Privacy Policy

DEBANGAN PAUL CHOWDHURY (trading as VectorTransformerLab), 268 SN Road, Sodepur, Natagarh, Parthapur, Kolkata, West Bengal 700113, decides how and why your personal information is used on Seed the Earth. This policy is written to meet the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 and the Information Technology Act, 2000 and its rules.

• Email address. To create your account, let you sign in and contact you about your account or a payment. It is private: no other user ever sees it.
• Password. We store only a one-way scrambled form of it (an Argon2id hash). We cannot read your password, and nobody at Seed the Earth will ever ask you for it.
• Username. Given to you at random when you sign up; it is not made from your email address. It is public.
• Profile details you choose to add (a short bio, a location, links). Optional. Shown to signed-in users.
• Your artwork, its title, any story and links you add to it, and where it is on the canvas. Public. This is the purpose of the service.
• Pieces you water. When you “water” a piece to say you like it, we keep a record of that so it counts once. Only the total is shown; nobody, including the piece’s owner, is shown who watered it.
• Views and link clicks. We count how many times a piece is opened and how many times its links are followed, and show those two numbers to the person who planted it. We do not record who looked or who clicked.
• Payment records. The amount, the date, the status, Razorpay’s reference for the order and payment, and the time you agreed to these terms. We do not receive or store your card number, UPI ID, bank details or the phone number you give Razorpay.
• A record of actions on your account (signing in, holding and planting pixels, changing your profile or username, reports and appeals you make). To keep the service secure, resolve disputes and investigate abuse.
• Technical information. Your IP address is used for a short time to limit abuse (for example repeated sign-in attempts), is held in memory for up to half an hour so that one visit to a piece is counted once, and may appear in server logs kept by our hosting provider.

If you upload an image, it is converted to pixels and then discarded; we do not keep the original or the information stored inside it. We do not collect your contacts, your precise location or any government identity number.

• Everyone: your username, your pixel face (drawn from your username), your artwork and titles, the story and links you add to a piece, where your pixels are, your place on the leaderboard, and your founder number if you have one. Anyone can find your pieces and your username through search.
• Signed-in users: also your bio, location and links if you added them, the date you joined, and how many pixels and pieces you have.
• Moderators: also the username of a person who reported a piece, and the notes on reports and appeals. Moderators do not see email addresses.
• Nobody else: your email address, your payment history and your account activity are visible only to you and to the small number of our staff who need them to run the service.

We use your information with your consent, given when you create an account and when you pay, and for the purposes you have asked for: running your account, displaying your artwork and taking your payment. We also use it where the law permits or requires, for example to keep tax and transaction records, to prevent fraud and abuse, and to respond to lawful requests.

• Razorpay, to take your payment. Razorpay collects your payment details directly from you and handles them under its own privacy policy.
• Hosting and infrastructure providers that run our servers and database on our behalf and under our instructions, including Vercel, which serves the site and counts page views for us.
• Authorities, when we are legally required to, or to protect someone’s safety or our legal rights.

We do not sell your personal information, and we do not share it with advertisers.

We use one cookie, and it is essential: it keeps you signed in. Page scripts cannot read it. We also keep a few items in your browser’s own storage:

• a note that this browser has signed in before, so we do not check on every page;
• the drawing you are working on in the studio;
• your choice of whether your pixels are outlined on the canvas;
• your choice of whether a sound plays when you plant.

We count page views with Vercel Web Analytics, which sets no cookie and does not identify you: it records which page was opened, the country, and the kind of device and browser. We do not use advertising or analytics cookies and we do not track you across other sites. When you pay, Razorpay’s window may set its own cookies under its policy.

• Account and profile information: for as long as your account exists.
• When you ask us to delete your account: your profile and artwork are removed and your email address is erased within 30 days.
• Payment and transaction records: for as long as tax and accounting laws require (currently up to eight years), even after an account is deleted.
• Security and audit records: for as long as needed to investigate abuse and resolve disputes, with identifying details removed where possible.

Connections to the service are encrypted. Passwords are stored only as hashes. Sign-in sessions are stored in scrambled form and expire. Access to personal information is limited to staff who need it, and important actions are recorded. No system is perfectly secure; if a breach affects your personal information we will tell you and the Data Protection Board of India as the law requires.

You can:

• see the information we hold about you (most of it is in your profile, including your payments and account activity);
• correct it (your profile and username can be changed there; write to us for your email address);
• ask us to delete your account and erase your personal information;
• withdraw your consent, which means closing your account, since we cannot run it without the information above;
• name another person to exercise these rights for you if you die or become unable to;
• complain to us, and if you are not satisfied, to the Data Protection Board of India.

To use any of these rights, write to support@seedtheearth.in from the email address on your account. We reply within the time the law requires and in any case within 30 days.

Seed the Earth is not for anyone under 18. We do not knowingly collect information from children. If you believe a child has created an account, tell us and we will remove it.

Your information may be processed on servers located outside your state or outside India by the providers named above, as the law permits. We may update this policy; the date at the top shows when it last changed, and we will give notice on the site of any significant change.