Privacy Policy
What Furbit collects, why, who else touches it, and how long it stays. Written to be read, not to be survived.
Draft dated
The short version
- Furbit sells one thing: a tag, once, for ₹999. There is no subscription, and we do not sell, rent or trade your data or your pet’s data to anyone.
- Your phone number is hidden on your pet’s public profile by default. A finder can call or message you without ever seeing it.
- A stranger who scans your tag is recorded as a scan with a city-level location. Their precise location is only ever captured if they choose to share it while your pet is marked lost, and it is erased within 30 days of the recovery closing.
- Health records are stored as private files and are served only through short-lived links. People you invite to your Care Circle see only what their role allows.
- Furbit v1 is available in India only.
Who we are
Furbit is a QR-coded identity tag for pets and the web service behind it. When this policy says “we”, it means the company that operates Furbit.
Founder / counsel to confirm: the registered legal entity name, its registered address, the CIN or equivalent registration, and the email address for privacy questions. Under the DPDP Act, 2023 a Data Fiduciary must publish contactable details for grievances; this policy cannot be published without them.
What we collect
We collect what the product needs to work, and we have tried hard not to collect anything else.
- Your account
- Your mobile number, which is how you sign in — Furbit uses a one-time code sent to your phone, not a password. Plus the name and contact details you enter on your profile.
- Your pet
- Whatever you choose to put on the profile: name, breed, age, photo, distinguishing details, and the emergency contacts you add.
- Health Vault
- Vaccination records, prescriptions, vet notes and any files you upload. These are stored as private objects and are never listed publicly.
- Scans
- Each time someone scans your tag we record the time, and a city- or area-level location. This is your history of who found your pet and where.
- Precise location
- Only while your pet is marked lost, and only if the finder taps to share it. See “Finders” below.
- Orders
- What you bought, the delivery address, and the payment reference returned by our payment processor. Card and UPI details are entered with the payment processor and never reach Furbit.
- Notifications
- A record of the alerts we sent you — a scan, an order update, a security notice — and whether they were delivered.
We do not run advertising, we do not build advertising profiles, and Furbit does not require an app to be installed on anyone’s phone.
If you scanned someone’s tag
You do not need an account, and we do not ask you to make one. Here is exactly what happens when you scan.
- The scan is recorded — the time, and a city- or area-level location derived from your connection. The owner sees this so they know their pet has been seen.
- If the pet is marked lost, you may be offered the option to share your precise location so the owner can come to you. That is a choice you make by tapping; it never happens in the background, and it is never offered when the pet is not lost.
- Precise location is erased within 30 days of the recovery being closed. We do not keep it beyond that, and archiving the owner’s account erases it immediately.
- Because you are anonymous to us, there is no account to look you up by — the automatic 30-day erasure above is how your data goes away. That is deliberate.
- The city-level part of a scan is not personally identifying and is kept as part of the owner’s history.
Why we are allowed to process it
Furbit operates in India and treats the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 as the governing regime. Our processing rests on three principles we have designed the product around, rather than on blanket consent buried in a checkbox:
- Purpose limitation — precise location is captured only while a pet is lost, because that is the only situation in which it has a purpose.
- Data minimisation — location is coarse by default; precise location requires a deliberate action by the finder.
- Storage limitation — every category of data has a defined retention window, published below.
Counsel to confirm: the correct statement of legal basis and consent-notice wording under the DPDP Act, 2023, and whether a separate consent artefact is required at the point a finder shares precise location.
Care Circle
You can invite people — family, a vet, a walker, a sitter — to part of your pet’s profile. Access is granted by role, and the limits are enforced by the database, not merely hidden in the interface.
- An invitation expires seven days after it is sent. Resending issues a fresh seven days; it does not extend the old one.
- Revoking someone’s access takes effect on their next request to the service. It is not guaranteed to end a session that is already open instantly, so treat revocation as taking a few minutes rather than being instantaneous.
How long we keep it
These windows are the ones Furbit engineering actually implements, not aspirations:
- Precise location
- 30 days after the recovery it belongs to is closed. If no recovery is open, it does not exist at all.
- City-level scan location
- 24 months from the scan.
- Scan and contact events
- For the life of the account. Once location has been stripped, the row says only that a scan happened.
- Recovery sessions
- For the life of the account — it is your history.
- Notifications
- 12 months.
- Care activity
- For the life of the account.
How it is protected
- Data is encrypted in transit and at rest.
- Access rules are enforced in the database itself, per row, so a bug in a screen cannot hand someone another person’s pet.
- Uploaded files are private objects. They are never public URLs; every view is a signed link that expires.
- Your Health Vault is additionally behind a six-digit PIN you set. Three wrong attempts lock it for fifteen minutes.
- Your phone number is hidden on the public profile by default. Call and WhatsApp actions connect a finder to you without revealing the number, unless you choose to make it visible.
No system is perfect, and we would rather say that plainly than imply otherwise.
Your choices
- Edit or correct anything on your profile or your pet’s profile at any time. Changes appear on the next scan.
- Choose whether your phone number is visible on the public profile. It is hidden until you say otherwise.
- Remove a health record or a pet. Removal hides it from you and from everyone you have shared with; the underlying row is retired rather than shredded, so that an accident is recoverable and so the history of a recovery stays intact.
- Ask us to archive your account. An archived account is closed, and archiving immediately erases any precise location held for your pets.
Being straight with you about a limit: Furbit v1 does not offer full, irreversible erasure of an account and everything in it. Accounts are archived, not deleted. This is a known open decision, recorded as such in our product requirements, and it needs a legal answer before launch — not an engineering one.
Founder / counsel to decide: whether the DPDP Act, 2023 right to erasure requires a full account-deletion path at launch, and if so, what it must do. Until that is answered this section cannot claim more than archival.
Children
Furbit is intended for adults buying a tag for their pet, and accounts are not intended for children.
Counsel to confirm: the required wording on children’s data under the DPDP Act, 2023, including the verifiable-consent obligation and the minimum age we should state.
Changes to this policy
If we change this policy we will update the date at the top of this page. If a change materially affects what we do with your data, we will tell you directly through the notification channel you already use with us.
Contact
Founder to supply: the email address and postal address for privacy questions, and the name and contact details of the Grievance Officer required under the DPDP Act, 2023, together with the response time we commit to.