Privacy Policy
Last updated: 2 November 2026
This page is the same Privacy Policy shown inside the Tribe app, published here so it can be read without an account. It describes what the app actually does.
Who we are
Tribe is a social app for college students in India. It helps you find people you are compatible with, chat with them, join groups, share short posts, and find internships, events and other opportunities.
Tribe is run by an individual developer, not a registered company. For anything in this policy — questions, requests, complaints — contact jainaagam1237890@gmail.com. That address is also the grievance contact for this policy (see "Complaints and grievances" below).
What we collect
Account: your email address and a hashed password, held by our authentication provider so you can sign in. If you sign in with Google, we receive your email address and name from Google. If you add a passkey, the device stores the private key and we store only the public half. Your email is never shown to other users and is not stored in your profile.
Profile: name, username, photo, age, gender, city, college, department, year of study, qualification, bio, interests, skills, languages, what you are looking for, personality, hobbies, favourite music and films, ambition, achievements, certificates, and any Instagram, GitHub or LinkedIn handles you add. All of this is optional except a username, and all of it is visible to other signed-in users.
Professional profile: headline, career goals, preferred roles, industries and locations, availability, employment status, projects, work experience and links. Visible to other signed-in users. If you upload a resume, it is read entirely in your browser — nothing is sent to a third party to parse it — and kept on your device unless you choose to back it up to Tribe or attach it to an application.
Compatibility ("DNA") answers: your responses to the DNA questions. Some are sensitive — sleep difficulties, anxiety and stress, your biggest fears, what you need emotionally, attachment style, love language, relationship status, smoking, alcohol, and political views. Every one is optional. Each answer has a visibility you control — "Only me", "Close friends" or "Public" — and every answer starts as "Only me": the answer itself is shown to nobody else until you change that, though every answer you give is used in calculating your match percentages.
Activity: posts and one photo per post, direct and group messages, message reactions, read receipts, daily check-ins, streaks, vibes, group membership, close-friends lists, the people you follow and the people you are connected with (including connection requests you send, accept or decline), comments on posts, bookmarks, applications, endorsements you give or receive, and reports or blocks you submit.
Asks: the topics you list under "I can help with", and every ask you post — the kind of help, the topic, what you wrote, who can see it, the people you asked, when it ends, how you said it went, and, if you choose to say so, who helped. If someone asks you directly, we record that you were asked and whether you chose "Not for me".
College verification: you can verify your campus with a code from your college or by proving you hold a college email address. For the email route, the domain of the email on your account is compared to a registry once, and only the college and the date are stored — never the address.
Usage: Tribe records which profiles and listings were shown to you and which you opened, with the position on screen, the match score shown, and a random session identifier, so that ranking can be checked for fairness and so we can see how many people use each part of the app. This is first-party measurement stored in our own database. There is no third-party analytics or advertising SDK, and no advertising identifier.
Technical: a login token and small preferences (theme, telemetry opt-out, and flags for things you have already seen) stored in your browser. Tribe sets no cookies of its own and uses none for tracking. If you enable notifications, we store a push subscription for your device. Our hosting providers keep standard server logs, including IP addresses, for a short time.
Consent record: the version of these documents you agreed to, the date, and that you confirmed being 18 or older, stored with your account by our authentication provider. It is how we know which version you accepted.
Why we collect it
Profile and DNA answers exist to calculate your match percentage and show you people you are likely to get along with. That is the core of the app.
Messages, posts, groups, check-ins and opportunities exist to provide those features. Applications, resumes and evidence exist so companies can consider you when you choose to apply.
Your email exists to sign you in, to confirm your account, and to send password resets and login links.
Usage records exist to check that ranking treats people fairly and to count how many people use each feature. They are never used for advertising and never sold.
Asks exist so you can get help from students who said they can give it, and so they can find people who need it.
Reports and blocks exist to keep people safe.
We do not sell your data and we do not share it with advertisers.
Who can see what
Other signed-in users can see your profile, professional profile, posts, rank, endorsements, and any DNA-derived match percentage between the two of you. They cannot see your DNA answers unless you have set a specific answer to "Public" or (for people on your close-friends list) "Close friends", your messages with other people, your check-ins, your bookmarks, your applications, your reports, or your usage records.
Direct messages are visible to you and the person you sent them to. Group messages are visible to members of that group.
When you follow someone, they are told and can see that you follow them; nobody else can see who you follow or who follows you. A connection request is seen by you and the person you asked; if they connect, you both see it, and if they decline, you are not told. No one is shown a count of how many people follow anyone or are connected with them. Blocking someone ends any follow or connection between you.
A comment on a post is visible to the people who can see that post, never to someone either of you has blocked, and it is deleted with the post. The author of the post is told that someone commented, without the comment’s text.
The topics you list under "I can help with" are visible to other signed-in users on your profile, and Tribe shows you to people asking about those topics. An ask is visible to you and to the people you name in it; if you choose "My campus too", it is also visible to signed-in users whose profile lists the same college. Only you can see who else you asked. If you close an ask as solved and say who helped, only that person sees it — it is never shown to anyone else or as a count. Tribe sends no message for you: you contact the people you ask yourself, in an ordinary direct message.
Anyone with your profile link (/?u=your-username) can see a public card — your name, username, bio, interests, languages, qualification, ambition, achievements, certificates, streak and cosmetic style — without signing in. A Wavelength card is public only if you publish it, and shows only the answers you chose.
If you apply to an opportunity, the company's members can see your application, the fields listed on the apply screen, and the resume you attached, until you withdraw. If you share your identity with a link, the holder of that link can see what the share screen lists until you revoke it or it expires.
Blocking someone hides you from each other inside the app — the People grid, posts, notifications, messages and team invitations — and hides any DNA answers you had shared with them. Your public profile card stays readable by anyone who has its link, and a person using tools outside the app could still load your profile: blocking is a safety control, not an invisibility switch.
Photos you upload — your profile photo, project images and post photos — are served from public web addresses that are not guessable but are not protected by a login. Anyone who has the exact address can load the image.
A moderator (an administrator of Tribe) can see reports, the reported post or profile, and moderation records, in order to act on them. Moderators cannot read your private messages or your DNA answers through the moderation tools.
Who else receives it
Data is stored with Supabase, which hosts our database, authentication and file storage. The app is hosted on Vercel, which also runs the small server functions that deliver push notifications and delete accounts. Both are third-party processors who act on our instructions and may store data on servers outside India.
Account emails — confirmation, login links, password resets — are sent by our authentication provider through Resend, an email delivery service, which receives your email address and the content of those emails in order to deliver them.
Every night an automated job run by GitHub Actions copies the database so it can be restored after an accident. The copy is encrypted inside that job before it is stored, GitHub keeps only the encrypted file, and the key that opens it is held offline by us and is never given to GitHub. Uploaded files such as photos and resumes are not part of this copy.
The app’s fonts are served from Tribe’s own address, so no font provider sees you load the page. If you sign in with Google, Google knows you use Tribe.
Push notifications, if you enable them, are delivered through your browser vendor's push service (Google, Apple or Mozilla). What a notification says — for a message, the sender's name and the first 140 characters — is encrypted to your device before it leaves our server, so the push service relays it without being able to read it.
We may disclose information when the law requires it: to a court, or to a government agency lawfully authorised to ask for it under Indian law, including under the Information Technology Act, 2000 and the rules made under it. We disclose only what the order or request covers, and we keep a record of what was disclosed.
Access to the database is restricted by row-level security rules, so users can only read and write the records they are entitled to, and every administrative action is checked in the database rather than in the app.
How long we keep it
We keep your data for as long as your account exists. Campus Pulse posts, the photo attached to a post, and the comments on it are deleted from our servers 24 hours after the post is shared (usually within a few minutes of the 24th hour); you can delete a post or your own comment sooner yourself. Follows and connections stay until either of you ends them, blocks the other, or deletes their account. If you saved a photo to your own device, that copy is yours and is not affected. Messages stay for as long as both accounts in the conversation exist — when either person deletes their account, the conversation is deleted for both.
Usage records are kept for up to 180 days.
An ask stays open for 7 days unless you close it sooner. It, and the list of people you asked, is deleted 180 days after it was closed or ended. The topics you list under "I can help with" stay until you remove them or delete your account.
Reports about an account are kept for one year after they are resolved, including after that account is deleted, so we can recognise repeat abuse. After deletion the report no longer links to any person we can identify.
Records of administrative actions (removing a post, suspending an account, resolving a report) are kept for two years.
Encrypted database backups are kept for 30 days and then deleted automatically.
Our providers keep server logs for their own short retention periods.
Deleting your account
You can delete your account at any time from Profile → Settings → Delete account. It removes your profile, DNA answers, messages, posts, photos, resume, check-ins and everything else tied to your account — files first, then records, then the login itself — in one step, and it cannot be undone.
Messages you sent are deleted from the other person's conversation too. Groups you created are deleted for their members. Notifications other people received about your activity keep the wording they had but no longer link to you. Your asks are deleted with your account; if someone said you helped on their ask, their ask stays but no longer names you.
Deletion takes effect in the live database at once. A copy may remain inside the encrypted nightly backups for up to 30 days, until those backups expire; we use a backup only to restore the service after an accident, never to bring back an account that was deleted.
If you would rather we did it, or you can no longer sign in, email jainaagam1237890@gmail.com from the address you signed up with, or use the deletion page at jointribe.online/delete-account.html. We will delete the account within 30 days and confirm by email.
Your rights
You can see and correct most of your data directly in the app, through your profile, the DNA screens and Settings.
You can ask us for a copy of your data, to correct it, or to delete it, by emailing jainaagam1237890@gmail.com. We will respond within 30 days. We may ask you to confirm the request from the email address on the account before acting on it.
You can withdraw consent for optional things at any time — turn off notifications, set DNA answers to "Only me", unpublish a Wavelength, revoke a share link, remove a resume, or clear any field on your profile. You can turn off usage recording in Settings → Privacy. Withdrawing consent does not affect processing that already happened.
If you are unhappy with how we have handled your data or your complaint, you may approach the Data Protection Board of India under the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023, once it is accepting complaints, or any other authority with jurisdiction.
Complaints and grievances
Grievance Officer: the developer who operates Tribe. Email jainaagam1237890@gmail.com with "Grievance" in the subject and tell us what happened, where (a username, a post, a message), and what you would like done. We acknowledge every complaint within 24 hours and aim to resolve it within 7 days. Complaints about intimate images shared without consent, or an account pretending to be you, are the most urgent category — put "Urgent" in the subject and we act on them first. You can also report any person or post from inside the app.
Reporters are not told the outcome of a report about another person, and the person reported is not told who reported them. If your own post was removed or your account suspended, you can appeal by email with "Appeal" in the subject; a person will look again.
Age
Tribe is for people aged 18 and over. By creating an account you confirm that you are 18 or older. We do not knowingly collect data from anyone younger; if you believe someone under 18 has an account, email us and we will remove it.
Security
Connections use HTTPS. Passwords are hashed by our authentication provider — we never see them. Database access is restricted per user by row-level security, and administrative functions are checked in the database.
No service can promise perfect security. If a breach affects your personal data, we will tell you without unreasonable delay, and we will notify the Data Protection Board of India and any other authority the law requires. Security concerns can be sent to jainaagam1237890@gmail.com with "Security" in the subject.
Changes
If this policy changes in a way that materially affects you, we will say so in the app and ask you to acknowledge it. The date at the top always reflects the current version, and the version you agreed to is recorded with your account.
Contact
Terms of Service · Community Guidelines · Delete your account