Privacy Policy
Sai Vani is published by Shri Sai Samsthana. This policy explains what the app records about you, why, who else can see it, and how to have it erased. It covers the mobile app and the web version alike.
1. Who is responsible for your information
Shri Sai Samsthana ("we", "us") is the data fiduciary under India's Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023, and the data controller under the EU and UK General Data Protection Regulation, for everything described here.
| Postal address | Shri Sai Samsthana, Bengaluru, Karnataka, India |
|---|---|
| Privacy enquiries | admin@saisamsthana.org |
| Grievance Officer | Grievance Officer, Shri Sai Samsthana — admin@saisamsthana.org |
We answer every privacy request within 30 days.
2. What the app records, and why
Nothing here is inferred from your behaviour. Each item is either something you typed, something you tapped, or something the app needs in order to work at all.
You can use most of the app without an account — reading and listening to the books, the aartis, the day’s blessing, temples and festivals. Used that way, the app sends no name, number or other detail about you, and nothing you read is recorded against you. Like any website, our server sees your connection’s internet address with each request; it is used only to stop abuse and is not linked to what you read. The app also tells the server which version of itself it is running, so that updates can reach it; that record carries nothing about you. An account, and everything below, begins only when you choose to create one.
When you create an account, only your mobile number is required. Everything else the form asks for is optional, and nothing else is asked:
| Name | Optional. So the app can greet you, and so a family circle can tell its members apart. Left empty, you are called Devotee. |
|---|---|
| Mobile number | This is your account. A one-time code sent to it proves the number is yours; no password is ever stored. |
| Email address | Optional. A second way to reach you if you lose the number, where account notices are sent, and where a copy of your data goes when you ask for one. |
| Gender | Optional. Kept on your account and in the copy of your data you can ask for; nothing in the app uses it. |
| Date of birth | Optional. If you give it, it is checked to make sure you are 13 or older and kept on your account and in the copy of your data; nothing else in the app uses it. |
| Occupation | Optional. Kept on your account and in the copy of your data you can ask for; nothing in the app uses it. |
As you use the app, it keeps what you make in it:
- Prayers and sankalpas you save, and the status you give each one.
- Journal entries and the mood you attach to them.
- Messages you send the companion on the Talk to Sai and Share My Sorrow screens, and the replies it gives.
- A short note the companion keeps so that it remembers you between visits: how you seemed last time, each worry you have shared with it (in a few words, with the day it matters if you named one), the small thing it last suggested, a few sentences of background you have told it, and what it means to ask when you come back. It is written by the companion itself, from what you have said — and it is what lets it ask how your mother’s test went instead of starting again from nothing. You can see the worries it keeps under My Sai → Your days with Sai, and mark any of them settled or have it forgotten for good. Every word of the note is also in the copy of your data you may ask for at any time, and it is erased with your account.
- How long you spend talking, and when. Talking is metered in minutes — a small amount given free once, when the account is new, and more available to buy — so we keep the seconds used each day, the start and end of each conversation, and what was charged for it. That is a record of time, never of what was said in it.
- Seva you log, chapters you have read, your reading progress, bookmarks and streaks, and the aartis you like.
- Oracle draws you take.
- Your family circle: its name and invite code, the members you add with the names, relations and numbers you give them, and messages posted in it.
- Your referral code, whoever joined using it, and your remaining conversation credits. If somebody signed up using a code you shared, our records link their account to yours — that link is what a reward is counted from. They see nothing of your account, and you see only their first name, the last three digits of their number and the date they joined.
- A postal address, but only if you reach a referral milestone and choose to claim the parcel. It is asked for at that moment, kept against that one reward, used to post it and to answer you if you ask where it is, and it is not added to your profile or used for anything else.
- Your settings: chosen language, large-text mode, read-aloud mode, and your plan.
A prayer, a journal entry, a message to the companion, or the note it keeps about how you were can say a great deal about your faith, your health or your state of mind. Indian and European law both treat that as sensitive, and so do we: it is never used for advertising, never sold, never shown to another devotee unless you deliberately share it with your family circle, and it is erased the moment you delete your account.
Two further things are handled by the servers rather than typed by you:
| Your IP address | Held in memory for a few minutes only, to count requests and stop a script hammering sign-in or burning through credits. It is not written to the database and is not used to identify you. |
|---|---|
| One-time codes | Stored as a cryptographic hash, never in readable form, and expiring within minutes of being sent. |
The app carries no advertising, no analytics or attribution SDK, no tracking pixels and no third-party cookies. It does not build a profile of you, does not follow you across other apps or websites, and does not read your photos, calendar, messages or call logs. Your contacts are read in one place only, on the Refer & Earn screen when you ask for it, and never leave your phone — see section 3.
3. Device permissions
The app asks for two permissions, each only at the moment it is needed, and works without either.
| Location, while using the app | Requested only when you tap "Use my location" on the Temples screen. Your coordinates are sent once, used to sort the temple list by distance from you, and are not written to the database, not logged and not shared. Decline, and you can still search temples by name, city or state. |
|---|---|
| Contacts | Requested only when you tap "Invite from contacts" on the Refer & Earn screen, and only after a screen explaining what will happen. Your contacts are read into the app on your phone so you can pick who to invite, and they stay there: they are never uploaded to our server, never written to our database, never logged, and never shared with anyone. Nothing is kept once you close the picker, and no message is sent by the app — choosing someone opens WhatsApp with the invitation written out, and you press send yourself. Decline, and you can still share your referral code by any other means. |
The app does not request the microphone, camera, photo library, calendar, background location, or permission to track you. It never asks to write or change your contacts, only to read them. On Android the microphone and storage permissions are blocked in the build itself, so no library can add them quietly. On the web version, dictation on the Talk screen uses your browser’s own speech recognition and runs only while you hold the microphone button; what it hears becomes text in the message box, which goes nowhere until you press send.
Read-aloud uses the text-to-speech voice already installed on your device. Nothing is recorded, and nothing leaves the device to make it speak.
4. The companion, and what it sends onward
The companion inside this app is software. It is not Sai Baba, it does not carry messages from him, and it does not predict the future. It is there to sit with you in the spirit of Baba’s teachings — shraddha, saburi, sincere effort and acceptance.
Nothing you write is sent to either company until you have been shown what is sent and have agreed to it. The first time you open Talk to Sai or Share My Sorrow, the app asks — naming both companies and listing exactly what leaves our servers — and you may say no. Saying no does not close the screen: the companion then answers from the curated replies described below, written by hand and never leaving our machines. You can change your mind at any time under Settings → Privacy & data, and withdrawing stops any further sending at once.
When you send it a message, and only once you have agreed, this is the order things happen in:
- A safety check runs first, on our own servers, before any model is involved. If your message suggests you may be in danger, you are given a helpline and no model is called at all.
- Otherwise your message, up to eight recent turns of that conversation, the short note described in section 2, the language you wrote in, and passages from the app’s own library are sent to whichever model is answering. That is OpenAI, L.L.C. first; if OpenAI cannot be reached or refuses, the same is sent to Anthropic PBC instead.
- The name you chose is sent, so that the reply can call you by it. Your mobile number, email address, date of birth, occupation, gender, city, prayers, journal, seva logs and family circle are never sent, and neither company is told which account the conversation belongs to.
- The conversation is stored on our servers against your account, so the screen still shows it tomorrow.
OpenAI and Anthropic each process those messages on our behalf, as our processors and only on our instructions, under commercial API terms that do not permit either of them to train models on what is sent or on what comes back. Neither may keep it beyond the limited period its terms allow for abuse monitoring, neither may sell it or share it onward, and neither receives anything that identifies you beyond the name you chose. We are satisfied that both give your information protection equal to what this policy promises. If neither model is available, the app answers from a curated set of replies written by hand — you always get an answer.
The short note described in section 2 is written in the same request as the reply, and it is sent back with your next message so the companion can pick up where you left off. Nothing else about you goes with it: not your number, not your prayers, not your journal, and not your name unless you gave one.
The companion may also check in on you later — a note a few hours after you have shared something heavy, or on the morning of a day you told it mattered, asking how you are. Its words are written while you are talking; your phone fetches them when the app is open and shows the notification itself when the time comes, with the words kept off the lock screen unless you choose otherwise. It also sends a short morning message, the same for everyone, and on evenings when you have not talked, a question about how the day was: if you answer it with one of its three buttons, that answer is kept with the other readings of how you have been. Nothing is pushed to you from our servers, we are not told whether you read a check-in, and none is delivered during the night. You can switch each of these off under Notifications, and anything already waiting is dropped. If something you write suggests you may be in danger, every waiting check-in is cancelled, nothing written by the companion is sent to you for three days, and the one message that comes the next morning is a plain one naming a free helpline — you are pointed to a person instead.
The companion is not a doctor, a counsellor, a lawyer or an astrologer, and nothing it says is medical, legal, financial or professional advice. If you are in distress, please reach a human being — in India, Tele-MANAS is 14416, free and open at every hour.
6. Where your information is held
Our servers and database are hosted in India. Three of the providers above process data outside it: OpenAI and Anthropic, both in the United States, and Meta’s WhatsApp Cloud API, in the United States and Ireland. Those transfers are made under the providers’ standard contractual clauses and equivalent safeguards, and carry only what sections 4 and 5 describe. Nothing reaches OpenAI or Anthropic unless you have agreed to it.
7. What is kept on your own device
So that the app opens quickly and reads with no signal, it keeps a copy on the device of the screens you last saw — the day’s blessing, chapters, aartis, temples, your prayers and your progress — and of the pictures it has already shown. It also keeps your sign-in token, your chosen language, and a note that you have seen the welcome screens.
All of it lives in the app’s own private storage. Signing out or uninstalling the app removes it from the device; if you use the app without an account, uninstalling it does.
8. How long it is kept
| Everything you write | Until you delete the account. Prayers, journal, conversations, the companion's note, seva, progress, bookmarks and family circles are erased that moment — see section 10. |
|---|---|
| The account record | Kept after you delete the account, marked closed: your name, mobile number, email, the dates, and counts of what the account held. Your number is released at once, so you may open a fresh and completely empty account on it whenever you wish. Ask us at admin@saisamsthana.org and the record goes too. |
| Payments | Kept as a receipt after the account closes, because a payment is our record as much as yours and the books are audited against it. |
| One-time codes | Minutes. They expire on use or on timeout. |
| Rate-limiting counters | Minutes, in memory only, cleared when the server restarts. Wrong codes typed against a mobile number are counted for six hours in the database, so that a short code cannot be guessed at. |
| Emails we have sent you | Kept by our email provider in its own delivery logs, typically no more than 30 days. |
| Backups | Database backups are kept for 30 days and then overwritten, so a deleted account leaves the backups within 30 days as well. |
9. How it is protected
- All traffic between the app and our servers travels over HTTPS.
- One-time codes are stored only as keyed hashes, which cannot be read back without a secret kept outside the database; they expire after ten minutes and are locked out after repeated wrong attempts.
- Sessions are signed tokens that expire. There is no password to be stolen or reused.
- Access to the database and the admin tools is limited to the samsthana staff who need it.
No system is perfect. If a breach ever affects your personal data, we will notify you and the Data Protection Board of India as the DPDP Act requires.
10. Your rights, and how to use them
| See what we hold | Settings → Privacy & Data → Email me my data sends a machine-readable copy of your account and everything in it to the email address on the account. |
|---|---|
| Correct it | Your name, language and preferences are editable in the app. Write to us for anything else. |
| Delete it | Settings → Delete my account. It is immediate and permanent. Erased from the live database: every prayer, journal entry and conversation, the note the companion keeps about you, any check-in it was going to make, your seva, reading progress, bookmarks, the aartis you like and family circle membership. Kept, marked closed: the account record itself — your name, number, email and dates — together with your payments and any referral reward still to be sent, for the reasons set out in "Your data & account deletion". Your mobile number is released at once and a new account opened on it starts empty. Devotees who joined through your referral code keep their accounts; the code itself stops working. A parcel already posted cannot be recalled. |
| Withdraw consent | Stop using a feature, or delete the account. Withdrawing does not undo what was lawfully done beforehand. |
| Complain | Write to the Grievance Officer, Shri Sai Samsthana at admin@saisamsthana.org. If we have not put it right, you may complain to the Data Protection Board of India, or to your own supervisory authority if you are in the EU or the UK. |
If you cannot open the app, write to admin@saisamsthana.org from the email address on the account, or give us the mobile number it was created with, and we will do it for you within 30 days.
11. Children
This app is meant for adults, and for families using it together. It is not directed at children.
An account is for people of 13 or over, and creating one confirms that you are; a date of birth given at sign-up that says otherwise is refused. A devotee between 13 and 18 may hold an account only with the consent and supervision of a parent or guardian. We do not profile children and we do not serve them advertising — we serve nobody advertising.
If you are a parent and find that a child has given us information without your consent, write to admin@saisamsthana.org and we will erase the account.
12. Why we are allowed to do this (EU and UK)
| Your account | Performance of the contract you enter into by creating it — Art. 6(1)(b). |
|---|---|
| Prayers, journal, conversations | Your explicit consent, given by writing them — Art. 6(1)(a) and Art. 9(2)(a), since they may reveal religious or health information. |
| Security and rate limiting | Our legitimate interest in keeping the service available and unabused — Art. 6(1)(f). |
| Legal orders | Compliance with a legal obligation — Art. 6(1)(c). |
13. Changes to this policy
When this policy changes, the date at the top of the page changes with it, and the new version appears here and on the store listing. Where a change materially affects how your information is used, we will tell you in the app before it takes effect.