The fine print, in plain English.
What Locara collects about you, why, who else sees it, and how to make us delete it. Reading the site needs no sign-up, so for most visitors the honest answer is: very little. Posting in a locality community needs an email address, and this page says plainly what happens to it.
The short version
Reading Locara and asking it questions needs no account. No sign-up, no password, no phone number. We do not know your name unless you type it in.
Posting to a locality community is the one exception. That needs a verified email address, because a question asked of a neighbourhood is worth nothing if the answer cannot reach the person who asked. Your email is never shown to anyone. Posts carry a pen name you pick.
What we do have: the questions you type, because we have to send them somewhere to answer them, and an anonymous count of which pages get used. Both are explained below, in full, and neither is sold to anyone. That is the whole policy. The rest is detail.
What we collect
Locara is deliberately thin on personal data. Here is the whole list.
The questions you ask
The text you type into Ask, and the locality facts we retrieved to answer it. We store the question text against an anonymous session id, so we can see what people actually want to know and decide which areas and factors to research next. We never store your IP address against it.
If you are signed out, which is how the site is used by default, a question carries nothing but that anonymous session id. If you aresigned in because you have posted in the community, questions you ask while signed in are stored against your account, and so are linked to your email address. If you would rather they were not, sign out before asking, or ask us to delete them.
Anonymous usage
- Which pages you visited, in what order, and the site that referred you.
- An anonymous session identifier, held in a cookie called
lsid, so a visit reads as one visit rather than nine unrelated page loads. - Nothing else. We do not store your IP address or your device fingerprint in our own event stream.
If you send feedback
The contact and feedback form takes a message, an optional rating, and your name and email only if you choose to leave them. Leave them blank and it still sends. If you do leave an email, we send a copy to that address too, so you have a record of what you told us.
If you post in the community
A verified email address, a pen name you choose, and the localities you say you are connected to along with how, such as "lives here" or "works here", and a year if you give one. The pen name and the relationship are public; the email never is. Its own section is below.
What we deliberately do not collect
- No real name and no address, ever. No phone number at all. No email, unless you type one into feedback or create a community account.
- No location. The site never asks your browser for it.
- No advertising identifiers, no cross-site tracking pixels, no data brokers.
- No sensitive personal data of any kind. Please do not type any into the question box.
The questions you type
This is the one part worth reading slowly, because it is the one place your words leave our servers.
When you ask something, the text goes to two AI providers, both in the United States: OpenAI, which turns it into a search embedding and runs a first pass, and Anthropic, which writes the reasoned answer over the facts we retrieved. Both are our processors, both are barred from using your text to train their models, and neither receives anything identifying about you, because we hold nothing identifying to send. But the text itself genuinely does leave, and you should type accordingly: it is a question box about neighbourhoods, not a private notebook.
The offline research that builds our locality profiles also uses web search and AI, but that runs on public place data and never on anything of yours.
If you post in the community
Locality threads and replies are the one part of Locara where you write something other people read. So this part works differently from the rest of the page, and it is worth knowing exactly how before you post.
What is public
- Your pen name. You choose it, it does not have to be your real name, and we would rather it was not.
- Your question or reply, in full, on a page with its own web address that anyone can open, share or find in a search engine.
- The locality you posted to, your stated relationship to it, and the year you gave if you gave one. These are self declared. We do not verify them, and we show no verification badge precisely so nobody mistakes them for checked facts.
Treat a post as public writing, because that is what it is. Please do not put your address, your flat or door number, your phone number, or anyone else's details into a post. If you have already done so, tell the Grievance Officer and we will remove it.
What stays private
- Your email address. It is never shown beside a post, never shown to other readers, never sold, and never added to a marketing list, because we do not have one.
- The link between your email and your pen name. We hold it so we can tell you about replies, so you can manage your own content, and so we can act on abuse reports.
Why posting needs an email, and what we send to it
Two things, both of which you set in motion yourself. A one-time code when you sign in, to confirm the address is really yours. And a notification when someone replies to a thread you started, with a link back to it. Nothing else. Every notification carries a link that turns them off. It needs no sign-in, because it is clicked from an inbox, and it keeps working however old the email is. Turning them off deletes nothing: your questions and answers stay up, you simply stop hearing about them.
Browsing the community, reading every thread in it, and asking Locara itself anything at all still need no account. The sign-in appears at the moment you post, and nowhere else.
Why, and on what basis
Under the DPDP Act we process personal data on consent and, where the Act allows, for legitimate uses. In practice:
- To answer you. Your question is processed because you asked it. That is the whole purpose, and it ends when the answer is written.
- To decide what to research next. We read the questions in aggregate to see which areas and which factors people actually care about.
- To run the site. Counting page views, spotting what is broken, and stopping abuse.
- To reply to you. If you leave an email on the feedback form, we use it to answer you, and for nothing else. We do not add it to a mailing list, because we do not have one.
- To let you post, and to tell you when someone answers. Your email verifies that a community account is yours, and carries the notice that a resident has replied to your thread. Both are the reason you gave it to us.
- To keep the community usable. Knowing privately which account wrote what is what lets us act on a report, remove abuse, and stop one person flooding a locality feed.
Cookies and local storage
One cookie on every visit: lsid, an anonymous session id used to count a visit as a visit. It identifies a browser session, not a person, and on its own it points at no account.
If you have a community account there is a second one,locara_session, which is what keeps you signed in. It is set only after you verify an email address, it is readable only by our server, and signing out deletes it. If you never post, it is never set.
We also keep small preferences in your browser's local storage, your light or dark theme choice and your recent questions, so the page looks right when you come back. Those never leave your device, and clearing your browser storage removes them.
PostHog, our product analytics (above), sets a first-party cookie and stores a device identifier in your browser so we can count visits and see which features get used. Beyond that there are no advertising cookies and no third-party advertising or tracking pixels. If we ever add a non-essential cookie beyond analytics, we will ask you first.
Where your data lives
Locara is built and run from Bangalore, on DigitalOcean (blr1). Our data sits in a managed MongoDB Atlas cluster on AWS in Mumbai (ap-south-1). Storage is in India.
Three processors run outside India: OpenAI and Anthropic, which answer your typed questions, and Resend, which delivers feedback email. All three are on US infrastructure, so your question text and any feedback you send cross a border. None of them receives more than that job needs, and if the government notifies restricted territories under s.16 of the DPDP Act, we will re-check all three against that list.
How long we keep it
- Your questions, kept against an anonymous session id while they are useful for deciding what to research. They carry no name, email, phone or IP.
- Anonymous usage events, the same.
- Feedback you send, until you ask us to delete it. If you left an email, it sits in our inbox as well as our database, and we delete both on request.
- Server logs, kept for up to 30 days for debugging and abuse investigation, then rotated away.
- Sign-in codes, for ten minutes. The database deletes them itself once they expire, whether or not they were used.
- Your community account, your email and pen name, until you ask us to delete it.
- Your posts and replies, for as long as they are up. They are part of a conversation other people took part in, so deleting your account does not automatically erase them. Ask us to remove the posts too and we will.
Anything already reduced to aggregate counts stays, because there is nothing in it that points at you.
Your rights under the DPDP Act
India's Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 is the law that governs this. It gives you the following rights, and you exercise all of them the same way: email the Grievance Officer, details below.
- Access. Ask for a summary of the personal data we hold about you, what we do with it, and who we have shared it with. In most cases the answer will be "nothing that identifies you", and we will say so plainly.
- Correction and completion. If something we hold is wrong or out of date, tell us and we will fix it.
- Erasure. Ask us to delete your data. We will, unless a law requires us to keep a specific record.
- Withdraw consent. As easily as you gave it. Processing that already happened stays lawful; everything after stops. In practice, stop using the site and clear your browser storage, and nothing of yours remains in play.
- Grievance redressal. Complain to us first. We respond within 30 days.
- Nomination. You may nominate someone to exercise these rights if you die or become incapacitated. Write to the Grievance Officer to record a nominee.
One practical limit, stated honestly. If you have a community account, we can find everything of yours, because your email points at it. If you do not, your questions and page views are anonymous rows we usually cannot tie to you. So if you want a specific question or feedback message removed, tell us roughly when you sent it and what it said, and we will find it.
Grievance Officer
Under s.13 of the DPDP Act, you can raise any privacy question or complaint with our Grievance Officer, and we will respond within 30 days.
Write to support@thelocara.com with "Privacy" in the subject line. It reaches the founders directly; there is no queue in between. If you are not satisfied with how we handle it, you may complain to the Data Protection Board of India.
Children's data
Locara is for adults. Our terms require you to be 18 or over. Reading the site involves no sign-up at all. Posting in the community asks for an email address and nothing else, so there is no point at which we could meaningfully verify an age, and we collect no profile and no contact detail beyond what is described above, from anyone, of any age.
We do not knowingly process a minor's data, we never profile or target anyone, and if you believe a child's personal data has reached us through the feedback form, tell the Grievance Officer and we will delete it.
How we protect it
- Everything is served over HTTPS, and the API only accepts requests from our own site.
- No passwords exist, so none can be stolen or reused. Signing in is a one-time code to your email, and the code is stored hashed, expires in ten minutes, and is void after five wrong guesses.
- A community account holds an email address and a pen name. There is no password to breach and no profile of you to steal, because we never built one.
- Access to the database and the server is limited to the two founders, over key-based authentication.
- The admin panel is separate, password-protected, and holds no reader data beyond the aggregate counts described here.
We are a two-person team and we will not pretend to enterprise security theatre. What we can honestly say is that the safest data is the data you never collect, and that is the principle this product is built on.
Visitors from the EU and UK
Locara is an India-facing service and we do not target the EU or the UK. If you use it from there, the GDPR may still apply to that use. We will honour access, rectification, erasure, restriction, objection and portability requests made to the Grievance Officer above, on the same terms as everyone else.
Changes to this policy
We update the date at the top whenever this page changes, and keep a summary of anything material at the top. We have no mailing list, so for most visitors this page is the notice. If a change materially affects people with community accounts, we will email them, because that is the one address we hold.
If we ever start collecting something new, this page changes before the code does, not after.