Privacy

• Your name, phone number, and - if you add one - your VIT email address
• Your role, department, and year, so buyers know who they are dealing with
• A profile photo, if you upload one
• Your listings: text, photos, videos, price, and location details
• Your messages to other students
• Location you choose to attach to a listing - a hostel block, or coordinates if you share them
• Basic technical data needed to keep the service running and to rate-limit abuse

Your number is never shown on your profile or on a listing. A buyer has to request it, and you decide each request individually. Rejecting a request reveals nothing.

Once you approve a request, that specific buyer can see your number. You can revoke that at any time from the request, which hides it again.

We use your number to send login codes. We do not sell it, and we do not use it for marketing.

Messages are stored so they are there when you come back, and they are visible to you and the person you are talking to. They are not end-to-end encrypted - we could technically read them, and the paragraph below sets out the only circumstances in which we do.

A moderator can open a conversation only when it has been reported, and only to investigate that report. Every such access writes a permanent record of which moderator opened which conversation, when, and the reason. That record cannot be edited or deleted from the admin panel.

If you would rather not have a conversation on record, move to a phone call once you have exchanged numbers.

Location is opt-in per listing. Hostellers usually give a block and a meeting window rather than exact coordinates. Day scholars can share a Maps link or precise coordinates.

Coordinates you attach are shown to people viewing that listing, so only attach a location you are comfortable making public. We never track you in the background.

Other students see your public profile, your listings, and whatever you send them in chat. Nobody else, with these exceptions:

• Our infrastructure providers - database, file storage, and SMS or email delivery - strictly to run the service
• Moderators, in the limited and logged circumstances described above
• Law enforcement, where we are legally required to respond

We do not sell your data and we do not run third-party ad trackers.

Your account data stays while your account is open. Deleting your account removes your profile and your listings. Messages you sent stay visible to the person who received them, shown as being from a deleted account - otherwise their side of the conversation would stop making sense.

Login codes expire in minutes. Moderation records are kept for accountability.

• Edit or delete your profile and listings at any time
• Approve or reject every phone-number request individually, and revoke access later
• Block a user to stop them contacting you
• Delete your account from Settings
• Ask us what we hold about you

Sessions use signed, HTTP-only cookies. Login codes are hashed before storage, expire quickly, and are rate-limited. All state-changing requests carry a CSRF token. Uploads are validated by type and size.

No system is perfect. If you find a security problem, please report it rather than exploiting it.