deleted automatically.
- You can share what you are doing without sharing where you are.
We do not use your location for advertising, we do not sell it, and we do not use it to build a profile of your movements. It is sent to the friends you chose, for as long as you chose, and then it is gone.
Reporting, and what happens to a report
You can report a message, a community post, a comment, or a service provider. A report records who reported it, what was reported, the reason you chose and anything you typed in the box, and the time. It is read by a person at PetCare Embrace. Nothing is hidden automatically on the strength of one report, and we do not tell you how many other people reported the same thing.
We keep reports after the reported content is gone, so that a pattern of behaviour is still visible to us. A report stores a reference to the reported item rather than a copy of it, so once the item itself is deleted the report no longer carries its content.
How we protect your data
We would rather describe what we actually do than make broad claims:
- All traffic between the app, this website and our servers uses encrypted HTTPS connections.
- Passwords are stored only as cryptographic hashes and cannot be read by us or recovered.
- Sessions use short-lived access tokens with refresh-token rotation.
- Email verification codes are stored hashed, with a cap on failed attempts.
- Identity and tax fields — PAN, licence numbers and identity document links — are excluded from every API response, so they are never sent to another user's device.
- Our database is managed infrastructure with restricted network access.
No system is perfectly secure, and we do not claim otherwise. If a breach occurs that affects your data, we will notify the Data Protection Board of India and affected users as required by the DPDP Act.
How long we keep it
- While your account is open — we keep your data so the service works.
- After you ask us to delete your account — your account, profile, pet and animal records are permanently deleted within 30 days of your request, apart from the narrow exceptions listed below.
- Financial and tax records — where a booking involved a payment, we must retain the transaction record for the period required by Indian tax law (six years under the Income Tax Act; 72 months under GST law), even after your account is deleted. These records are kept for that purpose alone.
- Treatment records written by a clinic — where a vet or clinic recorded a treatment they carried out on your animal, that entry is kept for three years after your account is deleted, because the clinic has its own duty to keep a record of what it did. What is removed is the link to you: the entry no longer connects to your account, your animal or you, and we keep no way to reconnect it. Notes you wrote yourself are deleted with your account in the ordinary way, and so is anything you uploaded yourself, including reports and scans.
- Public community content — posts and reviews you published may remain visible after account deletion, shown without your name, unless you delete them first. Delete them before closing your account if you would rather they went too.
- Messages — unlike public posts, your conversations are deleted with your account. Because a conversation has two people in it, deleting your account removes it from the other person's app as well.
- Reports — a report you made, or one made about your content, is kept after the content itself is gone so that repeated behaviour remains visible to us.
- Location sharing — kept only while a share you started is still running, and deleted when it ends, when you stop it, or when you delete your account. We keep no history of where you have been.
Your rights
Under the DPDP Act you have the right to:
- Access a summary of the personal data we hold about you and who we have shared it with.
- Correct anything inaccurate, and complete anything incomplete. Most of this you can do yourself in the app.
- Erase your data by asking us to delete your account, subject to the retention rules above.
- Nominate another person to exercise these rights on your behalf if you die or become incapacitated.
- Complain to us, and escalate if we do not resolve it.
In the app you can edit your own profile and delete individual pets, animals and records yourself, at any time. The one exception is a treatment record written by a clinic: you can always read it, but you cannot edit or delete it, because a record of what a vet actually did is only worth having if neither side can quietly rewrite it. If you believe one is wrong, contact the clinic, or email us at privacy@petcareembrace.com.
You can delete your account yourself. Open the app, go to Profile and choose Delete my account. You have 30 days to change your mind — sign in again during that window and we will ask whether you want to keep it. If you no longer have the app installed, email privacy@petcareembrace.com from your registered address instead. Full details on the Delete your account page. The same address covers access, correction and nomination requests.
We respond within 15 days. We may ask you to confirm your identity first, so that nobody else can make a request in your name. We do not charge for any of this.
Children
PetCare is for adults. You must be 18 or older to create an account. We do not knowingly collect personal data from anyone under 18, and we do not use anyone's data for behavioural advertising or tracking. If you believe a child has created an account, tell us at privacy@petcareembrace.com and we will delete it.
Cookies and local storage
This website sets no cookies. The app and site store a small amount of information on your own device to keep you signed in and remember your preferences. See the Cookie Policy for the detail.
Complaints
If you are unhappy with how we have handled your data, contact our Grievance Officer at grievance@petcareembrace.com. We acknowledge complaints within 24 hours and aim to resolve them within 15 days — see the Grievance Redressal page.
If we do not resolve your complaint to your satisfaction, you may escalate it to the Data Protection Board of India.
Changes to this policy
If we change this policy we will post the new version here with a new date, and tell you in the app when the change is significant. If a change requires fresh consent, we will ask for it.
Contact us
Privacy questions: privacy@petcareembrace.com
Complaints: grievance@petcareembrace.com
General support: support@petcareembrace.com