PrepKar, by Compete India · version 2026-10-11 · last updated 11 October 2026
Privacy notice
This is the whole of what PrepKar keeps about you, written for students rather than lawyers. Everything below is a real table in our database — the same list the copy of your data we send you is built from and the same list account deletion erases.
1. Who we are
PrepKar is built and run by Swathi Ganti, Visakhapatnam, India. We are the data fiduciary for everything on this page. Write to support@prepkar.in for anything about your data; the grievance officer is named in section 8.
2. What we store, and why
One row per real thing. The right-hand column names the table, so you can find it in the copy of your data we send you.
| What | Why | Table |
|---|---|---|
| Your email address | To sign you in and to send you sign-in and account codes. It is the only identifier we require. | user |
| Your name and profile picture, if you give them | To greet you. If you sign in with Google, Google supplies both; you can leave them blank otherwise. | user, user_ext |
| Your student or admission ID, if your institute adds it | If you study with an institute, it may record your own student or admission ID with your account, so its staff can match you to their own records. Its staff and our own staff see it beside your name. If you joined PrepKar on your own, there is none. | user_ext |
| Your exam choice, target exam date and, if you enter it, year of birth | To pace your plan and count down to the exam. We never ask for a full date of birth. | user_ext |
| Papers you keep unseen | If you choose to keep some past papers unseen for a rehearsal, we store which papers and the release date you set, so practice skips their questions until then. | held_paper |
| Your answers | Which question, what you chose or typed, whether it was right, how long you took, and whether you knew it, eliminated or guessed. This is the raw material of every mastery estimate. | answer_event, attempt_answer |
| Your test attempts and reports | The set of questions, the clock, your score and the report we wrote for it. | attempt, daily_quiz_attempt |
| Your mastery estimates | A per-subject and per-topic estimate computed from your answers, and its weekly history for trends. | topic_mastery, topic_mastery_weekly |
| Your flashcard schedule | When each card is next due and how you rated it, so spaced repetition works. | card_state, card_review |
| Your bookmarks and notes | The questions you marked and anything you wrote against them. | bookmark, user_note |
| What you say to the app, as text | If you use Talk or answer out loud, the words your phone recognised are stored as text, along with what the app understood you to mean. We never receive, record or keep any audio. But your browser has to send the audio somewhere to turn it into text: on most Android phones Chrome streams it to Google's speech service, on servers outside India (section 4). Some newer phones can do it on the device instead, and we cannot promise which one yours will use. Only the resulting text reaches us. We read it to find the things we fail to understand, and we delete it after 90 days. | voice_utterance |
| Photographs of your handwritten Mains answers, and what we made of them | Only if you submit a Mains answer to be marked: the photograph of each page you took, the bands and the feedback the marker wrote, and, where there is one, a transcript of what the marker read on the page, with any line where you told us that transcript was wrong. A page is a picture of your handwriting and of everything on it, so if you wrote your name or a roll number at the top, that is in the picture too. To be marked, the photographs leave this server (section 4). They are deleted 30 days after the feedback is delivered, or 60 days after you submitted them if they were never marked (section 6), and you can delete them sooner from the copy itself; the marking, and a transcript where there is one, stay with your account. We do not use them to train anything of ours, and we never publish them as anyone's model answer. A copy of each photograph is also kept in a storage service we rent, in India (section 4), so that a failure of our own server cannot lose it; it is deleted on the same clock, and within the hour of your deleting it. | mains_submission, mains_page, mains_page_s3, mains_evaluation, mains_transcript_correction |
| Your daily activity and streak | Questions, cards, tests and minutes per day — the streak calendar on Today. | user_daily_activity |
| Usage counters | How much of a daily or monthly allowance you have used. For past-year questions there is also one row for each question you have been given that day, so that seeing it again the same day does not count twice. For a Mains answer there is also one row each time you send a copy to be marked, or appeal one: that it counted against your allowance for that month, and whether we gave it back to you — because the pages could not be read, because the page was blank, or because we never managed to mark it. | usage_counter, entitlement_override, mains_unit |
| Your chat with Saarathi | If your institute has turned Saarathi's chat on and you use it: each message you send (typed, or spoken and turned into text by your browser) and each reply, when it was sent, which AI model answered and what the reply cost us, so that the chat can pick up where you left it and your count of messages for the day is right. Clear chat starts a fresh conversation on your screen; it deletes nothing, and earlier messages stay until you delete your account. A message our server stops before it reaches the model, because it is plainly not about your studies, is kept too, marked as stopped, but it is not sent to the model; a message that does reach Saarathi is kept with its reply, even if Saarathi declines to answer it (section 5). | coach_message |
| Saarathi's written note for you | A short note on your preparation — a headline, a few lines of advice and a next step — that a model writes from a summary of your progress when our staff refresh the notes (section 5), with a short digest of it that the chat is given. Shown on Saarathi's page, and replaced at the next refresh. | ai_profile |
| Problem reports about a question | Where a report that a question or explanation is wrong is kept until it is resolved. Today only our own reviewers can raise one, so no row here is yours. A button that lets you report a question yourself is written but not yet released; when it is, your reports are kept here, are in the copy of your data we send you, and are deleted like everything else. | error_report |
| Product events | Which screens you opened and which actions you took — no free text, no addresses — kept 90 days, then deleted. Daily totals survive as counts only. | event |
| Your consent record | That you confirmed you are 18 or older and accepted the terms, which version, and when. | consent |
| Feedback you send us | What you write in the Feedback panel, what it is about, the page you sent it from and, if you attach one, your screenshot (kept in our storage in India for up to 65 days). If you tick Anonymous, the people who review it do not see your name, but we still record that it came from your account. Yours to delete, and included in the copy of your data we send you on request. | student_feedback |
| A question-writer confirmation, if you write questions | Only for staff who add or edit questions: that you confirmed the questions you add are your own work, which version of that statement you saw, and when. A student never has one. | author_undertaking |
| Sign-in sessions | For each signed-in device: a session token, the IP address and browser identifier it was created from, until you sign out or it expires after 30 days (for a staff account, 8 hours after it signed in). | session, account |
| A record that we emailed you | Every email we send — a sign-in code, a verification code, an account-deletion code — is logged: who it went to, when, what kind of message it was, its subject in a fixed form that never carries a sign-in code, and whether it was sent, refused or failed. If it failed or was refused we log a short reason code; if it was sent we log our email provider's own reference for it. We never store a sign-in code, a verification code or an account-deletion code, or the message that carried one. There is one exception: the result emails we send about an answer you emailed us (the receipt, the marked result, or why we could not mark it). We keep a copy of the text of those, so that we can see exactly what you were told if you ask us. That copy is stored on our own server in India, is read only by our own staff, and is erased after 90 days. A copy of each of those emails also goes to our company email account, which Google hosts, as our record of what we sent. The rest of this record is kept 90 days too. | mail_log |
| A record of the messages we owe you | When something happens that we tell you about — that a Mains answer of yours has been marked, that an exam your institute set is about to start, or that today's In the news questions are ready — we note which kind of message it is, whether it went by email or to your phone, what it is about, when it is due, and whether it was sent, held back (for example because you switched it off) or could not be sent. We never store the message itself, a mark or anything you wrote. The email names no institute; its link opens on the address you sign in at. Kept 90 days once it is settled. | notification |
| Your email and phone notification choices | If you use the stop link in one of those emails, or change your Email settings, including the Phone notifications part of that page, we keep which emails and phone notifications you chose, how (the link, your email app's own unsubscribe button, or the settings page) and when, so that we send exactly what you chose, and start again if you switch them back on. Kept while your account exists. | notification_pref |
| Your phone notification sign-ups | If you turn on phone notifications, we keep the address your phone or browser gave us for sending them (a long link to its maker's notification service, with two keys that lock each message so that only your device can read it), what kind of device it is (the Android app, a browser, or an iPhone Home Screen app), which of our web addresses and which sign-in you turned them on from, when you turned them on, when you last opened PrepKar on it, and whether our last notification reached it. We delete it when you turn notifications off on that phone, when you log out on it, when the notification service tells us the address no longer works or it expires, when 5 notifications in a row cannot be delivered to it, or when you have not opened PrepKar on it for 120 days. In the Android app, turning them on also asks Android for its permission to show notifications, and they arrive through the browser the app runs in, usually Chrome; you can take that permission back in your phone's settings. | push_subscription |
| A record that a sign-in was refused | When a request to sign in, sign out, set a password, accept the terms or give the question-writer confirmation is refused, we note when it happened, which of our web addresses it was sent to, the kind of device and browser (for example "iPhone, Safari" — not its full identifier), and the short reason code, so we can see when sign-in is broken and fix it. If you were signed in, it is linked to your account. We never record your IP address, your email address, the password or code you typed, or anything else you entered. Kept 90 days. | auth_event |
| Plan and purchase records, if any | Your plan, any order and any waitlist entry. There is nothing to buy today (section 6). | subscription, payment_order, waitlist |
Answers sent by email
When you email your answers to mains@prepkar.in, we keep your email address, the pages you attached and the text of your email, and, if you have no account, we make one for that address. Until you sign in, we keep your pages unread: no one looks at them, and nothing marks them. If nobody signs in within 14 days, we delete them, and any account we made for that address. If we cannot process an email straight away, we keep it only so that we can process it once the problem is fixed, and for no more than 30 days. We check that each email really came from the address it names, and we keep a record of that check, without the email's contents, for 30 days. For an email we could not process, we keep a short record of it, with your address partly hidden and what went wrong, for up to 67 days.
Once you sign in, which is when you agree to the marking notice printed in our reply, or as soon as they arrive if you send them from the address of an account that has already signed in (sending them is then the request, as our Terms of Use say), the pages are marked exactly like pages sent from the site: the photographs are deleted 30 days after the marking is delivered, and the marking stays with your account until you delete it or your account.
Cookies and browser storage. One cookie keeps you signed in. Your browser also remembers a couple of preferences for itself (whether the navigation panel is collapsed, your theme); those never leave your device. There are no advertising or tracking cookies.
Web server logs. The server that answers every request writes one line per request: your IP address, the time, the method and path, the response status and size, how long it took, and the browser identifier your browser sends. Cookies and sign-in headers are stripped before the line is written, and no sign-in code, password or mail body ever reaches a log. Those lines are kept 14 days and then deleted. They are how we find errors and abuse. They are not in the copy of your data we send you, because they record requests to the server rather than anything about your account.
3. What we never do
- No advertising, anywhere in the product.
- No sale of personal data, and no sharing with data brokers.
- No third-party analytics kit. The counters we keep are our own rows in our own database, listed above.
- No profiling for anything other than your own preparation: the mastery estimates exist to choose your next question and to show you where you need to work. If an institute set up your account, its staff also see your levels and weak topics (section 4).
4. Who else sees anything
Seven parties at most, each for one reason — the fourth only if you choose to speak to the app or Saarathi, the fifth when you submit a handwritten Mains answer to be marked, write to Saarathi's chat, or our staff refresh Saarathi's written notes, the sixth only if you submit a handwritten Mains answer to be marked, and the seventh only if you turn on phone notifications. The fifth is an AI provider; section 5 says exactly what it is given and what it is not. The sixth only holds a copy of the photographs. After the list come two groups of people: our own staff and, if an institute set up your account, that institute's staff.
- Google — only if you choose Continue with Google, and only your email, name and profile picture, to prove the address is yours. Google's own privacy policy applies to that step. Separately, Google hosts our company mailbox, which keeps a copy of each Mains result email we send you (section 2).
- Our email provider — your address and the message, to deliver sign-in, verification and account-deletion codes, and the weekly Mentor Coach summary we send to your institute's staff.
- Google Fonts — every page asks your browser to fetch three typefaces: the stylesheet from fonts.googleapis.com and the font files themselves from fonts.gstatic.com. Both requests disclose your IP address to Google, as loading any web font does. Nothing about your account travels with either.
- Google's speech service — only if you use Talk, speak to Saarathi or answer a question out loud. To turn speech into text, your browser sends the audio it captured to Google, on servers outside India. We never receive that audio and never store it; what reaches us is the text, which section 2 describes. Newer Android phones can do the same work on the device without sending anything, but we cannot promise yours will.
- Anthropic — its model, Claude, does three jobs for us, on servers outside India, and Anthropic's own privacy policy applies to each. Marking a Mains answer, only if you submit one: the photographs of your pages are sent to Claude, which reads the handwriting and writes the feedback. Nothing from your account travels with them — not your name, your email address or your account id — but the page is a picture of everything you wrote on it. The queue is worked in batches from a computer of ours in India, which holds a copy of the pages only for as long as that run takes and deletes it afterwards. Saarathi's chat, only if your institute has turned it on and you write to it: each message goes from our server to Claude with the recent messages of that conversation and a summary of your progress, but not your name, email address or account id. Saarathi's written note, when our staff refresh the notes: a summary of your progress goes from our server to a computer of ours in India, which sends it to Claude, with your account id (a random code) so that the note comes back to the right account, but not your name or email address. Section 5 lists what each summary holds.
- Amazon Web Services — only if you submit a Mains answer to be marked. A copy of the photographs of your pages is stored in its Mumbai data centre, in India, under a key that carries no name or address. Amazon does not read them; it stores them. If you email your answers to us, the email itself also arrives through Amazon, which checks it for spam and viruses, and waits in the same Mumbai data centre until we have processed it (section 2).
- The notification service of your phone's or browser's maker — only if you turn on phone notifications: Google for Android phones and Chrome, Apple for iPhones and Safari, Mozilla for Firefox, Microsoft for Edge on Windows. It carries each phone notification to your device. The message is locked so that only your device can read it: the service sees that a message is going to that address, and when, but not what it says.
Our own staff. We keep a record of how the app is used, including what you write to Saarathi. Our own staff may read it to improve the app and to look into problems. An administrator (today, one account — the founder's) can open the photographs of your pages and the marking, to check the marker's work and to answer a complaint. A subject-matter expert can read the marking, and the transcript where there is one, but not the photographs, and can delete or change nothing. Every such access is by a named staff account and every change is logged. If an institute set up your account, our own staff who have been given access can also open the same progress pages that your institute's staff see. Our staff read Saarathi chats on a screen that only our own team can open, and each time they open a conversation, this is recorded. Your institute's staff never see your chats with Saarathi.
Your institute's staff. Only if an institute set up your PrepKar account for you. Staff at your institute who have been given access can see how you are doing, so that they can help you: whether you have signed in, when you were last on PrepKar and when you last studied, how many questions you have answered and how many were right, the days you studied, how many flashcards you have in use, your tests and their scores, your level in each subject, and the topics where you are weakest, with a word on what seems to be going wrong there. If you send Mains answers for marking, they can also see those answer copies, the text we read from them and, once marked, their marks and our feedback. They do not see what you write to Saarathi, what it writes back or its written note. They see their own institute's students and nobody else's. Once a week those staff, and your institute's own email address, are also emailed a Mentor Coach summary of the same figures — your practice, your tests and, if you send them, your Mains marks on PrepKar that week — never what you write to Saarathi or what it writes back. If you joined PrepKar on your own, no institute sees any of this.
Our database lives on a server we rent in India. Apart from the cases above — speaking to the app, submitting a Mains answer to be marked (including the copy of our result email kept in our company mailbox, which Google hosts; section 2), Saarathi's chat and its written note, and turning on phone notifications — we do not transfer your data anywhere else.
5. Saarathi, the AI coach
Every figure Saarathi shows you is worked out on our own server, by our own code, from your own answers. The mastery percentages, the areas where marks are leaking, the memory forecast, the streak and the pace are arithmetic over the rows in section 2. No model is involved in any of that, and nothing about you is sent to anyone to produce it. They are still only estimates from the answers you have given so far, so they can be wrong about you — treat them as a study partner's opinion, not a verdict.
A model does three things on this site. The first is to mark a handwritten Mains answer, and only when you submit one. Section 4 names the provider. It is given the photographs of your pages and the question you answered, and nothing else — no digest of your practice record, and nothing from your account — though the page itself shows whatever you wrote on it. The marking comes back as bands, from which we derive the mark or the range shown on your copy, and feedback in which every note points to the page and line it is about, so you can check each one against what you wrote. If a note rests on something the model misread, Submit for second review on your copy sends the pages back to be marked again, as long as the photographs have not been deleted. You are asked for a separate consent the first time, and the photographs are deleted on the clock in section 6.
The second is Saarathi's chat, where you can ask about your preparation and get a written reply. It is there only for students of an institute that has turned it on, and you choose whether to use it. With each message, the same provider's model is given what you typed, the last few messages of that conversation, and a summary of your progress: your target exam; for each subject, how many questions you have attempted, got right and got wrong, and topics you have not tried yet; the topics of your last few wrong answers; your active days in the last 30, your streak and the day you last studied; how many Mains answers you have sent and the latest band; and Saarathi's written note, where there is one. For a question about recent events it is also given our own In the news questions of the last few days, with the answer only for those you have already answered. It is not given your name, email address or account id, but it does receive whatever you type, exactly as you typed it, so leave out anything you would not want to share. If your institute allows it, the model may also look up a recent fact on a small set of Indian government websites, using words from your question. A message our server stops before it reaches the model, because it is plainly not about your studies, goes no further than our server: it is kept there, marked as stopped, and is not sent to the model; a message that does reach the model is kept with its reply, even if the model declines to answer it. For the chat we will not use a provider that trains its models on what we send.
The third is Saarathi's written note, the short note on your preparation on Saarathi's page. It is not written on a schedule or when you open the app: our staff refresh the notes from time to time, for students whose practice has moved on since their last note. For that, a summary of your progress — your target exam and its date, how many questions you have answered, your active days in the last 30, your streak, your questions and correct answers in the last seven days, your weakest and strongest topics, how many flashcards are due, how many tests you have taken, and the day you last studied — goes from our server to a computer of ours in India, which passes it to the model. Your account id, a random code, goes with it so that the note comes back to the right account; your name and email address do not. That computer keeps a copy of each note it has written, with the account id; deleting your account removes the note from our server but not that copy.
Your chat and your written note are in the copy of your data we send you, and are deleted from our server when you delete your account. If something Saarathi says is wrong, unhelpful or inappropriate, tell us at support@prepkar.in and we will look at it and at the numbers behind it.
6. How long we keep it
Until you delete your account, with eight exceptions:
- Product events, the record that we emailed you, the record of the messages we owe you (once each is sent or settled) and the record of refused sign-ins (section 2) are deleted after 90 days by a nightly job, whether or not you are still with us.
- Photographs of your Mains answer pages (section 2) are deleted by a nightly job 30 days after the feedback on them is delivered — or 60 days after you submitted them, if they were never marked — whether or not you are still with us. The marking, and a transcript where there is one, are not on that clock: they stay until you delete your account. You can delete the photographs sooner from the copy itself. The copy in the storage service goes on the same clock, and within the hour when you delete the photographs yourself.
- Purchase records, if any, are kept for tax law but detached from you: after deletion the record no longer names an account. There is nothing to buy today, so for most students this row is empty.
- Your consent record is kept after your account is erased, marked withdrawn on the day it was erased; if you write questions, your question-writer confirmation is kept too. They keep your email and, if you gave one, your name, as proof of what you agreed to, which version and when, but are no longer linked to an account.
- Staff audit entries — a record that an administrator edited a question or resolved a report — are about the administrator's action, not about you, and are kept.
- The number of free Mains markings your email address has used is kept after you delete your account, so deleting it and signing up again with the same address does not reset them.
- Web server logs (section 2) are kept 14 days and then deleted, whether or not you are still with us.
- A phone notification sign-up (section 2) is deleted when you turn notifications off on that phone, when you log out on it, when the notification service tells us the address no longer works or it expires, when 5 notifications in a row cannot be delivered to it, or when you have not opened PrepKar on it for 120 days — whichever comes first.
Why a few records outlive a deleted account. Purchase records, because tax law requires them. Your consent record and any question-writer confirmation, because they are our proof of what was agreed, which we may be asked to show. The count of free Mains markings, so that the free allowance cannot be claimed again by deleting an account and making a new one. Staff audit entries, because they record what our staff did.
Audio is never retained, by us or for us. We hold no recording of your voice at any point, and there is nothing of the kind to send you or delete. What we hold is the text (section 2), on the same 90-day clock as product events.
7. Deleting everything
Institute students — Your account is managed by your institute. To close it, please ask your institute — they can switch your account off. If you want your personal data erased, write to support@prepkar.in.
Direct students — Close my account. When you close your account, you are signed out on every device and your account is switched off straight away. If you change your mind within 30 days, write to support@prepkar.in and we will switch it back on. After 30 days your personal details and everything listed below are erased for good. Every table in section 2 that names you is erased — except the few records section 6 says are kept: purchase records detached from you, your consent record and any question-writer confirmation, with your email and, if you gave one, your name, and the number of free Mains markings your address has used. The photographs of any Mains pages are deleted from our disk and, within the hour, their copy in the storage service.
8. Your rights, and how to complain
- Access — write to support@prepkar.in from the address you sign in with, and we will send you a machine-readable copy of everything above within 30 days.
- Correction — your name, exam, exam date and year of birth are editable on your profile; for anything else, write to us.
- Erasure — section 7.
- Withdrawing consent — deleting your account withdraws it in full; the service cannot run without an account, so there is no narrower switch for the account itself. Marking a Mains answer asks for its own consent, the first time you submit one; you withdraw that by not submitting another, and you can delete the photographs from any copy you have already sent.
Under the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023, our grievance officer is Swathi Ganti, grievance@prepkar.in. We reply within 30 days. If you are not satisfied with the answer, you may escalate the grievance to the Data Protection Board of India.
9. Age
PrepKar is for users aged 18 and over — the sign-in page says so, and you confirm it when you create an account. We do not knowingly collect data from anyone younger; if you believe we have, tell us and we will delete it.
10. Changes
The version and date at the top change whenever this notice changes materially, and your consent record names the version you accepted. We will tell you in the app before a change that affects what we collect or who sees it.
See also the terms of use and how to reach us.