Privacy policy

The app keeps these on your phone or tablet, so that it opens the way you left it:

• your settings: appearance, text size and Sanskrit script;
• where you were reading in each collection, the page you reached in each book, and your choices in the readers;
• your last eight searches, which you can remove one by one, or all at once, on the search screen;
• copies of the page images it has shown, so that they open faster.

The app does not send these to the Trust or to anyone else. You can remove recent searches on the search screen; the rest stays on your device until you delete the app, although the system may clear the image copies sooner to free space. Your device's own backups may include them.

To show the library, the app downloads it over encrypted (HTTPS) connections from:

• vmlt.in, the Trust's server: the catalogue, the text of the books, the NCC, the corpus, the blog posts and search results. When you search, the words you type are sent to vmlt.in so that it can find the results.
• Google Firebase: the public, read-only database of theveda.org.in, the Trust's joint site with the Sri Aurobindo Society, which holds the text, translations and interpretations of the Ṛgveda.
• Amazon Web Services (Amazon S3): the page scans of the books and of the NCC, and the recitations of the Ṛgveda.
• The sites that host the pictures in the Trust's blog posts, when you open a post that has them.

Like every request on the internet, these carry your device's IP address and a short description of the app and of the system it runs on. The app sends no name, account, advertising identifier or other identifier of you or your device.

Apple and Google tell app publishers how many people download the app, and pass on crash reports and usage statistics from people who have agreed to share them with developers. None of these include names or contact details.

Links to other websites, such as the sources of quotations on incarnateword.in and the Trust's sister sites, open in the in-app browser: Safari's in-app view on iPhone and iPad, a Custom Tab of your browser on Android. The page is loaded by that browser, not by the app; the app does not see or record what you do there, and that site's own privacy policy applies.

Links to the App Store, Google Play and WhatsApp open in those apps. Write on WhatsApp opens a chat with the Trust with a greeting ready to send. Nothing is sent until you send it; then the Trust receives your message and your WhatsApp number, as with any WhatsApp message, and uses them to reply.

Reading and searching on vmlt.in need no account. Your reading settings and the places you were reading are kept in your browser's storage, not on the server. Searches are sent to the server to find the results, as in the apps. Apart from the cookies used for signing in and by Google Analytics (both below), the site sets no cookies.

Signing in is optional, and possible only on the website. You sign in with Google, which shares your name, email address and profile picture with vmlt.in. The site keeps your name and email address, a copy of your profile picture (on Amazon S3, at an unlisted web address that includes your name; if the copy fails, the link to your picture at Google), your role and your email choices, and sets a cookie that keeps you signed in until you sign out or it expires.

New accounts are set to receive an email when a new post is published; you can turn this off on your account page. These emails are sent through Amazon Simple Email Service. Corrections you make to the text of a book page are kept with your name, and the page shows anyone who opens it the name of whoever corrected it last, with the date and time. The names of the Trust's writers are shown with their posts.

The website can use Google Analytics to count visits and see which pages are read. On its main pages it runs only when the Trust switches it on; a few older pages (the proofreading view of book pages and the blog-writing pages) still carry an older Google Analytics tag. Where it runs, it sets cookies in your browser and sends Google details of the visit, such as the pages viewed, your browser and device and your approximate location, under Google's privacy policy. You can block it in your browser's settings or with Google's opt-out add-on. The apps do not use Google Analytics.

Those older pages also load fonts, styles and scripts from other companies' servers, which receive the usual details of each request.