Your Privacy, Simply Explained

Last updated: September 5, 2026

The Short Version

✓ GPS location is used only to place your report on the map

✓ Your mobile number is never shown publicly or sold

✓ Reports are shown as aggregated, anonymous incidents

✓ We do not sell or share your personal information

✓ Ads are not running yet; when they are, they will be served by Google — advertisers never receive your number, GPS or reports (section 6)

1. What We Collect

GPS Location

When you submit a report, we collect your GPS coordinates (latitude and longitude) to place the outage marker on the map. We do not track your location continuously — coordinates are collected only at the moment of report submission.

Mobile Number

We collect your mobile number to prevent spam submissions (rate limiting and duplicate detection). Your number is stored securely on our servers and is never included in any public API response, map display, or shared with any third party.

Report Content

The area name, problem type, duration, impact level, and optional description you enter are stored to power the map and incident clustering. This information is shown publicly in aggregated form — individual reports may be visible to admins for moderation.

Usage Data

Standard server logs (IP address, request timestamps, browser type) are retained for up to 30 days for security and debugging purposes only.

2. How We Use Your Data

To display outage markers and incident clusters on the live map
To calculate area-level reliability statistics (always aggregated, never individual)
To detect and prevent spam or duplicate reports
To improve the accuracy of the confidence and severity scores

We do not sell your data and we do not build advertising profiles of you ourselves. When advertising is introduced it will be served by Google and its partners, who set their own cookies and may use your browsing history across other sites — that is described in section 6. What we never pass to them is the data you gave us: your mobile number, your GPS coordinates, and your individual reports stay with us.

3. Data Sharing

We do not sell, rent, or trade your personal information.

Aggregated, anonymised outage data (e.g. "5 reports in Koramangala in the last hour") may be published publicly via our API and statistics endpoints. This data contains no personal identifiers.

We may share data with law enforcement if required by Indian law, but only to the extent legally required.

4. Data Storage & Security

Your data is stored on servers in India. We use industry-standard security practices including encrypted connections (HTTPS), rate limiting, and access controls. Mobile numbers are accessible only to the server — they are programmatically stripped from all API responses.

5. Your Rights

You may ask us to confirm what data we hold about you, correct it, or delete the reports associated with your mobile number. Email akgotech@gmail.com and we will process the request within 14 business days.

These rights are given effect under India's Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023. If you are unhappy with how we have handled a request, you may escalate it to our grievance contact in section 10, and then to the Data Protection Board of India.

6. Advertising

Power Watch is free to use and currently shows no advertising. We intend to fund the service through Google AdSense. The terms below describe how advertising works here and apply from the moment the first ad is served.

Third-party vendors, including Google, use cookies to serve ads based on your prior visits to Power Watch or to other websites.
Google's use of advertising cookies — including the DoubleClick DART cookie — enables it and its partners to serve ads to you based on your visit to this site and/or other sites on the Internet.
You can opt out of personalised advertising in Google Ads Settings, or opt out of third-party vendor cookies at aboutads.info and optout.networkadvertising.org.
If you are in the EEA, the UK or Switzerland, we ask for your consent before any advertising cookie is set, and you can change or withdraw that choice at any time. Without consent you will see non-personalised ads only.
Advertisers never receive your mobile number, your GPS coordinates, or any individual report. Ad networks see only what your browser sends them.
Ads are never placed between you and a helpline number, and never on the report form or the live map.

Separately, we run our own privacy-friendly, cookieless analytics to count page views and understand which pages are useful. It stores two randomly generated identifiers in your browser's local and session storage (not cookies), records the pages you visit, how long you spend on them, your device type, and where you arrived from. Your IP address is used once to derive an approximate state and city, then discarded — only a salted, irreversible hash of it is kept, so repeat visits from the same network are counted once. We never store your IP address, and none of this data identifies you personally. To opt out, set pw_analytics_optout to 1 in your browser's local storage, or use any standard tracker blocker.

7. Cookies & Local Storage

Power Watch itself sets no cookies. We use only browser local storage and session storage — for the admin login token, your language preference, and the two anonymous analytics identifiers described in section 6.

Once advertising is introduced, Google and its partners will set advertising cookies on this site. Those cookies are theirs, not ours, and are governed by those vendors' own policies — you will be able to opt out using the links in section 6. You can also block or delete cookies in your browser settings; Power Watch keeps working without them.

8. Children's Privacy

Power Watch is a general-audience service and is not directed at children. We do not knowingly collect personal data from anyone under 18, and we do not serve personalised advertising to users we know to be children. If you believe a child has submitted a report containing personal data, email us and we will delete it.

9. Changes to This Policy

If we make material changes to this privacy policy — including switching advertising on — we will update the "Last updated" date at the top of this page. Continued use of Power Watch after changes constitutes acceptance of the updated policy.

10. Contact & Grievances

Questions about your privacy, or a complaint about how your data has been handled? Email akgotech@gmail.com or visit our contact page. We aim to respond within 14 business days.