Privacy Policy

1. Information We Collect

The information we collect when you use Yahan falls into three categories.

1.1 Information you provide us
To use some of our products and services you need to have an account, and to create an account, you need to provide us certain information. Likewise, if you use our paid products and services, we cannot provide them to you without getting payment information. Basically, certain information is necessary if you want to use many of our products and services.

Personal Accounts: If you create an account, you must provide us with some information so that we can provide our services to you. This includes a display name (for example, “Journal”); a username (for example, @myjournal); a password; an email address or phone number; a date of birth; your display language; and third-party single sign-in information (if you choose this sign-in method). You can also choose to share your location in your profile and posts, and to upload your address book to Yahan to help find people you may know. Your profile information, which includes your display name and username, is always public, but you can use either your real name or a pseudonym. And remember, you can create multiple Yahan accounts, for example, to express different parts of your identity, professional or otherwise.

Professional Accounts: If you create a professional account, you also need to provide us with a professional category, and may provide us with other information, including street address, contact email address, and contact phone number, all of which will always be public.

Payment Information: In order to purchase ads or other offerings provided as part of our paid products and services you will need to provide us payment information, including your credit or debit card number, card expiration date, CVV code, and billing address.

Preferences: When you set your preferences using your settings, we collect that information so that we can respect your preferences.

Biometric Information: Based on your consent, we may collect and use your biometric information for safety, security, and identification purposes.

Job Applications / Recommendations: We may collect and use your personal information (such as your employment history, educational history, employment preferences, skills and abilities, job search activity and engagement, and so on) to recommend potential jobs for you, to share with potential employers when you apply for a job, to enable employers to find potential candidates, and to show you more relevant advertising.

1.2 Information we collect when you use Yahan
When you use our services, we collect information about how you use our products and services. We use that information to provide you with products and services, to help keep Yahan more secure and respectful for everyone, and more relevant to you.

1.3 Information we receive from third parties
When you use other online products and services, they may share information about that usage with us.

Ad Partners, Developers, Publishers: Our ad and business partners share information with us such as browser cookie IDs, Yahan-generated identifiers, mobile device IDs, hashed user information like email addresses, demographic or interest data, and content viewed or actions taken on a website or app. Some of our ad partners, particularly our advertisers, also enable us to collect similar information directly from their website or app by integrating our advertising technology. Information shared by ad partners and affiliates or collected by Yahan from the websites and apps of ad partners and affiliates may be combined with the other information you share with Yahan and that Yahan receives, generates, or infers about you described elsewhere in this Privacy Policy.

Other Third Parties, Account Connections, and Integrations: We may receive information about you from third parties who are not our ad partners, such as other Yahan users, developers, and partners who help us evaluate the safety and quality of content on our platform, our corporate affiliates, and other services you link to your Yahan account. You may choose to connect your Yahan account to your account on another service, and that other service may send us information about your account on that service.

2. How We Use Information
Breaking down how we use the information we collect is not simple because of the way the systems that bring our services to you work. For example, the same piece of information may be used differently for different purposes to ultimately deliver a single service. We think it’s most useful to describe the five main ways we use information and if you have questions that are not answered, you can always contact us. Here we go:

2.1 Operate, improve, and personalize our services
We use the information we collect to provide and operate Yahan products and services. We also use the information we collect to improve and personalize our products and services so that you have a better experience on Yahan, including by showing you more relevant content and ads, suggesting people and topics to follow, enabling and helping you discover affiliates, third-party apps, and services. We may use the information we collect and publicly available information to help train our machine learning or artificial intelligence models for the purposes outlined in this policy. We may use the information we collect from accounts of other services that you choose to connect your Yahan account to provide you features like cross-posting or cross-service authentication, and to operate our services.

We use your contact information to help others find your account if your settings permit, including through third-party services and client applications.

We use your information to provide our advertising and sponsored content services subject to your settings, which helps make ads on Yahan more relevant to you. We also use this information to measure the effectiveness of ads and to help recognize your devices to serve you ads on and off of Yahan. Some of our ad partners also enable us to collect similar information directly from their website or app by integrating our advertising technology. Information shared by ad partners and affiliates or collected by Yahan from the websites and apps of ad partners and affiliates may be combined with the other information you share with Yahan and that Yahan receives, generates, or infers about you, as described elsewhere in our Privacy Policy.

2.2 Foster safety and security
We use information we collect to provide for the safety and security of our users, our products, services, and your account. This includes verifying your identity, authenticating your account, and defending against fraud, unauthorized use, and illegal activity. We also use the information to evaluate and affect the safety and quality of content on Yahan - this includes investigating and enforcing our policies and terms, as well as applicable law.

2.3 Measure, analyze and make our services better
We use the information we collect to measure and analyze the effectiveness of our products and services and to better understand how you use them in order to make them better.

2.4 Communicate with you about our services
We use the information we collect to communicate with you about our products and services, including about product updates and changes to our policies and terms. If you’re open to hearing from us, we may also send you marketing messages from time to time.

2.5 Research
We use information you share with us, or that we collect to conduct research, surveys, product testing, and troubleshooting to help us operate and improve our products and services.

3. Sharing Information
You should know the ways we share your information, why we share it, and how you can control it. There are five general ways we share your information.

3.1 When you post and share
With the general public: You are directing us to disclose that information as broadly as possible. Yahan content, including your profile information (e.g., name/pseudonym, username, profile pictures), is available for viewing by the general public. The public does not need to be signed in to view some content on Yahan. They may also find Yahan content off of Yahan, for example from search query results on Internet search engines.

With other Yahan users: Depending on your settings, and based on the Yahan products and services you use, we share:
Your interactions with Yahan content of other users, such as likes, and people you follow.
Content you send to a specific Yahan user, such as through Direct Messages. Please keep in mind that if you’ve shared information like Direct Messages or protected posts with someone else who accesses Yahan through a third-party service, the information may be shared with the third-party service.

With partners: Depending on your settings, we also provide certain third parties with information to help us offer or operate our products and services. You can learn more about these partnerships in our Help Center. You can control whether Yahan shares your personal information with these partners by using the “Data sharing with business partners” option in your Privacy & Safety settings. (This setting does not control sharing described elsewhere in this Privacy Policy, such as when we share information with our service providers, or through partnerships other than as described in this Help Center article.)

3.2 With third parties & third-party integrations
With service providers: We may share your information with our service providers that perform functions and provide services on our behalf, including payment services providers who facilitate payments; service providers that host our various blogs and wikis; service providers that help us understand the use of our services; applicant tracking system providers to send and receive applicant and job data to potential employers; and those that provide fraud detection services.

With advertisers: Advertising revenue enables us to provide our products and services. Advertisers may learn information from your engagement with their ads on or off Yahan. For example, if you click on an external link or ad on our services, that advertiser or website operator might figure out that you came from Yahan, along with other information associated with the ad you clicked, such as characteristics of the audience it was intended to reach and other Yahan-generated identifiers for that ad. They may also collect other personal information from you, such as cookie identifiers, or your IP address.

Third-party content & integrations: We share or disclose your information with your consent or at your direction, such as when you authorize a third-party web client or application to access your account or when you direct us to share your feedback with a business. Similarly, to improve your experience, we work with third-party partners to display their video content on Yahan or to allow cross-platform sharing. When you watch or otherwise interact with content from our video or cross-platform sharing partners, they may receive and process your personal information as described in their privacy policies. For video content, you can adjust your autoplay settings if you prefer that content not to play automatically.

Through our APIs: We use technology like APIs and embeds to make public Yahan information available to websites, apps, and others for their use, for example, displaying posts on a news website or analyzing what people say on Yahan. We generally make this content available in limited quantities for free and charge licensing fees for large-scale access. We have standard terms that govern how this information can be used, and a compliance program to enforce these terms. But these individuals and companies are not affiliated with Yahan, and their offerings may not reflect updates you make on Yahan. For more information about how we make public data on Yahan available to the world, visit https://developer.yahan.com.

3.3 When required by law, to prevent harm, or in the public interest
We may preserve, use, share, or disclose your information if we believe that it is reasonably necessary to:
comply with a law, regulation, legal process, or governmental request;
protect the safety of any person, protect the safety or integrity of our platform, including to help prevent spam, abuse, or malicious actors on our services;
explain why we have removed content or accounts from our services (e.g., for a violation of Our Rules);
address fraud, security, or technical issues; or
protect our rights or property, or the rights or property of those who use our services.

3.4 With our Affiliates
We may share information amongst our affiliates to provide our products and services.

3.5 As a result of a change in ownership
We may share, sell, or transfer information about you in connection with a merger, acquisition, reorganization, sale of assets, or bankruptcy. This Privacy Policy will apply to your personal information that is shared with (before and after the close of any transaction) or transferred to the new entity.

4. How Long We Keep Information
We keep different types of information for different periods of time:

We keep your profile information and content for the duration of your account.

We generally keep other personally identifiable data we collect when you use our products and services for a maximum of 18 months.

Remember public content can exist elsewhere even after you remove it from Yahan. For example, search engines and other third parties may retain copies of your posts longer, based upon their own privacy policies, even after they are deleted or expire on Yahan. You can read more about search visibility here.

Where you violate our Rules and your account is suspended, we may keep the identifiers you used to create the account (i.e., email address or phone number) indefinitely to prevent repeat policy offenders from creating new accounts.

We may keep certain information longer than our policies specify in order to comply with legal requirements and for safety and security reasons.

5. Take Control

5.1 Access, Correction, Portability
You can access, correct, or modify the information you provided to us by editing your profile and adjusting your account settings.

You can learn more about the information we have collected or inferred about you in Your Yahan Data and request access to additional information here.

You can download a copy of your information, such as your posts, by following the instructions here.

To protect your privacy and maintain security, we take steps to verify your identity before granting you access to your personal information or complying with a deletion, portability, or other related request. We may, in certain situations, reject your request for access, correction, or portability, for example, we may reject access where you are unable to verify your identity.

5.2 Deleting your Information
If you follow the instructions here, your account will be deactivated and your data will be queued for deletion. When deactivated, your Yahan account, including your display name, username, and public profile, will no longer be viewable on yahan.live, Yahan for iOS, and Yahan for Android. For up to 30 days after deactivation it is still possible to restore your Yahan account if it was accidentally or wrongfully deactivated.

5.3 Objecting to, Restricting, or Withdrawing your Consent
You can manage your privacy settings and other account features here. If you change your settings it may take some time for your choices to be fully reflected throughout our systems. You may also notice changes in your Yahan experience or limitations in your ability to access certain features depending on the settings you’ve adjusted. You may also manage additional settings when interacting with certain content and features on different parts of the platform, such as whether a Space is recorded, or whether videos you upload are downloadable by others. Yahan adheres to the Digital Advertising Alliance Self-Regulatory Principles for Online Behavioral Advertising (also referred to as “interest-based advertising”) and respects the DAA’s consumer choice tool for you to opt out of interest-based advertising at https://optout.aboutads.info/.

5.4 Authorized Agent Requests
To submit a request related to access, modification, or deletion of your information, or someone else’s information if you are their authorized agent, you may also contact us as specified in the How To Contact Yahan section of our Privacy Policy below. We may require you to provide additional information for verification.

6. Your Rights and Ours

We provide Yahan to people all over the world and provide many of the same privacy tools and controls to all of our users regardless of where they live. However, your experience may be slightly different than users in other countries to ensure Yahan respects local requirements.

6.1 We have specific legal bases to use your information
Yahan has carefully considered the legal reasons it is permitted to collect, use, share and otherwise process your information. If you want to dig in to learn more and better understand the nuances, we’d encourage you to check out this additional information about data processing. And no, we don’t sell your personal information.

6.2 We move your data to make Yahan work for you
Just as you use Yahan to seamlessly participate in global conversations with people in countries all over the world, Yahan must move information across borders and to different countries around the world to support the safe and reliable service you depend on. For example, if you live in Europe and are having a conversation with someone in the United States, information has to move between those countries to provide that experience – it’s what you expect from us.

We also use data centers and cloud providers, and engage our affiliates and third-party partners and service providers located in many parts of the world to help us provide our services. Before we move data between countries we look at the risks that may be presented to the data and rely on standard contractual clauses (SCCs), where applicable, to ensure your data rights are protected. To request a copy of the SCCs, please contact us here. If data will be shared with a third party, we require them to maintain the same protections over your data that we provide directly.

Yahan is a participant in the EU-US Data Privacy Framework (DPF), the Swiss-US DPF and the UK Extension to the EU-US DPF. Yahan complies with the DPF Principles for all its processing of personal data received from the European Union, Switzerland and the UK, in reliance on the EU-US DPF, Swiss-US DPF and UK Extension to the EU-US DPF, respectively. If you have an inquiry or complaint related to our participation in the DPF, please contact us here. As part of our participation in the DPF, if you have a dispute with us about our adherence to the DPF Principles, we will seek to resolve it through our internal complaint resolution process, alternatively through the US-based independent dispute resolution body JAMS, and under certain conditions, through the DPF Arbitration Process following the procedures and subject to the conditions described in Annex 1 to the DPF Principles. DPF participants are subject to the investigatory and enforcement powers of the US Federal Trade Commission and other authorized statutory bodies. Under certain circumstances, participants may be liable for the transfer of personal data from the EU, Switzerland and the UK to third parties outside the EU, Switzerland and the UK. Learn more about the EU-US DPF, the Swiss-US DPF and the UK Extension to the EU-US DPF here.

7. Yahan's Audience
Our services are not directed to children, and you may not use our services if you are under the age of 13. You must also be old enough to consent to the processing of your personal data in your country (in some countries we may allow your parent or guardian to do so on your behalf).

8. Changes To This Privacy Policy
The most current version of this Privacy Policy governs our processing of your personal data and we may revise this Privacy Policy from time to time as needed.

If we do revise this Privacy Policy and make changes that are determined by us to be material, we will provide you notice and an opportunity to review the revised Privacy Policy before you continue to use Yahan.

9. General
The Yahan Privacy Policy is written in English but is made available in multiple languages through translations. Yahan strives to make the translations as accurate as possible to the original English version. However, in case of any discrepancies or inconsistencies, the English language version of the Yahan Privacy Policy shall take precedence. You acknowledge that English shall be the language of reference for interpreting and constructing the terms of the Yahan Privacy Policy.

10. How To Contact Yahan
We want to hear from you if you have thoughts or questions about this Privacy Policy. You can contact us via our Privacy Policy Inquiries page or by writing to us at the appropriate address below. Information about our handling of California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) requests is available here. Information about our handling of “Consumer Health Data” and associated requests as defined under Washington State’s My Health My Data Act and other similar state laws is available here.

Address:

Yahan HQ, Bengaluru