Privacy Policy

Privacy is a foundational tenet of the FAQ Vault experience. This policy outlines how we handle data within our curated intelligence vault.

• We don't ask you for personal information unless we truly need it.
• We don't share your personal information with anyone except to comply with the law, develop our products, or protect our rights.
• We don't sell your data, and we don't build advertising profiles from it.
• We tell you plainly what we do keep, for how long, and how to have it removed. That is sections 3 and 9 below.

1. Information We Collect

Like most website operators, FAQ Vault collects the information web browsers and servers routinely make available: browser type, device type, operating system, language preference, referring site, the page requested, and the date and time of the request. We use it to understand how the vault is used and which answers are worth writing next. We may publish aggregate trends drawn from it; we do not publish anything about an individual visitor.

We also record the IP address your request arrives from. We are explicit about this because it is the one item here that can, in combination with other records, identify a person. We keep it for a narrow set of reasons: to distinguish automated traffic and scrapers from readers, to investigate abuse, and, for contributions, to support fraud and chargeback enquiries. We do not use it to build a profile of you, and it is never shared with advertisers.

Alongside the address we store a rotating visitor identifier, which is a one-way hash of the address, your browser string and the current date. It lets us count how many people read a page on a given day without linking that reading to you across days: the identifier is different tomorrow and cannot be reversed.

We ask for personal information directly only when you choose to give it, either through the contact form or by supporting us financially. That may include your:

• Full name
• Email address
• Message content (in contact forms, and any message you attach to a contribution)
• The display name you ask us to show publicly, if you choose to be credited

2. Contributions and Payments

If you support FAQ Vault financially, your payment is processed by Razorpay. We never see or store your card, UPI or bank details. They are entered on Razorpay's systems and are governed by Razorpay's own privacy policy.

What we do keep is a record of the contribution itself: the amount and currency, Razorpay's order and payment references, whether it succeeded, any name and email you supplied, the display name and message you asked us to publish, and the technical details described in section 1 (address, approximate location, device and browser). We keep this because it is a financial record. We need it to answer questions about a payment, to honour a recognition you paid for, and to meet the record-keeping expected of anyone taking payments.

If you ask to be credited publicly, only the display name and the message you wrote are ever shown. Your email address, the amount you gave, and every technical detail stay private. If you choose to remain anonymous, the credit appears without your name. You can ask us to remove a public credit at any time and we will take it down. See section 9.

3. How We Use Your Information

The information we collect is used to provide, maintain, and improve our AI-powered knowledge service. Specific uses include:

• Service Delivery: To generate and display relevant FAQ content based on your interests.
• Communications: To respond to your comments, questions, and requests through our contact forms.
• Analytics: To monitor and analyze trends, usage, and activities in connection with our Service.
• Personalization: To customize the service to provide you with a more tailored experience.

4. Log Data and AI Interactions

When you search our vault or interact with our AI-generated answers, we may log certain data about the query to improve the accuracy of our models. This data is generally anonymized and used for aggregate analysis.

Search queries are stored as the query text and the number of results it returned, with no visitor identifier attached. We can see that nobody found an answer to a question, but not who asked it.

Separately, every request leaves the ordinary server log data described in section 1: the address it came from, the browser version, the page requested, and the date and time. The retention period for that is in section 8.

5. Cookies and Tracking Technologies

A cookie is a string of information that a website stores on a visitor's computer, and that the visitor's browser provides to the website each time the visitor returns. FAQ Vault uses cookies to help identify and track visitors, their usage of FAQ Vault website, and their website access preferences.

Visitors who do not wish to have cookies placed on their computers should set their browsers to refuse cookies before using FAQ Vault's websites, with the drawback that certain features of the website may not function properly without the aid of cookies. For more details, please see our Cookie Policy.

6. Data Security

We value your trust in providing us your Personal Information, thus we are striving to use commercially acceptable means of protecting it. But remember that no method of transmission over the internet, or method of electronic storage is 100% secure and reliable, and we cannot guarantee its absolute security.

7. External Links

Our service may contain links to external sites that are not operated by us. If you click on a third-party link, you will be directed to that third party's site. We strongly advise you to review the Privacy Policy and terms and conditions of every site you visit. We have no control over, and assume no responsibility for the content, privacy policies or practices of any third party sites, products or services.

8. How Long We Keep It

Nothing is kept indefinitely by default.

• Page-view records, including the IP address and the rotating visitor identifier, are deleted automatically after roughly thirteen months. This is enforced by the database itself, not by someone remembering to run a clean-up.
• Search queries are kept so we can see which questions the vault fails to answer. They are stored as the query text and a result count, with no identifier attached to them.
• Contact messages are kept until the conversation is finished and we have no further need for them.
• Contribution records are kept for as long as financial records need to be retained. Public credits, by contrast, are removed the moment you ask.

9. Your Rights Over Your Data

Whatever jurisdiction you are in, and regardless of whether a particular law happens to apply to us, you can ask us to:

• Tell you what we hold about you, and where it came from.
• Correct it if it is wrong, including the name shown on a public credit.
• Delete it. We will delete anything we are not legally required to keep. Where a financial record must be retained, we will say so rather than quietly ignoring the request.
• Remove a public credit, at any time and without giving a reason. This one we act on immediately, and it does not affect the contribution itself.
• Object to analytics collection. Most of it can be stopped at your end by blocking the third-party scripts described in our Cookie Policy; write to us for anything that cannot.

Write to [email protected] and we will respond within thirty days. We may ask you for something that confirms the request is genuinely yours, because a request to delete someone else's data is one we should refuse.

10. Changes to This Privacy Policy

Although most changes are likely to be minor, FAQ Vault may change its Privacy Policy from time to time, and in FAQ Vault's sole discretion. FAQ Vault encourages visitors to frequently check this page for any changes to its Privacy Policy. Your continued use of this site after any change in this Privacy Policy will constitute your acceptance of such change.

11. Contact Information

If you have any questions about this Privacy Policy, please contact us via our Contact Page or directly at [email protected].