Privacy Notice

This notice tells you what personal data Fellow Feeling Foundation collects about you through this website and through our mobile applications, why we collect it, what we do with it, how long we keep it, and what you can ask us to do about it. It is written to meet the requirements of Section 5 of the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023.

In this notice, we and the Foundation mean Fellow Feeling Foundation, a Section 8 company at 46/1, Swarnambika Layout, Ramnagar, Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu 641009 (PAN AAECF7056J). Under the Act we are the Data Fiduciary. You are the Data Principal.

1. What we collect, and why

If you donate. Your name, PAN, mobile number, postal address, district, State and PIN code. Optionally your email address and Aadhaar number. We collect these because the Income-tax Act, 1961 requires them before we can issue an 80G receipt and file the statutory donor return in Form 10BD, from which your Form 10BE certificate is generated. Your payment itself is handled by our payment gateway; we receive only a payment reference, never your card number, CVV or banking credentials.

If you contact us or volunteer. Your name, phone number, email address and whatever you choose to write to us. We use it to reply to you and, for volunteers, to consider and administer your offer.

If you ask us for assistance. Details of your household, income and circumstances, and identity documents. We use these only to verify and decide on your application, and to keep the record the Company is required to keep.

When you browse this site. Ordinary server logs including IP address and browser type, kept for security and troubleshooting.

2. The legal basis for each use

The Act allows personal data to be processed either with your consent, or for certain legitimate uses. It matters which applies, because it decides what you can ask us to undo.

• Your 80G receipt and Form 10BD filing — legal obligation. This is a legitimate use under Section 7 of the Act, because the Income-tax Act compels it. Once a donation is receipted, we cannot delete that record on request, and withdrawing consent does not remove it.
• Newsletters and updates — your consent. Given freely, and you may withdraw it at any time, as easily as you gave it.
• Photographs and stories — your consent. We publish a photograph of a person we have helped only where that person has agreed. Consent may be withdrawn and we will take the image down.
• Volunteer and assistance applications — your consent, plus any record-keeping the law requires of a Section 8 company.

3. How long we keep it

Donation records, receipts and the data reported in Form 10BD are retained for at least eight years from the end of the relevant assessment year, as required of a Section 8 company under the Income-tax Act, 1961, and for longer if a proceeding is pending.

Volunteer records are kept while you are with us and for three years afterwards. Unsuccessful applications are erased within one year. Enquiry messages are erased within two years. Server logs are kept for twelve months.

Where you withdraw consent and no law requires us to keep the data, we erase it, and we ask any processor acting for us to do the same.

4. Who else sees your data

We do not sell, trade or rent personal data, and we do not share it for anyone else's marketing.

• Our payment gateway, to take your donation and confirm it.
• The Income Tax Department, in the Form 10BD return.
• Our hosting provider and email provider, who store the data on our behalf under contract and may not use it for their own purposes.
• Our auditor, and any authority entitled by law to ask.

Donor names published anywhere on this site are masked, for example R****h K. We never publish a PAN, Aadhaar number, address or phone number.

5. Your rights

Under Sections 11 to 14 of the Act you may:

• Ask what we hold — a summary of your personal data, what we are doing with it, and who we have shared it with.
• Ask us to correct or complete it if it is wrong, and to update it.
• Ask us to erase it, where no law requires us to keep it. Tax records are the main exception.
• Withdraw your consent at any time, for anything we do on the basis of consent. It is as easy as giving it: one message to the address below. Withdrawal does not undo what was lawfully done beforehand.
• Nominate someone to exercise these rights for you if you die or become incapable.
• Complain to us, and if we do not resolve it, to the Data Protection Board of India.

We answer within thirty days. We may ask you to prove who you are first, so that we do not hand your data to somebody else.

6. Grievance redressal

Our Grievance Officer under Section 13 of the Act is Karthick Subramaniam, Director. Write to or call +91 82205 99780, or post to the Company's address above, marking it for the Grievance Officer.

If you are not satisfied with our answer, you may complain to the Data Protection Board of India in the manner prescribed under the Act.

7. Children

Donations are accepted only from persons aged eighteen or over, and our donation form is not directed at children. We do not knowingly collect a child's personal data through this website. Where our programmes involve children, we process their data only with the verifiable consent of a parent or lawful guardian, and we never use a child's data for tracking, behavioural monitoring or targeted advertising, as Section 9 of the Act requires.

If you believe a child has given us personal data through this site, tell us and we will erase it.

8. Keeping your data safe

We hold data on servers in India with access restricted to directors and authorised staff. Traffic to this site is encrypted with TLS. Credentials are stored outside the public web directory. Access to donor records is logged. We do not store card numbers, CVV or net-banking credentials at any point.

If a personal data breach occurs, we will notify the Data Protection Board of India and every affected person, in the manner and within the time the Act requires.

9. Cookies and browser storage

This site uses only what it needs to function and to load quickly. We do not use advertising cookies and we do not track you across other websites. You can clear or block cookies in your browser at any time; the site will still work.

10. Our mobile applications

We publish an Android application called FFF Admin. It is a working tool for the trustees and authorised staff of the Foundation, not an app for the public. There is nothing to see in it without an account, and accounts are issued only by the Foundation.

What the app collects from the person using it. Your email address, so you can sign in. A sign-in token, which is kept on your own device and nowhere else, and which stops working 24 hours after you sign in. The IP address of the device you sign in from, which we record to limit repeated failed sign-in attempts and to keep an audit trail of who did what. Photographs, only the ones you choose to take or select when adding a photograph to a case.

What the app does not do. It contains no advertising and no analytics. There are no tracking tools of any kind inside it and no third-party software development kits that collect data. It never asks for your location and never collects it. Where a photograph you upload carries location information from the camera, that information is stripped out on our server before the photograph is stored, so it is neither kept nor published.

Permissions. The app asks for access to your camera and photographs only at the moment you choose to add a photograph, and for nothing else. You can refuse, and the rest of the app will work normally.

Where the information goes. Only to the Foundation's own server, over an encrypted connection. Nothing is sent to any other company. We do not sell, rent or share what the app handles.

Information about other people. Staff use the app to record details of donors and of the people the Foundation helps. That information belongs to the Foundation's records rather than to the person using the app, and it is governed by the rest of this notice — in particular sections 1 to 5. Names, telephone numbers and the school or hospital involved in an individual case are held inside the app only and are never sent to the public website.

Removing your information. Signing out deletes the token from your device. Uninstalling the app removes everything the app kept locally. Records held on our server, including the audit trail, are kept for the periods set out in section 3 because we are required to keep them; to ask about those, write to the Grievance Officer named in section 6.

If we publish an application for donors, we will update this notice before it is released and say plainly what it collects.

11. Your duties

Section 15 of the Act asks that you give us authentic information, that you do not impersonate anyone else when donating or applying, and that you do not raise false or frivolous complaints. Please give your own PAN and your own details.

12. Changes to this notice

If we change how we use personal data we will update this page and change the version and date at the top. Where the change is significant and the law requires it, we will ask for your consent again.

13. Contact

For anything in this notice, write to or call +91 82205 99780.

This notice is available in English. A Tamil version is being prepared, as Section 5(3) of the Act allows notice to be given in any language listed in the Eighth Schedule to the Constitution.