Privacy Policy

1Who we are

Pestren is operated by Ankita Sahu, a sole proprietor based in India (“Pestren”, “we”, “us”). We are the Data Fiduciary for the personal data described here under India’s Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 (“DPDP Act”), the controller for visitors in the EU and UK, and the equivalent under California law.

Contact for any privacy question, request or complaint — including our Grievance Officer under §13 of the DPDP Act: core@pestren.com. Pestren is an unincorporated sole proprietorship, so there is no registered office to publish. Every privacy request, grievance and legal notice reaches us at core@pestren.com, and a postal address is provided on request. When Pestren incorporates, the registered address is published here.

This policy covers pestren.com, interface.pestren.com, socials.pestren.com and our API. When Pestren incorporates, the successor entity assumes these obligations unchanged and we will update this section.

2The short version

We collect the minimum the product needs. We do not sell personal data, we do not run advertising or cross-site tracking, we set no analytics or advertising cookies, and we do not train any model on your data.

The land data in Pestren is land you nominate — boundaries you draw, import or select. We never ask for, and never collect, the location of your device.

3What we collect, and why

3.1If you join the waitlist or send feedback

• Your country (required) — to understand regional interest and to determine whether we may lawfully offer the service in your region.
• Your feedback and the sentiment you pick (required) — product research.
• Your email (optional) — stored only if you tick the newsletter box. If you do not tick it, no email is stored at all.
• A salted, irreversible hash of your IP address — for spam and abuse limiting. We do not store the IP itself.

3.2If you create an account

• Your email address, and first/last name if you choose to give them. Sign-in is handled by Clerk; if you use Google sign-in, Google confirms your identity to Clerk and we receive your email and name, nothing more.
• We never receive or store your password. Clerk holds and hashes credentials; they do not reach our servers.

3.3The land data you create

• Boundaries of parcels and fields you draw, import (.geojson, .kml, .gpx, .zip, .gpkg) or select from a public cadastre.
• Attributes you add — name, crop, colour, tags, and free-text notes.
• Management events you log — planting, fertiliser, irrigation, pest and disease observations, harvest and yield.
• Files you upload — photographs for pest diagnosis, documents in the interior module.
• A version history of every change, retained as an audit trail. See §7 for what this means when you ask for deletion.

3.4When you use the Assistant

Each question is answered by a third-party reasoning model, currently DeepSeek, whose servers are in the People’s Republic of China. Two things are sent, and only these two:

• The question you typed. This is your own text — if you type an address, a name or a private note into the question box, it is transmitted.
• The land report for the parcel you selected, assembled from public datasets (soil surveys, climate records, cadastral and land-cover data, hazard maps).

Your email address, account identifier, IP address and the contents of your account are not sent. We do not train models on your data, and we contractually prohibit our providers from doing so. Your questions are kept in your own browser’s storage, not on our servers, unless you publish a chat (§3.6).

3.5If you are an invited tester

We store your invite code, the IP address it was first redeemed from, and an append-only log of each action taken on it — the action type, the IP, a short excerpt of the action (up to 300 characters, which may include the question you asked) and the time. The IP binding exists so a single code cannot be forwarded to a group and used by thirty people; it is a quota control, not an identity check.

3.6If you publish a chat

3.7Technical data

• Server logs and rate-limit counters — IP address, timestamp, endpoint, status. Used to keep the service up and to stop abuse.
• Aggregate page views via Vercel Web Analytics — cookieless, with no cross-site identifier and no profile of you.

3.8What we never collect

Your device or precise location · your phone number · your postal address (unless you email it to us) · your payment card details (when billing launches, the payment provider handles these and we receive only the last four digits and the outcome) · any special-category data — health, financial, biometric, religion, caste or political opinion. If we do not need it, we do not ask for it.

4Our legal basis

• Consent — the waitlist, the newsletter, and any optional upload. You may withdraw it at any time, and withdrawing is as easy as giving it.
• Performance of a contract — running your account and delivering the reports you request.
• Legitimate uses / legitimate interests — security, abuse prevention, rate limiting, and keeping our own financial records.

For EU and UK visitors these map to Articles 6(1)(a), (b) and (f) GDPR respectively.

5Who we share data with

We do not sell personal data and we do not share it for advertising. We use the processors below, each bound to act only on our instructions.

We will also disclose data where the law requires it, and to a successor entity if Pestren is incorporated, merged or acquired — in which case this policy travels with the data.

6International transfers

We operate from India and our infrastructure is largely in the United States, so your data is transferred abroad. Where the transfer is out of the EU or UK we rely on the European Commission’s Standard Contractual Clauses. The DPDP Act permits transfers to any country the Central Government has not restricted; if India restricts a destination we use, we will move or stop that processing.

7How long we keep it

8Your rights

Under the DPDP Act you have the right to:

• Access a summary of the personal data we process about you and who we have shared it with.
• Correct, complete, update or erase your personal data.
• Grievance redressal — raise a complaint with us first; we will respond within 30 days. If unsatisfied you may escalate to the Data Protection Board of India.
• Nominate another person to exercise these rights if you die or become incapacitated.
• Withdraw consent at any time, without giving a reason.

We extend the same handling to everyone regardless of where they live. If you are in the EU or UK you additionally have rights to portability, restriction and objection, and may complain to your supervisory authority. If you are in California you may request disclosure and deletion and opt out of “sale” or “sharing” — we do neither, so there is nothing to opt out of. We will never charge you or degrade your service for exercising any of this.

Exercise any right at core@pestren.com.

9Security

TLS on every connection; passwords held and hashed by Clerk, never by us; land data scoped to its owner and checked on every read and write; rate limiting and per-account quotas; secrets in environment variables, never in the browser; IP addresses on the marketing site stored only as salted hashes.

No system is perfectly secure, and we do not claim otherwise. If a breach occurs that is likely to affect you, we will notify you and the Data Protection Board of India without undue delay.

10Cookies

Pestren sets only the cookies it needs to work — to keep you signed in and to check your invite. There are no advertising, analytics or tracking cookies anywhere in the product. Every cookie is itemised in the Cookie Policy.

11Children

Pestren is a professional tool and is not directed at anyone under 18. We do not knowingly collect data from children, and we do not carry out behavioural advertising or tracking of any user, which the DPDP Act prohibits for children.

12Changes

We will update this policy when the product changes, and revise the effective date above. For a change that materially reduces your protections — a new category of data, a new purpose, a new country — we will notify account holders by email before it takes effect.