Privacy policy

What Nehzn collects, why, how long it is kept, and what you can make us do about it.

Last updated 5 October 2026.

Who is responsible

Nehzn is operated by Hibjul Ahmed (sole proprietor, trading as Nehzn), [registered address — to be filled in]. Under India’s Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 we are the Data Fiduciary for the information described here, which means we decide what is collected and why, and we are answerable for it.

Questions about your data go to privacy@nehzn.com. Complaints go to our Grievance Officer, Hibjul Ahmed, at grievance@nehzn.com.

Nehzn is for adults

You must be 18 or over to use Nehzn. We do not knowingly keep accounts for anyone younger, and we remove those we find. If you believe someone under 18 is using Nehzn, report them in the app or write to us.

What we collect, and what each part is for

Phone number or email	Signing you in, and reaching you about the service.
Name and date of birth	Your profile. Your age is worked out from the date and shown; the date itself is not.
Gender and pronouns	Your profile, and the discovery preferences of others.
Photos	Your profile. You choose how many and who sees them.
Interests, prompt answers, languages, beliefs, education, work, hometown	Your profile, and finding people with something in common.
Approximate location and city	Showing how far away someone is, and checking you are inside a hotspot's radius when you join.
Daily ping answers, including photos	The daily loop, and the feed of nearby answers.
This-or-that choices, and how quickly you made them	Matching. Speed is a rhythm signal: it is never scored and never shown to anyone.
The time of day you use the app	Matching, and your own rhythm chart.
Waves, connections and blocks	Discovery and safety.
Messages you send	Delivering them to the conversation.
Hotspot and community membership, posts and polls	Running those rooms.
Reports you file	Keeping people safe.
Records of access to personal data	Detecting and investigating unauthorised access, as the DPDP Rules require.

We ask for this on the basis of your consent, which you give on a screen of its own before anything is collected. We keep a record of which version of that notice you agreed to. If we change what we collect, we ask again.

What we never do

We do not sell your data, and we do not run advertising against it.
We never show anyone your exact location. Other people see a rounded distance, such as “1.2 km away”, and nothing sharper.
We do not track your location in the background. The app asks when it is open.
Nobody can message you until you have both waved. There is no inbox for strangers.
Your activity score is yours alone. Others see only a broad label, never the number.

Who else processes it

We use these services to run Nehzn. They process data on our instructions, and some of them operate outside India, which means your data is transferred abroad for those purposes.

Amazon Web Services (Mumbai, India) — the servers and database.
Cloudflare R2 — photo storage.
Resend (United States) — sign-in codes and service email.
OpenAI (United States) — writes the daily prompt and checks Stranger Sync proof photos. It is never sent your profile, your name or your messages with other people.
Ola Maps (India) — map tiles and place search, requested through our servers so your device is not identified to them.

How long we keep it

Hotspot rooms and everything in them	30 days after the room's seven-day life ends
Daily ping answers and their photos	180 days
How quickly you made a choice	90 days, then the timing is erased and only the choice remains
Echoes and waves	90 days
Sign-in codes	Erased as soon as they expire
Uploads never attached to anything	7 days
Records of access to personal data	1 year, the minimum the DPDP Rules set
Everything else	Until you delete your account

Your rights

Under the DPDP Act you can ask us to:

Show you what we hold. The app does this instantly, under You → Your data, including the quiet things like when you tend to open the app.
Correct or update anything. Every field is editable under You → Profile.
Erase it. Delete your account in the app, or at nehzn.com/delete-account. It is immediate and cannot be undone.
Nominate someone to exercise these rights for you if you cannot. Write to us and we will arrange it.

We answer within 90 days, and usually far sooner. Withdrawing your consent is the same thing as deleting your account: we would have no basis to keep your data, so we do not keep it.

If something goes wrong

If your data is ever exposed, we will tell you without delay — what happened, what it means for you, what we have done, and what you can do — and we will report it to the Data Protection Board of India within 72 hours.

If we have not dealt with your complaint properly, you can complain to the Data Protection Board of India.

How it is protected

Access to personal data is logged so that unauthorised access can be detected and investigated. Data travels encrypted. Photos are uploaded straight to storage without passing through our API, and no map key ships inside the app.

Changes, and the law that applies

If we change this policy in a way that affects what we collect or why, we will ask for your consent again rather than quietly update the page. This policy is governed by the laws of India, and the courts of Kolkata, West Bengal, India have jurisdiction.