01Who we are
Redline (redlineapp.in) is a student-run project based in Delhi, currently in an invite-only beta for Delhi NCR. It's made up of the Android app, this website, and the server behind both. Under India's Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 (the DPDP Act), Redline, run by its founder, is the Data Fiduciary for your personal data: we decide why and how it's used. You are the Data Principal.
Questions, requests and complaints about your data go to our contact email (it will be listed here before the public launch).
02The short version
- Other people only ever see an approximate area (about 1 km) and a day, never the exact place or time you took a photo. A spot taken at a public event we list also shows that event.
- Spots appear on the map only after 24 hours.
- We strip location and camera data from every photo before storing it, and we never keep the unblurred original.
- No ads. We don't sell or rent your data, and we don't share it for advertising.
- Your spots help train our car-recognition model only if you switch that on. It's off by default and you can switch it off any time.
- You can delete any spot, or your whole account, whenever you like.
03What we collect
When you create an account
- Email address and password. The password is stored only as a salted hash (scrypt); we can't read it.
- Username and display name. These are public.
- The date you accepted the Terms and the version you accepted.
Your profile (all optional, all public)
- Avatar photo, bio, home city, and the cars in your garage.
When you post a spot (Android app)
- The photo, after the blur boxes you drew are applied.
- The car you identified, and your caption.
- Your precise location when the photo was taken, from your phone's GPS, from the photo itself, or from a pin you place. Plus the GPS accuracy your phone reports.
- The capture time, as reported by your phone or the photo. We can't independently verify it.
- Whether it came from the in-app camera or your gallery (this decides whether the spot is “verified”).
- A fingerprint of the image (a perceptual hash) so the same photo can't be posted twice.
When you use the community features
- Likes, comments, follows, blocks, event RSVPs, reports you file, and the notifications these create.
Technical data
- For each signed-in session: a session token, the IP address and the browser or app user agent. Sessions expire after 30 days.
- Short-lived rate-limit counters keyed to your IP address or account, to stop abuse.
- Standard server logs from our hosting provider (request time, path, status). Our own logs never contain precise locations, emails or tokens.
We don't use analytics, advertising or crash-reporting SDKs, and we don't read your contacts, messages or other files. The app asks for the camera and your location while you're using it, and nothing in the background.
04How your location is protected
Location is what makes Redline useful and what makes it risky, so this part is strict and is enforced by the server, not by a setting:
- Precise location stays private. It's never returned by any part of Redline to anyone except you, on your own spot. Not to your followers, and not to other users.
- The public sees a ~1 km area. We snap every spot to a grid cell about 1 km across and label it with the nearest neighbourhood or landmark, worked out from the centre of the cell (for example “Hauz Khas” or “Cyber City, Gurugram”).
- The public sees a day, not a time. “Today”, “Yesterday”, a weekday or a date. Never the hour or minute.
- The map waits 24 hours. A spot joins the car culture map a day after it's posted, as part of its cell's heat. The map never shows individual pins.
We use your precise location to work out the area label and the city, to stop the same car being counted twice by the same person (within 500 m and two hours), to link spots to an event held at that venue, and to work out local rarity. One honest limit: the image files we serve carry a standard “last modified” time, which is roughly when the spot was uploaded. It never reveals where the photo was taken.
Event galleries. If a spot was taken inside the venue area of a public event listed on Redline (a circle around the venue with a radius of 300 m to 5 km, set by us) during the event (from an hour before it starts to an hour after it ends), we add it to that event's gallery. Anyone who can see the spot can then tell it was taken at that venue during that time window, which can be narrower than a day. The link is worked out on our server from the private location and time, and others see it only after the event has ended and the spot's 24-hour map delay has passed (you see it on your own spot straight away). If you don't want a spot linked to an event, delete it.
“Locate me” on the map, in the app and on the website, uses your device's location only to move the map, and first rounds it to the centre of your ~1 km cell. Your exact position stays on your device (the app draws the “you are here” dot itself). Like any other view, the map then loads the spots around that rounded point, so our servers see roughly which square kilometre you're looking at. Posting a spot is different: its precise location is sent to us and kept private as described above.
05Photos, plates and faces
Before you post, the app lets you draw blur boxes over number plates and faces. Our server applies the blur (pixelation plus blur, which can't be undone) and only then saves the photo, in three sizes. The unblurred original is never stored. Plate and face blurring is manual for now: it's your responsibility to cover plates and faces that identify someone, and our Terms require it when asked.
Photos carry hidden metadata (EXIF), including GPS coordinates and camera details. We read the date and location from it once, to place the spot, and then strip all metadata from every image we store. Spot photos are public, so anyone with the link can view them; their web addresses are random and can't be guessed.
Your photos are used to train a car-recognition model only if you opt in. See Training our car-recognition model for exactly what's used.
06Why we use your data
We process personal data on the basis of your consent, which you give when you create an account, and only for these purposes:
- to run your account and keep you signed in;
- to publish your spots, profile, comments and RSVPs, and to work out rarity, points and leaderboards;
- to show the feed, the car culture map and events;
- to keep Redline safe: stopping spam, duplicate photos and abuse, handling reports, and moderating;
- only if you opt in, to train our car-recognition model from your confirmed spots (a separate consent, below);
- to meet legal obligations, for example responding to a lawful request from an authority.
You can withdraw your consent at any time by deleting your account, which is as easy as signing up. Consent to model training is separate and can be switched off on its own without touching your account (below). When you withdraw consent we stop the processing that relied on it; it doesn't make anything we did before unlawful.
07Training our car-recognition model (optional, off by default)
Redline wants to build its own car-recognition model from spots the community has confirmed. This is a separate consent from the one you give for your account. It's off unless you switch on “Help train India's car-recognition model”: a checkbox when you sign up on the website, a step after sign-up in the app, or later in Settings. It's never pre-ticked, and saying no changes nothing else: you post, score and appear on leaderboards the same.
What a training set contains
- Only spots by people who have the setting on when the set is built, and only spots whose car ID other users (or a moderator) confirmed. That includes your confirmed spots from before you switched it on. Demo content and photos credited to someone else are never included.
- For each spot: the photo as we store it, with the plates and faces you blurred still blurred and no location or camera data; the confirmed make and model, rarity tier and niches; the city and the ~1 km grid cell; whether it was a verified capture; how the ID was confirmed; and where the blur boxes you drew are in the photo.
- Never: your username, display name, email or any other account detail; the spot's id or anything else that links back to your profile (each image gets a new random name in every set); your exact location or capture time; captions or comments.
- Sets are built on our own systems and used only to train and test Redline's own models. We don't sell, license or share them.
Switching it off
- Switch it off whenever you like, the same way you switched it on: in the app under Settings → Research, or on the website in the account menu → Model training. We record when you switched it on; switching it off clears that.
- From then on your spots are left out of every training set we build. Deleting a spot, or your account, does the same for those photos.
- A model already trained can't “unlearn” a photo and isn't retrained, but we don't keep old training sets around (see How long we keep it).
08What other people can see
- Your username, display name, avatar, bio, home city, garage and stats (spots, points, rank, logbook, ID confirmations).
- On a spot: how many people confirmed or suggested a different car. Who voted isn't shown.
- Your spots: photo, car, caption, rarity and points, approximate area and day, likes and comments.
- Your comments and the number of likes on your spots. Other users can't see who you follow beyond the totals, or your RSVPs.
- If a spot was taken at a listed event during the event, the event it belongs to (see Event galleries above).
- Never your email address, precise locations, exact capture times, or anything about your sessions.
09Who processes data for us
We use a small number of service providers (Data Processors under the DPDP Act). They process data only to provide their service to us:
- Vercel Inc. hosts the website and API (Mumbai region) and stores photos (Vercel Blob, delivered through its global network).
- Neon hosts our PostgreSQL database in the Mumbai region (AWS ap-south-1).
- Upstash, Inc., if enabled, keeps short-lived rate-limit counters (keyed to IP address or account ID).
- OpenFreeMap serves the map tiles. Your browser or phone fetches them directly, so OpenFreeMap sees your IP address and which part of the map you're viewing, as with any website. We send it nothing else.
Some of these providers may process data outside India. We don't transfer data to any country the Government of India has restricted under section 16 of the DPDP Act. We never sell personal data and never share it with advertisers or data brokers.
10How long we keep it
- Your account: until you delete it. Deletion is immediate: your profile, spots and their photos, likes, comments, follows, blocks, RSVPs, notifications and sessions go at once. Copies kept with reports are the one exception (below).
- A spot you delete: it disappears at once. Its photos, caption, likes and comments are deleted at once, and its exact location and time are reduced to the ~1 km cell and the day. The rest of the record, including the image fingerprint (so someone else can't re-post your photo), is deleted after 30 days.
- A spot a moderator removed: you can still see it, nobody else can. 90 days after the removal its photos are deleted and its exact location and time are reduced to the ~1 km cell and the day. The rest of the record and the image fingerprint stay, so the photo can't be posted again, until you delete the spot or your account.
- Notifications: 90 days. Expired sessions: removed daily.
- Training sets (only if you opted in): kept while a model is being trained, then deleted. Each new set is built from scratch, so it reflects who has the setting on at that time.
- Reports: when someone reports a spot, comment or profile, we save a copy of what was publicly shown at that moment, as evidence for the moderators: the username and display name, the caption, comment text or bio, the car, the area label and day, and the web address of the photo or avatar. Never a precise location, exact time or email address. The copy stays even if the content or the account is deleted later, so deleting an account doesn't erase the evidence of what it posted. It's kept while the report is open and for one year after it's resolved; then the copy and the reporter's note are deleted. Photos themselves aren't copied: they go when the spot or avatar is deleted.
- Moderation records: that a report was made, its reason and what was decided (dismissed, hidden, removed, suspended) are kept as a record of the action taken. If you delete your account, reports you filed stay but are no longer linked to you.
- Backups: our database provider keeps short-term backups for recovery; deleted data rolls off them within 30 days.
11Your rights
Under the DPDP Act you have the right to:
- Access a summary of the personal data we hold about you and how we use it, and the list of processors above;
- Correct and update it. You can edit your profile in the app, or ask us;
- Erase it, by deleting a spot, a comment or your whole account;
- Withdraw consent, by deleting your account, or for model training alone, with the switch described above;
- Grievance redressal: write to our contact email (it will be listed here before the public launch). We aim to acknowledge within 24 hours and resolve within 15 days. If you're not satisfied, you can complain to the Data Protection Board of India;
- Nominate someone to exercise these rights for you if you die or become unable to. Email us with their details.
We'll verify that a request really comes from you before acting on it, usually by asking you to send it from your account's email.
12Security and breaches
Everything travels over HTTPS. Passwords are hashed, sessions use secure, http-only cookies on the web and the phone's encrypted storage in the app, and every API response is built from an explicit list of allowed fields so private ones can't leak by accident. No system is perfect. If a personal data breach happens, we'll inform the Data Protection Board of India and the people affected, as the DPDP Act requires, and tell you what we're doing about it.
13Age
Redline is for people aged 18 and over. Under the DPDP Act anyone under 18 is a child, and we don't knowingly collect their data. If you believe a child has an account, tell us and we'll delete it.
15Changes and contact
If we change this policy in a way that matters, we'll tell you in the app before it takes effect, and update the version and date at the top of this page.
Contact: our contact email (it will be listed here before the public launch).